Turkish government exerts more pressure on social media content
The internal situation in Turkish politics is destabilised by comments about a media appearance by President Recep Tayip Erdogan. In the instant footage, the Turkish president can be seen staggering and walking with great difficulty before being tucked in by a cohort of his aides and assistants.
Comments made on social media about the disturbing appearance, mainly on Twitter, have been met with a harsh response from the Turkish authorities. More than 30 social media users are being investigated for questioning Erdogan's health through messages and posts on social media. The reaction of the Turkish police has been immediate, and these individuals have now been identified and are facing criminal charges of spreading falsehoods and insulting the president of the Republic of Turkey.
Erdoğan: Ecevit ciddi şekilde rahatsız. Artık istifa etmeli
— Ayşe Aydoğdu (@ay_moon_ay) November 1, 2021
(22 Mayıs 2002) pic.twitter.com/DnKZ42zvaW
Speculation about possible complications in Erdogan's health has precedent. In July 2021, also after another on-camera appearance in which the president was shown dozing off in a bad state during a congress of his party, Justice and Development. These are rumours that Turkey's government does not want to see flourish in the public eye, and the presidency's communications office has already tried to dispel them with a new video of Erdogan's trip from Ankara to Istanbul, attesting to his good health. Leaders' health problems, and the rumours that go with them, are a constant source of instability in presidential governments and regimes, and Ankara is now taking a heavy toll.
The Turkish General Directorate of Security, which is responsible for the police investigating the 30 tweeters, issued a press release regarding the investigations, giving some details about its procedures. "Within the scope of the virtual patrol activities carried out, it was found that a hashtag was started on the social media platform called Twitter, referring to our President, Mr. Recep Tayyip ERDOĞAN. Under the aforementioned hashtag, 30 people deemed to have shared disinformation and manipulative content, as well as content that insults, misrepresents, insults our President," reads the statement. According to the statement, a unit of the Cybercrime Department would be specially dedicated to monitoring content circulating on social media with absolute regularity 24/7.
The Turkish state's control over social media is among the most restrictive in the Mediterranean. Turkish control over social media has been progressively escalating in recent years, until it became more effective when in the summer of 2020 the Turkish parliament passed a new law to make social media subject to much more restrictions. The 2020 law puts freedom of expression in the online space to the test. The law was publicly denounced by Amnesty International, which called it "the most brazen attack on freedom of expression in Turkey. Journalists are already spending years in prison for their critical reporting and social media users have to police themselves for fear of offending the authorities," the Amnesty statement denounced. Previously, the Turkish judiciary blocked up to 136 news websites.
Nowadays it is very common for Turkish internet users to surf the web with the help of tools that make them escape the radar of the authorities, such as TOR or a VPN to be able to enjoy all internet content that is not blocked by the Turkish government, as well as to defend themselves from prosecution by the authorities. Another imperative of the Turkish law obliges social network providers to have a legal representative and legal counsel to answer to the Turkish judiciary if necessary. Social networks can face fines of millions of dollars if content declared illegal by the judiciary or the executive is not removed from the face of the internet within a designated period of time.
