Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan shut down another social network on Thursday, blocking access to YouTube just a week after banning Twitter. And, despite a history of public demonstrations, Turkish people have yet to take to the streets en masse.

The people of Turkey are no strangers to street protests. In the summer of last year, a small, peaceful sit-in opposing the urban development of the historic Gezi Park in Istanbul sparked a massive country-wide movement popularly referred to as Occupy Gezi. As authorities tried to clamp down on the protests, more people joined the movement.

In the end, it's estimated that 3.5 million Turks took part in the protests, which turned violent, with 11 deaths and more than 8,000 people injured.

More recently, the death of a teenager who was injured last summer reignited the unrest. Yet, after the Twitter and YouTube ban, the reaction has been considerably more measured. Barring some DNS graffiti, the outrage and protests have largely taken place on social media, rather than in the streets of Taksim.

It's hard to know exactly why the outrage hasn't spilled out onto the streets yet, but people on the ground in Turkey say Erdoğan is banning social media to provoke more violent protests. With Sunday's elections looming, there is a very real fear that any protests will give Erdoğan's AKP party the justification to declare martial law and cancel the elections.

"[Erdoğan] wanted people out on the streets again so he could prove that they needed him leading the country just to avoid complete anarchy," Kathy Hamilton, a Turkish-American journalist who has been living in Istanbul for 15 years, told Mashable.

But, so far, people in Turkey have largely not taken the bait. In fact, ever since Twitter was banned, Hamilton explained, Turkish netizens have asked their fellow countrymen to keep it quiet.

"People just stepped back and said 'we're not giving anybody an excuse to try to do more bans, to maybe delay the elections because of problems in the country,'" Hamilton added.

Kozan Demircan, an IT communications consultant who also writes for Popular Science Turkey and the tech blog Turk-Internet, told Mashable that people are "outraged" and "pissed-off," but they're not going to protest on the streets.

"People are waiting for the local elections, because they want this man to go in a democratic way," he said in a phone interview on Monday, adding that many in the country feared the government would soon set its sights on other social media. "YouTube could be next."

Image: Emrah Gurel/Associated Press

To outsiders, these fears may seem far-fetched, but Turkey has a history of military coups that many in the country still remember well. The most recent coup occurred in 1980, which resulted in Turkish citizens living under martial law for three years until democracy was restored.

Nicole Goksel, who recently moved back to the United States after living in Istanbul with her Turkish husband for more than five years, told Mashable that the government's violent reaction to protests last summer and the pressure to self-censor prompted her to move back.

"The last year it’s been getting really bad," she said. "It was the first time I was self-censoring. Being American, you would never think about something like that, but in Turkey you have to watch what you’re writing, on Twitter especially.”

But Erdoğan's social media bans may, in a way, end up being beneficial to the country's international media profile. In response to the government's actions, the Turkish people are learning how to circumvent Internet censorship.

After Erdoğan ordered the Twitter ban on Thursday last week, Turkish netizens quickly found ways around it. They used all kinds of methods: Virtual Private Network software, which tunnels traffic to a server outside of the country, the anonymizing tool Tor, and graffiti offering specific IP addresses, as well as other useful tips for getting around the Internet blocks.

As the government made the block harder to circumvent, usage of Tor skyrocketed in the country. Before March 20, the first day of the ban, Tor users clocked in steadily at around 25,000. Just one day after the service was blocked, users grew to 35,000 and, according to the Tor Project (see graph below), kept growing until more than 60,000 were detected as of yesterday.

For a few hours on Thursday morning, TTNet, the country's largest Internet provider blocked access to the Tor Project website, where users can download Tor, according to the Internet activist group Telecomix. But the block was mysteriously lifted hours later.

It's unclear what happened exactly, but if the government or the local ISPs move to prevent Turks from using Tor, they will take away an important tool to skirt the block and access Twitter and YouTube.

Bolstered by the new Internet censorship law that passed last month, Erdoğan maintains the social media bans are justified. However, a Turkish court disagreed and ordered the government to lift the ban Wednesday. Under Turkey's censorship law, websites can only be blocked by obtaining a court order.

Though government officials said they would respect the court's decision, it isn't yet clear when access to Twitter and YouTube may be restored, or if another social network may be next.

In the meantime, Turks are holding off on turning to street protests as a means to voice their opinion, although Turkish activist and artist Burak Arikan said that there have been some isolated protests, and more might be coming soon.

"Turkey's day to day agenda is extremely busy with the leaked tapes, election stories, heavy internet censorship, blocked access to social media, corruption of the government and what not," he told Mashable. "I believe we will soon see larger masses on the streets again."

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