Social Media Important in Turkey
A Turkish court is threatening to block Facebook if it doesn’t restrict access to several pages deemed insulting to the Prophet Muhammad. This comes on the heels of an ongoing government crackdown on critical political expression.
“There is a continuous, routine crackdown on media,” Erkan Saka, a communications professor and new media expert at Istanbul’s Bilgi University told The Media Line. “Social media is relatively uncontrolled, so one must expect more and more interventions, legal or otherwise.”
Recent legislation has been passed increasing state control over the Internet, and several prominent journalists are under investigation for expressing criticism of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) over Twitter.
The court order also occurs in the wake of widespread revulsion at the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, seen by most Turks as disrespectful towards Islam.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said earlier this month that “insults to our Prophet” will not be tolerated. Over the weekend he addressed a huge crowd gathering to protest against Charlie Hebdo in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir.
Professor Saka says that Facebook, which currently has 1.3 billion active users, usually complies with government demands to remove content. “It’s relatively easy to close a Facebook page,” he said.
In its latest report on government removal requests, the company said censorship on the site increased by 19 percent during the first six months of 2014 compared with the previous six-month period. In late 2013/early 2014 Facebook removed 1,893 pieces of content after the Turkish state made 2,014 removal requests, the second highest of any country.
However, in a recent Facebook post following the attacks in Paris, the multi-billion dollar company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged to not allow governments to define what is and isn’t appropriate content.
“We follow the laws in each country, but we never let one country or group of people dictate what people can share across the world,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Different voices — even if they're sometimes offensive — can make the world a better and more interesting place.”
Professor Saka says he wouldn’t be completely shocked if the Turkish state did shut down the world’s most popular social media site. “I think the government now feels powerful enough, so that they might try to block [Facebook] too.”
Though Twitter, YouTube, and other major social media sites have been temporarily blocked in the past in Turkey, Facebook never has, and the results would be significant.
“Facebook is a bit different from all the other [forms of social media], because everyone uses it, including AKP voters, so I’m expecting some kind of reaction,” says Saka. “If it’s blocked, some users will experience Internet censorship for the first time.”
However, many users would be likely to circumvent a block using proxy servers. Following a Twitter ban last March, increasingly-sophisticated Turkish users initially tweeted 33 per cent more.
According to the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK), as of April 2014, 60 per cent of Turkish households had Internet access, up ten per cent from the previous year. Almost 80 per cent of those people use the Internet specifically to access social media. Approximately 34 million Turks, out of a population of about 80 million, use Facebook, making Turkey one of the website’s most popular countries in the world.
Prominent columnist and author Mustafa Akyol says judicial decisions like this one can be influenced by the ruling party.
“It is reasonable to assume that the political narrative of the government encourages at the very least some prosecutors to maybe be more aggressive on these issues,” he says.
Freedom of speech has never been particularly widespread in Turkey. Akyol says it’s a value not indigenous to Turkey, and iconoclastic criticism has always had major limits.
“Insults are a bigger deal in this part of the world,” he says. “This is a society that highly regards sacred symbols and values. And that sacredness can be religious or national.”
In the past, issues involving the country’s ethnic minorities were difficult or impossible to openly discuss, and the current ruling party during its early years hugely increased freedom of expression. Akyol says that, though the AKP resided over a decrease in former nationalist taboos, the party has also increased the prevalence its own forbidden topics.
“The AKP challenged these taboos because they weren’t their taboos,” he says. “The more the AKP became more politically dominant, the more their own taboos have become more visible. And these taboos come not from nationalism, but from religious conservatism.”
Akyol says domestic politics affect the government’s reaction to issues involving free speech and denigration of Islam, especially ahead of general elections in June.
“Obviously the AKP now wants to use this insult of the Prophet Mohammed as an election campaign,” he says. “On a local level they’re pumping the idea that they’re standing up for their Prophet, whereas, not just the West, but the godless secularists in Turkey are also insulting our Prophet. That’s certainly a propaganda item that the AKP will use in the upcoming months before the elections.”
Professor Saka says social media plays a crucial role for political expression in Turkey.
“It’s now the only remaining channel for citizens to intervene in the public sphere,” he says. “There are of course still some newspapers and mainstream channels in opposition [to the government], but for younger, educated, urban populations, which are increasing, social media is the only channel. So understandably now the government is moving to restrict this space.”
Saka says the battle for freedom of expression is far from over. “Social media and the Internet are harder to control, so we’ll see more struggles on this front.”