Instagram was blocked in Turkey on Friday morning, 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 said on Monday that they restricted Instagram due to its “policies concerning catalog crimes,” adding that they had a first meeting with the platform’s officials last week.
“This afternoon, we will meet with them again. We hope they will fulfill our requests and expect positive developments,” Uraloglu said on X.
The minister noted that in last week’s meeting, he conveyed his country’s sensitivities regarding compliance with the laws of Turkey.
Censoring Instagram comes 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 early Wednesday.
"We are facing a digital fascism that cannot even tolerate photos of Palestinian martyrs and immediately bans them, all while marketing this as freedom," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said during a party meeting in Ankara on Monday.
"Social media platforms show great care in adhering to rules in US, Europe, but deliberately withhold same diligence when it comes to Turkey," he said, adding that the issue will be "automatically resolved" if Ankara's demands are met.
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.
In 2023, X (then Twitter) restricted access to “some content” in Turkey to ensure that the social media platform remained accessible in the days before the country’s presidential election.
This April, Meta suspended its Threads platform in Turkey after a decision from Turkish authorities that blocked it from sharing information with Instagram.
From 2017 to 2020, Turkey’s information and technologies authority BTK also blocked access to Wikipedia after the website’s administrators refused to remove two pages stating that Ankara had channeled support to extremists in Syria. BTK said the law empowers it to ban access to any website deemed obscene or a threat to national security.
