Turkish lawmakers to vote on bill critics say will strangle media
Despite international warnings and the opposition’s efforts to kill the controversial bill, the parliament is set to consider Turkey's latest restrictive press law.
An advisory body to the pan-European rights defender Council of Europe urged Turkey to withdraw its controversial press law, which the government is pushing through the parliament before looming elections.
The legislation, dubbed the “disinformation law” and the “online censorship law,” has been fiercely criticized by Turkish and international media groups since its submission to parliament last May.
Kerem Altiparmak, a human rights lawyer and one of its fiercest critics, described the bill as worse than all its previous iterations. It adds a new crime called "distributing deceptive information publicly" to the penal code. It also gives the administration new powers to sanction the media with fines, advertising bans and bandwidth throttling.
Turkey already tightened controls on the internet in 2020 with registration requirements for social media companies and forces platforms to remove violating content within 48 hours. Freedom House’s 2021 Report on Freedom on the Net said internet freedom continued to decline for a third year in Turkey, noting that hundreds of websites were blocked, including the news outlet Tele1's YouTube account, which frequently puts out content critical of the government.
