Turkmenistan Faces 'Parallel Reality' Media Landscape
Turkmenistan Faces 'Parallel Reality' Media Landscape "We know about Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. But we can't access them -- everything here is blocked," said Byashim Ishanguliyev, a fruit seller in the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat. To keep information from the outside world hidden from its citizens, Turkmenistan, one of the world's most closed and isolated countries, exercises almost total control over the internet. Getting round the ban is no small feat. "Some people manage to connect to a VPN, but that's only temporary, it will also be blocked," 19-year-old Ishanguliyev told AFP at a market in Ashgabat, referring to a Virtual Private Network. "Plus the internet is slow. So if somebody manages to download an interesting video, clip or film, we all watch it together," he said. Despite the effectiveness of the Turkmen firewall, the regime is constantly stepping up measures to prevent outside information seeping into the energy-ric...