President Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AK party, which has a majority with an allied nationalist party, had subsidized the bill. The meeting began debating the new law on Tuesday and its adoption was announced through parliament on Twitter.
The law requires foreign social media sites to designate representatives based in Turkey to address the authorities’ considerations of the content and supplies for the removal of the content to which they oppose.
Businesses can face fines, ad blocking or bandwidth relief of up to 90%, necessarily blocking access, under the new regulations.
With most of Turkey’s major media under government over the past decade, Turks have turned to social media and small online media in search of critical voices and independent information.
The Turks are already heavily monitored on social media and many have been accused of insulting Erdogan or his ministers, or of allegations similar to foreign army raids and control of the new coronavirus.
Before the bill was approved, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said the bill “would give the state a tough team to enforce even more in the media landscape.”
Presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said the bill would lead to censorship, but would identify ads and legal links to social media platforms.
Turkey took the moment in the world on Twitter-related court orders in the first six months of 2019, according to the company, and had the number of other legal requests from Twitter.
Erdogan has continually criticized social media and said that in recent years “immoral acts” are accumulating online due to lack of regulation.
(REUTERS)