“The ban on Instagram has been lifted,” wrote Turkish Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu on the X platform. An agreement had been reached with Instagram’s parent company Meta on the deletion of criminally relevant content. Meta initially did not comment on the lifting of the ban, which had lasted for more than a week. Uraloğlu had accused the company of allowing content that is a criminal offense in Turkey, such as sexual abuse, advertising for gambling and insults against the country’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Instagram was finally blocked on Friday last week, and since then the platform has only been accessible from Turkey via protected network connections (VPN). According to media reports, around 57 million people in Turkey use Instagram.
The reasons for the ban, however, probably lie elsewhere. Shortly before, communications director Fahrettin Altun had accused Instagram of blocking expressions of condolence for the slain Hamas foreign chief Ismail Haniya and accused the platform of censorship. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was even more specific. He accused social media of “muzzling the voices of the Palestinians”. This was nothing other than “digital fascism”. Ankara has good relations with the Islamist Hamas. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan met Haniya in Istanbul just in April. After Haniya’s killing in the Iranian capital Tehran, the Turkish government ordered a day of national mourning.
