Turkey begins life under strict social media rules
Turkey yesterday entered a new era of tight social media restrictions which threaten to erase the local presence of Facebook and Twitter should they fail to take down contentious posts. The legislation was rammed through parliament by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling AKP party and follows the government's crackdown on opposition newspapers and television channels. Under the new rules, platforms with more than one million daily users must open offices in Turkey that can deal with local court decisions to remove offending content within a day. If not, they face advertising bans, multi-million-dollar fines and -- crucially -- bandwidth reductions of up to 90 percent, making the platforms effectively unusable. They also require social media companies to "take necessary measures" to store user data locally.
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