With elections on the horizon, the Turkish government has blocked the use of Twitter (News - Alert) within its borders as it believes the eight-year-old microblogging service is used in “systematic character assassinations.” And yet, it seems a number of Turkish citizens have continued using Twitter with ease, which isn’t too surprising considering Turkey is a country that loves Twitter — it’s among the top 10 countries in Twitter users — and that circumventing such censorship isn’t usually too hard.

In this case, Turkey’s Twitter block is even easier to avoid than most, according to Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, who told NBC News that the block is “more of a political statement than an effective ban.”

And yet, if Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is to be believed, the block is a move to “eradicate Twitter.” Regardless, mere hours after Twitter access became restricted on Thursday, citizens had found a way to keep on using it.

This is because the Turkish government doesn’t have the advanced physical censorship infrastructure of, say, China; it relies on simple DNS (Domain Name System) instead. As such, for people in Turkey, getting around this is as simple as changing their DNS settings to make their computers and mobile devices look like they’re from outside the country.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with computers and networking can make a DNS change very quickly and easily. For those who aren’t as familiar, it seems they simply need to head over to Facebook (News - Alert) where detailed instructions on how to make the change are being shared by many.

Other methods for getting around the Twitter ban involve the use of a virtual private network (VPN), which encrypts Internet communications to let users access restricted sites. Evidently, this method is popular as well since HotSpot Shield’s iOS VPN app saw a significant rise in downloads on Thursday, jumping from an average of 400 per day to 88,000.

The ironic result is that the people of Turkey have been tweeting at a record pace since the ban was enacted.