Protests against Turkey's Twitter ban/via Twitter @enginonder

White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters on Friday that the U.S. urges "Turkish authorities to respect the freedom of the press by permitting the independent and unfettered operation of media of all kinds, and support the people of Turkey in their calls to restore full access to the blocked technologies."

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Errdogan said he wanted to "rip out the roots" of the social media service after reports incriminating the prime minister and members of his administration for corruption and other crimes were spread on Twitter.

Erdogan's administration has insisted that the Twitter ban was carried out due to court order and not in a response to the criminal allegations.

In response, Twitter users in Turkey have circumvented the ban by changing their DNS records, allowing them to bypass the government's censorship. Hashtags and memes mocking Erdogan's Twitter ban have gone viral throughout Turkey and around the world.

Twitter has also instructed users on how to send tweets via SMS messaging to bypass the country's censorship attempts.

Read more about Turkey's Twitter ban at the Washington Post, Miami Herald, the New York Times, and The Hill.

Reach Associate News Editor Colin Hale here. Follow him on Twitter.