BEVERLY HILLS, October 01, (THEWILL) – Turkey on Thursday entered a new phase of tight social media restrictions which threaten to erase the local presence of Facebook and Twitter should they fail to take down contentious posts.
The legislation was rammed through parliament by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AKP party and follows the government’s crackdown on opposition newspapers and television channels.
Facebook’s Human Rights officer Iain Levine tweeted that the move “raises many concerns about human rights”.
Free speech advocates are however doubtful whether Erdogan’s government will be able to implement the law or if social media companies will ever fully comply.
“We believe that these days it’s really impossible in a country like Turkey to suppress social media. It is so much a part of people’s lives,” said Emma Sinclair-Webb, the Turkey director of Human Rights Watch.
Under the new rules, platforms with more than one million daily users must open offices in Turkey that can deal with local court decisions to remove offending content within a day. If not, they face advertising bans, multi-million-dollar fines and crucially bandwidth reductions of up to 90%, making the platforms effectively unusable.
They also require social media companies to “take necessary measures” to store user data locally, although binding legislation to that effect was taken out of the final version of the law passed in July.
Digital rights expert Yaman Akdeniz said platforms have until the end of Thursday to open Turkish offices or start facing penalties and fines. He added that bandwidth throttling would begin in April and reach 90 percent by May of next year if the social media companies still fail to comply.
Many Turks, especially the young, turn to social media for news updates since most of the traditional media are owned or controlled by pro-government firms. “There are a lot of cases of domestic violence against women and murders that we don’t see on TV”, Ayse Nur Akyuz, a model and self-described “influencer” with 47,000 Instagram followers said.
The new legislation gained momentum after Erdogan became enraged by online insults of Finance Minister Berat Albayrak and his wife Esra, the president’s daughter, following the birth of their fourth child.
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