Turkish Parliament passes a new controversial social media law

The Turkish Parliament passes a new controversial social media law in order to put a control to the social media content.

The new law is controversial as it allows the government to block or remove content from social media that is any way controversial.

The new law subjects the social media owners such as Facebook, Twitter and others to  have local representatives in Turkey and to comply with court orders over the removal of certain content or face heavy fines.

The legislation targets social networks with more than a million unique visits every day and says servers with Turkish users’ data must be stored locally.

If companies refuse to comply, they will face fines and restriction of bandwidth making the platform unusable.

The bill was passed as the ruling party holds a majority in the parliament.

According to Ibrahim Kalin, Erdogan’s spokesman, “There is no obstacle to social media users freely expressing their opinion. Here is the rule: whatever is a crime in real world is also a crime in cyber world … there must be a limit to criticism.”