Twitter objects to Turkish court orders after pre-election warnings

Twitter said it had filed objections to Turkish court orders requesting a ban on access to some accounts and tweets on the platform, after keeping its service available during an election weekend despite warnings from authorities in Ankara.

On Saturday, a day before presidential and parliamentary votes, Twitter said it had restricted access to some content in Turkey in order to keep the platform available to users there.

The court orders, which were shared by Twitter, requested the access bans on the grounds that they posed a threat to public order and national security.

We are today sharing an update on our approach in Turkey.

We were in negotiation with the Turkish Government throughout last week, who made clear to us Twitter was the only social media service not complying in full with existing court orders.

We received what we believed to be…

— Twitter Global Government Affairs (@GlobalAffairs) May 15, 2023

"We received what we believed to be a final threat to throttle the service - after several such warnings," Twitter said in a statement issued late on Monday.

"So in order to keep Twitter available over the election weekend, we took action on four accounts and 409 Tweets identified by court order."

Twitter said five court orders had been issued against it regarding these actions and it had already objected to four of them.

"While one of our objections has been rejected, three of them are still under review. We are filing our objections to the fifth order tomorrow," it added.

President Tayyip Erdogan led comfortably after the first round of the presidential election, with his rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu facing an uphill struggle to prevent the president extending his rule into a third decade in a runoff vote on May 28.

Last year, Turkey introduced a law requiring social media companies to remove "disinformation" content and to share user data with authorities if they post content constituting crimes, including misleading information.

Social media companies are required to appoint Turkish representatives and they face bandwidth being throttled by up to 90% immediately after a court order should the representative fail to provide information to the authorities.

Activists and opposition figures have voiced concern over the law, saying it could tighten the government's grip on social media, one of the last bastions of free speech and dissent in Turkey after 20 years of Erdogan's rule.

(Reuters)