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By Associated Press
ISTANBUL – Turkey’s parliament passed a law Wednesday morning that gives the government greater force on social media despite fears of expanding censorship in a country where critical voices are already repressed.
The law requires social media corporations such as Facebook and Twitter to remain representatives in Turkey to address court cases about the content of their platforms. Companies that refuse to appoint an official representative may be subject to fines, advertising bans, and bandwidth discounts that would make their networks too slow to use.
More alarming to criticism from the Turkish government, the nine-article law would also require social media to buy user knowledge in Turkey.
The government says the law needed to fight cybercrime and protect social media users. Speaking in parliament Wednesday morning, ruling party lawmaker Rumeysa Kadak said it would be used to eliminate messages containing cyberbullying and insults against women.
Lawmakers who oppose the measure called it a “censorship law” that would further restrict freedom of expression in Turkey.
Garo Paylan, a Kurdish pro-opposition party lawmaker who arrested members for alleged ties to outlawed Kurdish activists, said the law would further reduce opportunities for political rivals in the government to succeed in the public.
“This way, the last remaining trachea of the opposition will be off,” Paylan said.
The local representative of social media corporations would be guilty of responding to individual requests to remove content that violates privacy and non-public rights within 48 hours or providing grounds for rejection. The company would be liable for damages if the content is not deleted or blocked within 24 hours.
After heavy fines and advertising bans, a court may simply order that the bandwidth needed for the social network be halved and then cut it further if the company persists in not appointing a representative based in Turkey.
Storing user data raises considerations about more than privacy, critics of the law said. Hundreds of others have been investigated and some arrested by social media posts about the COVID-19 pandemic, opposition to Turkish army offensives or insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other officials.
In Turkey, 54 million of the country’s 83 million people identify as active users of social media.
A Survey conducted in July through survey company Metropoll found that 49.6% of respondents did not have a law that could limit, close, or fine social media corporations for content. 40.8% said they would.
Serkan Aslan, 23, a resident of Istanbul, supported some social media regulations.
“In environments where other people give a percentage of their private lives like Instagram, I don’t think interference is good,” Aslan said. “But on channels like Twitter, where other people can be fooled without problems, to be honest, I think regulation is the right thing to do.”
But Tugrul Calis, 62, disagreed. A staunch social media user, Calis said he needed to break the law.
“Then what are you doing? You automatically self-censorship. And that’s the worst part: a user who can’t freely express their thoughts, self-censorship,” Calis said.
Cyber rights activist, lawyer and educator Yaman Akdeniz warned: “These measures will have a deterrent effect on users of Turkish social media platforms and others will be afraid to use those platforms because the Turkish government will have to use user data.”
Human rights teams and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights voted against the bill on Tuesday before the vote, and Amnesty International called it a “draconian.”
“If approved, these amendments would particularly strengthen the government’s powers to censor online content and prosecute social media users. This is a flagrant violation of the right to freedom of expression online and violates foreign human rights laws and standards,” said Amnesty International’s Andrew Gardner.
Erdogan demanded the law, promising to “control social media platforms” and eliminate immorality.
Twitter responded to a request for comment. Turkey is the world leader in legal requests to remove content from Twitter, with more than 6,000 applications in the first part of 2019, according to the company’s most recent transparency report.
More than 408,000 are blocked in Turkey, according to the Association for Freedom of Expression, a non-governmental organization.
Akdeniz, from the association’s 2019 report, said the law would result in the removal of content from news sites and social media, as well as past measures to block access.
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia blocked for about 3 years before Turkey’s highest court declared that the ban violated the right to freedom of expression.
Most client media corporations are owned by pro-government corporations, and critical hounds have been ignored or imprisoned over the years. The Turkish Journalists’ Union says 76 journalists and media staff are bars in Turkey.
The law was passed after 16 hours of tense deliberations in parliament, where Erdogan’s ruling party and his nationalist best friend hold the majority of seats. It is expected to enter into force on 1 October after the presidential approval and its publication in the Official Journal.
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Ayse Wieting in Istanbul and Kelvin K. Chen in London contributed.
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