Twitter deletes ‘insulting’ tweets/accounts by critics of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan following court order
Since 2016, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has sued, arrested, and detained thousands of opposition journalists, academics, civil servants, and other critics of his government’s increasingly authoritarian policies.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (source)
Online, Erdoğan’s efforts to control his public image have been equally aggressive, with a seemingly endless string of takedown requests, censorship demands, and court orders demanding the removal of mocking satirical cartoons and images, “hurtful, exaggerated words,” and “humiliating” news reports comparing him to Adolf Hitler.
Now it appears that Erdoğan has found an ally in U.S. social media platform Twitter.
Within the past month, Twitter has deleted over a dozen tweets and suspended a number of users for violating “[Erdoğan’s] personal rights by being insulting,” in compliance with a December 28, 2018 court order obtained by the Turkish leader and subsequently posted by the Lumen Database, which archives online takedown requests.
The court order does not specify the substance and manner of the insulting content. However, details gleaned through a review of a few remaining uncensored tweets suggest that Erdoğan objected to the online dissemination of a Guardian newspaper article titled “2018: Year of the Autocrat” by foreign affairs reporter Simon Tisdall.
That article, which included stinging criticisms of “America’s first ‘rogue president'” Donald J. Trump, Russia’s “rigged poll” president Vladimir Putin, and North Korea’s “ever-grinning dictator” Kim Jong-un, described Erdoğan as having “bullied his way to another presidential term and sweeping extra powers.”
The court order also sought to halt the dissemination of news of a corruption scandal involving Erdoğan’s son Bilal, and at least one tweet that appeared to mock Bilal’s moustache.
According to Twitter’s biannual transparency report, Turkey leads the world in Twitter censorship demands, accounting for 508 of 628 of all court orders filed in the first half of 2018.
According to that same report, in 2018 Twitter withheld 1464 tweets and “filed 113 legal objections with Turkish courts in response to 508 court orders on the grounds that they did not comply with the principles of freedom of speech, freedom of press, and/or did not specify the content at issue. Four objections were accepted in full and one was partially granted.”
Shooting the Messenger 