Instagram Statement from the Minister: “We are not in a prohibitionist mentality”

First of all, we do not have such a setup. “Whatever they do, however they behave, we will shut them down.” We never take such an approach. Look, we are talking about up to 60 million social media users here. So, after all, I have a world account, which means I have accounts on almost every platform. So me and our team use it, we all use it. Here, we are really talking about how we can expand this approach rather than being in a prohibitionist, censorious mentality. I say this very clearly.

Unfortunately, these social media platforms do not show the democratic approach that we, as a country, show. I say it very clearly. It can block your account, remove it, and block some posts completely, without any notification to you. After all, it is a private company, of course it will have rules and regulations, but they can do things against your laws when necessary. Therefore, in this sense, we are definitely in favor of continuing the activities of social media platforms. We are never in a prohibitionist mentality.

We are in constant communication with Instagram and other social media platforms. There were things we informed them before. There are issues that we have reported in the last period. What’s here? There are issues that we call ‘catalog crimes’ and ‘sensitivities of our society and country’. We constantly report. Yesterday, friends re-evaluated, we came to a point. We really want to solve it as soon as possible.

We were not actively working on a new social media ban. But in any case, we follow and inspect. (Roblox) As the Information Technologies and Communication Authority (BTK), we were about to comply with the decision taken by the Adana 6th Criminal Court of Peace regarding the blocking of a children’s game portal. We did that too. Let me truly say this, it was never on my agenda.

Maybe that’s why we don’t have a small child. It hadn’t occurred to me that there was such a platform and that it had so many followers, but when we look at the court’s reasons for banning it, we really need to look at what our children are dealing with. These are our children. I leave that to your discretion. We were only at the point of implementing the decision there.