Until Feb. 18, Turkish President Abdullah Gul was the hope of all people who cared about the status and prestige of their country in the international system. Although optimism about Turkey’s near future has been considerably thinned by the rigid, coarse, divisive and confrontational discourse and conduct of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the "strong man" of the country, the sober, sane and moderate statesmanship of Gul provided some security.

That was until the late evening hours of Feb. 18. When the story broke around 10 p.m. that Gul had signed the controversial Internet bill, the president won his share of the anger directed against Erdogan. About 40,000 Twitter users, out of 4.3 million nationwide, unfollowed Gul’s Twitter account before midnight, in the space of 90 minutes.

Gul was one of the first Turksh politicians to join the Turkish Twitterverse. Turks, delighted to have a president aware of contemporary technological progress, responded en masse to their president’s interest in social media, and Gul’s Twitter followers shot up in a very short period to 4 million in country of 76 million.

Turks were already worried by a new Internet bill that would put their country in the same category as Saudi Arabia, Iran, China and North Korea. A veto by Gul to send the draft back to the parliament would have been a major moral victory for proponents of Internet and individual freedoms against the Erdogan government.