Erdogan slams ‘digital fascism’ as Turkey said to ban Instagram over Haniyeh posts
Turkish president accuses social media of censoring ‘Palestinian martyrs’; Ankara holding talks with Meta-owned company as e-commerce losing millions daily since Aug. 2 shutdown
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused social media platforms of “digital fascism” on Monday for allegedly censoring photographs of Palestinian “martyrs.”
The Turkish leader’s comments came as Turkish officials were engaged in discussions with representatives of the social media platform, Instagram, to reinstate access to millions of its users in Turkey.
The Information and Communication Technologies Authority barred access to Instagram on August 2 without providing a reason. Government officials said the ban was imposed because Instagram failed to abide by Turkish regulations.
Several media reports said, however, that the action was in response to Instagram removing posts by Turkish users that expressed condolences over the killing of the Hamas terror group’s leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on Wednesday, July 31.
The Instagram shutdown was the latest instance of a clampdown on websites in Turkey, which has a track record of censoring social media and other online platforms.
“They cannot even tolerate photographs of Palestinian martyrs and immediately ban them,” Erdogan said in a speech in Ankara on Monday. “We are confronted with a digital fascism that is disguised as freedom.”
“They are resorting to every means to hide Israel’s cruelty and muzzle the Palestinian people’s voices. Especially social media companies have literally become militants,” he said.
Erdogan, who was speaking at an event on human rights education hosted by his Islamist AKP political party, went on to state that social media websites were allegedly allowing all kinds of propaganda by groups considered terrorists in Turkey.
“We have tried to establish a line of dialogue through our relevant institutions. However, we have not yet been able to achieve the desired cooperation,” Erdogan said.
Turkey’s transportation and infrastructure minister, Abdulkadir Uraloglu, said Turkish authorities met with representatives of Instagram last week and were holding a fresh round of talks on Monday.
Foreign Minister Israel Katz wrote on social media on August 2 that the decision to block Instagram demonstrated how Erdogan “is turning Turkey into a dictatorship just because of his support for the murderers and rapists of Hamas, against the stance of the entire free world.”
At the end of his post, Katz tagged Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the leading opposition figure to Erdogan. İmamoğlu’s secularist CHP party scored a stunning victory against Erdogan’s AKP in Turkey’s March 31 municipal elections.
Unlike its Western allies, Turkey does not consider Hamas a terror organization. A strong critic of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, Erdogan, who met with Haniyeh in Istanbul in April, has described Hamas as a liberation movement, and repeatedly compared Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler.
The Turkish strongman appeared to threaten to invade Israel last week, saying at a meeting of his political party that Turkey must be “very strong so that Israel can’t do these things to the Palestinians.” In early May, Erdogan halted his country’s robust trade ties with Israel.
Soon after the war in Gaza began, Turkey, a NATO member, began blocking any cooperation between NATO and Israel, which holds partner status in the military alliance, Reuters reported last week.
The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, when thousands of terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill nearly 1,200 people and take 251 hostages.
Instagram has more than 57 million users in Turkey, a nation of 85 million people, according to the We Are Social media company.
The Electronic Commerce Operators’ Association estimates that the Meta-owned app and other social media platforms generate about 930 million Turkish lira ($27 million) worth of e-commerce per day.
