How Turkey silences journalists online, one removal request at a time - Committee to Pr... - 0 views
cpj.org/...nalists-online-one-removal.php
Turkey censorship media socialmedia twitter Facebook google journalists journalism analysis
shared by Ed Webb on 15 Jan 19
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over 1.5 million tweets belonging to journalists and media outlets censored there under Twitter's "country withheld content" (CWC) policy
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, 13 countries have used Twitter's CWC tool to effectively censor content, according to the social media platform's transparency reports. Governments usually cite laws around national security, counter-terrorism, defamation, or hate speech when requesting removals.
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legal demands to remove content on the platform went from 432 requests in the first part of 2014 to 6,651 requests in the second part of 2017. Turkey and Russia were responsible for 74 percent of all requests during that period
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In the second part of 2017 in Turkey, more Twitter accounts were withheld and Facebook content restricted than in any other country
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"I challenge both Twitter and the Turkish government to [find in my tweets] anything that can be considered illegal or harmful. My only crime is being a journalist."
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"Twitter, Facebook, [and] Google...are responsible to their shareholders primarily, I don't consider them as guardians of the free speech. But the imbalance in the tools they offer to users versus governments make them complicit in the authoritarian rulers' crackdown against opposition."
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Getting a court order to censor journalists is not a hard task in Turkey which, according to CPJ research, is the world's worst jailer of journalists. Human Rights Watch said in 2014 that "Turkish courts have tended to accede to government requests to block websites with apparent minimal, if any, scrutiny."
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Amendments to law 5651 in 2014 gave authorities power to block sites without a court order. Google transparency reports show that since the amendments came into effect, the majority of removal requests came from judicial rather than executive orders. Law 5651 is "a very fast-track system [to block content] with almost no checks,"
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In his U.N. report on regulation of user-generated online content published earlier this year, David Kaye, the U.N. special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, recommended that "companies should recognize that the authoritative global standard for ensuring freedom of expression on their platforms is human rights law, not the varying laws of states or their own private interests."