Instagram was blocked by Turkey without giving any reasons, according to the country’s national communications authority. This action came after Fahrettin Altun, a highly placed Turkish communications official blamed the American corporation for censorship.
Altun on Wednesday accused Instagram of blocking condolence posts on Ismail Haniyeh’s killing, a known figure in Palestine’s Hamas faction.
“This is pure and simple censorship,” he said in an interview with X adding that no policy violations had been cited by Instagram as reasons behind their actions.
Ismail Haniyeh, political head of Hamas and close ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was killed in Tehran on Wednesday driving what Israel has termed an attack. Altun called out Instagram for “preventing people from publishing messages of condolence for the martyr Haniyeh” stating that it was “A very clear and obvious attempt at censure.”
The parent company to Instagram Meta Platforms Inc has not commented either about this ban or Altun’s statements.
It is just two hours since Information Technologies and Communication Authority (BTK) announced its decision to block Instagram in Turkey through their website whose date was August 2nd 2024. Many users in Turkey are having problems refreshing their feeds on Instagram.
There are more than fifty million users of Instagram in Turkey according to Turkish media which have a total of 85 million people. The decision created public taunting and disapproval on other social platforms such as X
This is not the first time Turkish authorities have blocked social media sites. Wikipedia was banned from April 2017 till January 2020 due to two articles linking the presidency with extremism.
In another case, Meta suspended its Threads network across Turkey when local authorities ordered it not to share information with Instagram.
