Turkey is taking steps to close the window to press freedom once and for all. The announcement of new restrictions is no surprise: dozens of hounds have been unlawfully detained and sentenced to lengthy sentences in unfair trials in Turkey, especially since the failed coup attempt in July 2016. Media pluralism has been destroyed. Until recently, social media platforms were the ultimate safe haven for critical Turkish hounds.
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is politically weakened and has been seriously criticized on social media sites for his mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic: Turkey has more than 37 million Facebook users as well as 16 million on Twitter. Erdogan must now silence his critics by applying domestic controls on foreign social media platforms.
On Tuesday, the Turkish parliament passed amendments to its 2007 Internet Crime Act, a widely used tool to silence online media. The prosecution government uses it to impose criminal fees on Americans on the grounds that they have insulted the country or pose a risk to national security.
Mihr’s paintings focus on the hound’s paintings in Turkey
But the latest adjustments will force social media platforms with more than one million daily users to nominate a permanent representative in Turkey. This representative will act as a tactile user for the Turkish authorities, to deal with government court cases that oppose the content of their platforms involving imaginable criminal rates or invasions of privacy.
Companies designating a representative shall be subject to sanctions.
The Turkish government also needs the sites to create a mechanism to remove content within 48 hours of receiving a privacy complaint or court decision. If insulting content is not removed, the sites will be blocked within 4 hours. Internet providers who do not report government court cases to the guilty party will face hefty fines.
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Reporters Without Borders rejects the extension of Turkey’s internet law. It is transparent that the aim of the law is to use social media platforms to quell developing political unrest. It will also restrict access to independent information, which is vitally important in a society as polarized as present-day Turkey.
The expansion of the law comes at a time when online censorship has intensified. In 2018, Turkish courts blocked at least 2950 press articles and other newspaper content, adding studies and reports on political corruption, cronyism, human rights and labour abuses. In addition, the government blocked countless other data resources without the court’s approval.
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Turkey’s expansion of its Internet law confirms what we have been saying all along: authoritarian regimes point to the precedent set, among other things, through the German Network Enforcement Act 2017 (NetzDG), a measure to combat hate speech, as a justification for the adoption of new legislation that controls social media.
Christian Mihr is the director of Reporters Without Borders of Germany, a foreign NGO committed to protecting press freedom and combating censorship. Among other things, Mihr focuses heavily on the hounds in Turkey.