Turkey restored access to Instagram on Saturday evening, after more than a week of it being blocked nationwide.
On August 2, the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Authority banned access to Instagram without giving any specific reason. Government officials later said the ban had been imposed because the social media platform did not respect Turkish laws.
In our discussions with Instagram officials, we were assured that our requests would be addressed, especially those related to criminal activities, and we were given a promise that we would work together on a means to censor users, Abdulkadir Uraloglu, Turkey’s Minister of Transport and Infrastructure, wrote on social media platform X on Saturday.
Uraloglu explained in a video also posted on X that the platform aimed to establish compliance with Turkish law and that in cases where the law was violated, there would be swift and effective intervention.
He added that all accounts belonging to terrorist organisations will be banned and all content promoting such organisations will be removed, especially the PKK, PYD and FETO.
The PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, is an outlawed group that has been waging a decades-long insurgency in Turkey to establish an autonomous region in the southeast of that country. The PYD is a Syrian Kurdish political organization that Turkish authorities say is an arm of the PKK. FETO is the movement led by Fethullah Gulen, a former ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom the government blames for a failed coup attempt in 2016.
Instagram has more than 57 million users in Turkey, a nation of 85 million people, according to We Are Social Media, a digital marketing news company based in New York.
The Association of E-Commerce Operators estimates that Instagram and other social media platforms generate around 930 million Turkish liras ($27 million) in e-commerce daily.
First published: August 11, 2024 | 6:40 a.m. IS
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