Update: Turkish Parliament approved on Wednesday afternoon.
Turkey is in a position to join the number of developing countries introducing new social media regulations, which can be used to combat hate speech, but at the same time constitute an exclusive opportunity for authoritarists around the world to suppress freedom of expression. in your country.
In early July, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan welcomed the regulation of what he described as “immoral social networks” after insults to his daughter and son-in-law after the birth of their fourth child on Twitter.
A three-week fast-forward, and the Turkish Parliament Justice Committee approved a bill that can force social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to comply with strict new regulations and block content that violates people’s nonpublic rights or privacy, or incur heavy fines. bandwidth limitation. The invoice will have to be approved through the Turkish Parliament, the voting timetable is clear.
Supporters of the new law argue that it will balance the rights to freedom of expression with the desire to create a safer online environment, but critics see it more as a path to the only channels through which citizens can still express themselves in a country. where the press is most commonly found below Array
According to Amnesty International, at least 180 media outlets were closed by executive order following the failed 2016 coup, while the report of Turkey’s main opposition party, the CHP, lists at least 721 journalists detained between 2002 and 2019, 93 of whom remain important in prison.
“If passed, the new law will allow the government to access social media, remove content at will, and arbitrarily target individual users,” Human Rights Watch’s deputy program director Tom Porteous said in a statement.
This would make it more difficult for foreign Internet corporations not to stick to local rules. Social media corporations with more than one million users in Turkey must appoint a legal representative, who will be guilty before the government and will be required to purchase the knowledge of users in the country. If they don’t comply, they can face fines of up to $1.5 million and their bandwidth can be reduced by up to 50% at first and then up to 95% in the event of a prolonged violation.
Heavy fines may also be imposed on online businesses and news portals that remove illegal or hateful content within 24 hours, following a court decision.
The concept of applying stricter controls on social media in Turkey is not new. Some legal proposals, much to those released last Tuesday, were first presented in April, as part of a bill on economic measures to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, but were later withdrawn.
The coordinator of the Europe and Central Asia Program of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Gulnoza Said, called the new bill “a blatant attempt to make international companies censor more news on behalf of Turkey’s leaders.”
Critics are also concerned that the new provisions will end anonymity on social media in Turkey well, at least because storing user knowledge in local knowledge centers will make a raid much less difficult for the government.
To avoid blockages and fines, Internet companies may also feel compelled to cooperate more with the government by transmitting non-public user awareness and retaining content, while so far only a fraction of those requests have been accepted. In the first part of 2019, Turkey was the country that sent the highest number of deletion requests (6073) to Twitter in the world, but only 5% of them were granted.
That percentage can be replaced soon.
I am a freelance journalist covering generations for various media, in English (Zdnet, techPresident) and Italian (La Stampa, Espresso, Corriere della Sera and
I am a freelance journalist covering generations for various media, whether in English (Zdnet, techPresident) and Italian (La Stampa, Espresso, Corriere della Sera and others). I was a member of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in 2013. You can find my studies on journalism and content retention here. I like to write about the effect of generation on society. I am amazed and fascinated by how our relationships, our jobs, our daily life are now shaped through it. But generation, to me, is just a way to end, not an end in itself. To be clear: I don’t mind the newest smartphone, unless it offers a genuine extra price and improves the quality of my life. You can follow me on Twitter on @fede_guerrini and receive more information about me by visiting my LinkedIn. For story releases, tap me here: stories (at) onthebrink.it