Turkey has taken 78 people into custody for making posts on social media regarding the earthquake

ANKARA: The Turkish police have said that they have detained 78 persons on the suspicion that they incited fear and terror. They did this by “posting provocative posts” regarding the earthquake that occurred a week ago on social media. We got to know the detention of twenty of them in jail for their respective cases. Over 41,000 individuals have lost their lives as a direct result of the devastating earthquake. This earthquake struck Turkey and Syria, and millions of people are in need of assistance.

According to the General Directorate of Security in Turkey, they have uncovered 613 people. The accusation was of creating provocative posts, and legal processes. The total charge is almost against293. The chief prosecutor sent a request for 78 of these individuals,  to be put into custody.

46 websites and 15 social media profiles were taken down:

In addition, the directorate reported that 46 websites and 15 social media profiles that pretended to be official entities were taken down. It is because they were operating “phishing scams” to obtain financial donations for earthquake victims.

In October 2018, the Turkish Parliament introduced a law that has the potential to send journalists and users of social media to prison for up to three years if they receive any accusation of propagating “disinformation”. This caused concern among rights groups and countries in Europe.

The party in power under President Tayyip Erdogan has significantly stated that legislation is required to deter people from making false charges on social media. However, they also stated that they will not use any measures to silence criticism. The government is very active to ban access to social media platforms in the past.

Turkey restricted access to Twitter for around 12 hours:

During the previous week, Turkey restricted access to Twitter for around 12 hours, beginning in the afternoon on Wednesday. It continued until the early morning hours of Thursday. They did this because of the distribution of inaccurate information. That made people who used Twitter to identify family members and share information about rescue attempts very unhappy, which led to the spread of misleading information.

Consequently, on Monday, Turkey’s Communications Director Fahrettin Altun took to Twitter to express concern over “severe information pollution”. They explicitly announced that the Turkish government will be distributing a daily bulletin to rectify inaccurate information.

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