ISTANBUL — To avoid being banned throughout Turkey,
Facebook has blocked Turkish users’ access to a number of pages
containing content that the authorities had deemed insulting to the
Prophet Muhammad, according to a company employee with direct knowledge
of the matter and a report by the state broadcaster TRT.
The
company acted to comply with an order from a Turkish court, the
employee said on Monday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because
Facebook had not authorized the employee to speak publicly. The court
order was issued late Sunday at the request of a local prosecutor in
Ankara, the capital.
Turkey’s
Islamist government has not hesitated to temporarily cut off access to
services like Twitter and YouTube for various political reasons, and it
often intervenes to restrict content it finds objectionable, despite
strong criticism from the West on freedom-of-speech grounds.
Like
many American technology companies, Facebook, which has more than 1.2
billion users around the world, has been pushing hard for growth in
emerging markets like Turkey. It tends to focus on its mobile services
in such countries, because most Internet users in the developing world
view content on cellphones rather than on computers.
This
strategy has sometimes entangled the social network in turbulent
political situations, as when activists used Facebook to organize during
the Arab Spring protests. And the approach has frequently led the
company to bump up against governments that try to restrict online
content for political or social reasons.
Though
the Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, went to Paris this month
to express solidarity after the deadly terrorist attack on the satirical
newspaper Charlie Hebdo, he returned promising government action
against the kind of material that Charlie Hebdo was attacked for
publishing, including depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, which many
Muslims consider blasphemous.
Two
weeks ago, prosecutors began an inquiry into Cumhuriyet, a Turkish
newspaper, and two of its writers after it reprinted a selection of
items from Charlie Hebdo’s first issue following the attacks, including a
cover illustration of Muhammad.
The
government blocked Twitter and YouTube last March after the posting of
leaked information that appeared to detail senior officials’ discussions
of plans for military action in Syria, and of audio recordings that
seemed to imply corruption among figures in President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s close circle. It took Twitter two weeks, and YouTube two months, to get the blocks lifted.
Turkish officials also threatened
to shut down Twitter in the country this month unless it blocked the
account of a local newspaper that had circulated documents about a
police raid on Turkish Intelligence Agency trucks traveling to Syria.
“In
comparison with Twitter and YouTube, Facebook cooperates with the
Turkish authorities much better,” said Yaman Akdeniz, a cyberlaw
professor at Bilgi University in Istanbul. “Therefore, it’s not
surprising that Facebook removed these pages right away.”
The
company’s most recent public report on compliance with government
requests covers the first half of 2014. In that time, Facebook said,
India asked the company to block almost 5,000 pieces of online content,
the most of any country. Turkey was second, with nearly 1,900 pieces of
content blocked at the government’s request, and Pakistan was third, at
more than 1,700.
Facebook
said that Turkish officials asked for details about local users of the
service 249 times in the first half of 2014, and that the company
complied in about three-fifths of the cases.
