Turkey blocks access to Instagram

This Friday, Turkey blocked  access to Instagram. Hayyip Erdogan's executive justified the measure on the grounds that the social network was "preventing people from posting messages of condolences" for the death of Ismail Haniyeh, leader of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

It happened early Friday, just after users of the Meta platform reported on the social network X that they were unable to access Instagram in the country. Minutes later, the Turkish communications authority published a statement in which it assured that "instagram.com was blocked by a decision dated 02/08/2024," without giving further details about it.

The justification about the decision did not take long to arrive. A senior official of the country assured that the blocking was due to the censorship they had perceived in certain contents published by the country's population.

Moments later, the communications director of the Turkish presidency, Fahrettin Altun, confirmed that he had decided to prevent access to Instagram after realizing that the social network "prevented people from posting messages of condolences for martyr Haniya," the Hamas terrorist leader killed last Wednesday. What Altun denounced through a statement posted on the social network X, "is a very clear and obvious censorship attempt."

This will prevent, Turkish media claim, access to Instagram to the more than 50 million users who use the social network in the country. 

Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has not yet commented on what happened, but the rest of the social networks belonging to the company (except for Threads, whose use was suspended by the social network itself in this country in April this year) are working without any problems, according to users of these platforms. 

It is not the first time that the authorities in Turkey have blocked, although always temporarily, access to social networks such as Facebook or even X although it usually happens, AFP recalls, when there are attacks in the country.

Wikipedia is also not spared from Turkish blockades. Between April 2017 and January 2020, the country's authorities blocked the well-known encyclopedia after finding two articles that established links between Ankara and extremist organizations. 

A decision that, as every time they block access to any digital content, unleashed criticism towards Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government which, in this case, surprised by the huge amount of censored content which, critics claimed, attacked freedom of expression.