The good and fine day of Wednesday turned out to be not that fine for face book, twitter, YouTube, Periscope and Tiktok. As the companies faced severe penalties for not appointing a turkey representative, all of this took place under a very controversial law which came into effect the previous month.
The legislative assembly of Turkey passed a statement in July asking for a platform with more than a million users to appoint a Turkey representative to restrict the flow of content that they thought was inappropriate. And if that wasn’t done, the social media platforms would be fined heavily.
The new law which was adopted way back in the summer came into effect last month. What this law does is gives more power to the government to police the content. As a result of which, social media platforms with more than 1 million users had to have permanent turkey representatives. The law also wants the social media platforms to store the information and data of all turkey users in the country itself. And also give power to the government to issue court orders in order to take down certain content.
For not following the law and missing the deadline of November 2nd face book, twitter, YouTube, Periscope and Tiktok were fined 10 million Turkish liras which goes about $1.2 million for each platform. Deputy Minister of transportation and infrastructure of Turkey, Omer Fatih Sayan, said on Wednesday.