A fraudster’s attempts to deter online reports about him failed again, while BIRN’s monitoring of digital rights violations over the past month exposed shadowbanning by social media companies as well as government bans on platforms and content.
The pressure comes at a precarious time for the digital environment in Turkey, where BIRN digital rights monitoring has witnessed a surge in government bans on social media platforms, as well as individual accounts.
Turkey expedites platform bans
Supporters of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party at a rally in Diyarbakir, Turkey, March 2023. Photo: EPA-EFE/SEDAT SUNA
In an unprecedented move, eighty-two accounts on X operated by Kurdish politicians, journalists, publishers and media houses have been blocked in Turkey by a court for “making terrorist propaganda”.
The X account owners include the honorary president of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Al Monitor’s chief correspondent Amberin Zaman, the Yeni Yasam newspaper and Cansu Ozdemir, who leads the Left in Hamburg and has been a member of Hamburg’s parliament since 2009.
It came amid a series of website bans by Turkish institutions across August. Following a ban on global story-sharing platform Wattpad in July, the national communications regulatory agency blocked access to Instagram on August 2 without stating the reason or duration of the ban.
It was later revealed that Instagram had been blocked over its failure to remove illegal content on matters such as “the sexual abuse of a child”, “insulting Ataturk [the founder of Turkey]”, and items on “gambling and drugs”. Following discussions between META and the Turkish government, the access ban was lifted on August 10.
The Istanbul municipal statistical agency, however, said that Turkey’s decision to block Instagram caused daily economic loss of about 52.1 million euros. Businesses, citizens, and social media influencers were financially affected by the ban. More than 10 per cent of total e-commerce in Turkey is conducted on social media, according to the Electronic Commerce Operators Association’s Board of Directors Vice President Emre Ekmekci.
The content removals also involved META, which shadowbanned several posts following the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran. META removed content including that on respected independent media outlet T24.
However, the ban by the Turkish government on Instagram was not the final one. A court in Turkey blocked the popular gaming platform Roblox for allowing content that could allegedly “lead to child abuse”. Though the decision does not cite the link between the platform and potential child abuse, some experts believe it is linked to previous complaints around child safety relating to private chatrooms and other features the platform offers.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s Information Technologies and Communication Authority blocked the domain of the Read the Docs platform, which offers online documentation creation and hosting services for software projects. Readthedocs.io was blocked on the grounds of alleged illegal gambling, though evidence of the link remains undisclosed.
Serbian activists pressured for supporting environmental protests
Protesters march during a rally in Belgrade against plans to start mining lithium in Serbia, August 2024. Photo: EPA-EFE/ANDREJ CUKIC
The June announcement of lithium exploration licences for the Anglo-Australian corporation Rio Tinto prompted protests around the area of Jadar, where mining for the metal is set to take place.
Protests over the granting of licences spread across the country in the following months, peaking in August, when thousands gathered in Belgrade to oppose the mining plans.
BIRN Digital Rights Monitoring has recorded at least three instances of pressure by the government and other unidentified individuals against journalists, researchers and activists, who are linked to the protests and who have published investigations into lithium mining online.
United Media, which operates the media outlets N1, Nova, Danas, and Radar, alerted the public and international community about the latest alleged government smear campaign against their group, which they see as an attack on independent media in Serbia.
They claimed that in the most recent incident Serbia’s president and premier publicly accused the director of the media group of plotting the president’s murder. The pressure intensified in recent weeks following the nationwide lithium mining protests.
Aleksandar Matkovic, a research associate at the Institute of Economic Sciences in Belgrade, received death threats on his Telegram app a few days after publishing an article about lithium on the Danas newspaper’s website. “One of them was written in German. It mentions the murder of my younger brother and demands that I withdraw from public [life] if I want to continue breathing and writing,” Matkovic said.
Additionally, police questioned activist Ivan Bjelic over an Instagram post casting doubt over the legality of the Jadar lithium mining project. After speaking at a protest in Gornji Milanovac against the mine, officers asked him, along with the organiser, to make a statement at the police station. There, he was told a warrant had been issued to search his home over the Instagram post which reported that the constitutional court had declared the Jadar project unconstitutional, the activist said.
Police told him that this was deemed a call for the violent overthrow of the constitutional order of Serbia. The activist noted that they asked him to show the post – which they photographed – and checked his phone to see if he had other accounts on Instagram.
Monitoring: Turkey was covered by Hamdi Firat Buyuk, Serbia by Tijana Uzelac, North Macedonia by Bojan Stojkovski and Goce Trpkovski, Bosnia and Herzegovina by Elma Selimovic, Aida Trepanic and Sara Velaga Drek, Kosovo by Flaka Fazlija, Montenegro by Djurdja Radulovic, Croatia by Katarina Gulan, Romania by Adina Florea, Albania by Nensi Bogdani, Hungary by Akos Keller-Alant.