“Blocking everyone’s access to an entire social media platform is a grossly disproportionate measure that violates the right to free expression and information of millions of users of the platform in Türkiye and should be reversed immediately,” Deborah Brown, technology and rights deputy director at Human Rights Watch, was cited by the organization as saying.
“A government’s disagreement over certain decisions either to take down or to permit certain content on a platform should never be used as a pretext to block access to the platform in its entirety,” she added.
HRW and the Istanbul-based Freedom of Expression Association (IFOD) said in a joint statement on Friday that Turkey’s decision “to impose a blanket block on access to Instagram violates the rights to freedom of expression and of access to information for millions of users.”
“The Turkish government should ensure access is immediately restored,” the statement read.
Instagram was blocked in Turkey on August 2, while other platforms owned by parent company Meta like WhatsApp are still accessible. The Turkish Information and Communications Technologies Authority (BTK), the body responsible for monitoring the Internet, announced the decision without elaborating.
Turkey’s Transport and Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloglu later said that they restricted Instagram due to its “policies concerning catalog crimes,” adding that they had a first meeting with the platform’s officials the previous week.
Censoring Instagram came a day after Turkish authorities slammed the platform for preventing people from posting pro-Palestine content and sharing condolence messages for Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in the Iranian capital of Tehran.
There are approximately 57.1 million Instagram users in Turkey, according to German statistics platform Statista. Many users depend on Instagram to communicate and conduct their online businesses.
The ban will affect a daily e-commerce volume of 1.9 billion liras ($57.4B), according to Vice President of Turkey’s Board of Directors of the Electronic Commerce Operators Association (ETID), Emre Emekci who told CNBC-e, that a total of 10 percent of the e-commerce in Turkey is conducted on social media.
Imposing sanctions and restricting the services of tech companies is not new in Turkey. The government of Erdogan has often been accused of targeting civil liberties by restricting free speech and political expression on social media platforms.
