The new Turkey |
---|
29-Jul-2020 |
29 July 2020: The Turkish parliament ratified a bill introducing new powers to control social media early on Wednesday, T24 reported. The bill was passed by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has a majority with an allied nationalist party. With the amendment, social media companies with more than one million users must appoint a legal representative in Turkey to address the authorities' concerns over content and includes deadlines for its removal. Companies could face fines, blocked advertisements or have their bandwidth slashed by up to 90 percent, essentially blocking access. Social network providers would have 48 hours to respond to orders to remove offensive content, T24 said. The law also imposes fines between 1 million to 10 million lira ($146,165 - $1.5 million) on social media companies who fail to swiftly remove hate speech and other illegal content from their platforms. Read the full article Turkey was second globally in Twitter-related court orders in the first six months of 2019, according to the company, and it had the highest number of other legal demands from Twitter. Meanwhile, the majority of Turkey's mainstream media has come under AKP government control especially after the 2016's coup attempt, Turks have taken to social media and smaller online news outlets for critical voices and independent news. Following a failed military coup in 2016, the AKP government closed more than 150 news outlets and jailed more than 100 journalists, often on terrorism-related accusations. Many journalists also often face charges of “insulting the president”. |