Turkey has voted narrowly in favour of granting more powers to President Erdogan to act in an executive way, with less power for elected parliamentarians. How will the referendum vote change things?
The referendum is problematic in several ways because there are two groups of people who disagree. And that will always cause problems. At the moment, some people think that it will provide stability, but it doesn’t look that way. There doesn’t seem to be a solution in sight. If you don’t agree with something, you speak up for it. And it’s not OK to suppress those voices. Things need to go through the right procedure. If there are complaints, then there is a process and there is a right to question the results in these scenarios, and that needs not to be disrupted.
Technically how does Turkey Blocks work?
Turkey Blocks monitors pages, content, the internet - much as ordinary users would. And then we use stats. We use statistics to analyse this. It’s actually big data, clustering, time series analysis - the same kind of thing startups are starting to use. But instead of using it to track customers and take people’s personal data, we use it to try to understand patters in the data so that we understand what’s happening in real time on the ground.
How are you going to take the campaign forward now, following the success of Turkey Blocks?
It’s not really a success, it’s a bit of a failure that we have this situation in Turkey now. But we do want to take some of our experience now to other countries. Because it’s something that can be reproduced quite effectively – even on a global scale. That’s the nice thing about algorithms - they scale very well. So there’s no need to sit on it and I think it’s also a matter of getting some input back in; maybe there are some people who could help us make it better. We’re all about fixing Turkey and getting people across the divides to talk, from all sides of the debate. But we do also want to get it out there to the rest of the world as well.
This article is licensed under a 
All content available on the ECPMF website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If you would like to republish this article on your blog or website you can do so using the words "This article was originally published by the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom" including a direct active link to the article page and indicating the author's name.