Elaborate series productions from Turkey have been an export hit for several years. Stories about the Ottoman Empire attract millions of people around the world to their screens. Another Turkish product has been celebrating surprising success at home and abroad since the beginning of January.
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The messenger service BiP of the state telephone company Turkcell has been downloaded more than ten million times in the past few weeks. Government-related media in Turkey have been regularly delivering new positive headlines via the domestic app since January 6th.
Enormous growth in user numbers is announced – initially in Turkey, a few days later in Indonesia and Bangladesh. Most recently it was said that BiP was also enjoying increasing popularity in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
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“I like Turkey. I love Turkish series. I like the courageous Turkish leader Erdoğan. So I downloaded the app as my app «, quoted the state news agency Anadolu plus a student from Bangladesh. In fact, there is more to the success of BiP than the sympathy for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that prevails in some Islamic countries.
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The world’s most successful messenger service WhatsApp is changing its user conditions. The new guidelines include an automatic exchange of certain user data with the parent company Facebook. WhatsApp asserts that the update of the data protection guideline will not result in any changes to the transfer of user data to Facebook. Nevertheless, the move announced at the beginning of January caused trouble internationally. This was particularly large in Turkey.
Telegram boss welcomes Erdoğan and Bolsonaro
Because of the new guidelines, President Erdoğan has turned away from WhatsApp and advises his compatriots to switch to domestic services such as BiP and Dedi. He has also called for people to stand up against “digital fascism”. According to official figures, the appeal has paid off.
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More than one million users switched to the recommended BiP service almost overnight on January 6th. Other messengers such as Telegram and Signal are also benefiting from the annoyance of WhatsApp and are seeing growing download numbers worldwide. Even Erdoğan now uses Telegram.
App founder Pavel Durov recently welcomed the Turkish President and Brazil’s head of state Jair Bolsonaro there – and spoke of what may be the largest digital migration in history. The pro-government Turkish newspaper »Daily Sabah« In this context he even wrote of a “Whatsappocalypse”.
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In addition to the new guidelines, there is another point of displeasure in Ankara: the new conditions must be approved in any case in order to continue using WhatsApp. However, the European Union and Great Britain have negotiated a clause that allows their citizens to continue using the service without consent. There is no such option for Turkey. The Turkish competition authority has launched an investigation against WhatsApp and Facebook.
In addition, Ali Taha Koç, who is responsible for digital transformation on Erdoğan’s staff, promotes the alleged security advantages of Turkish services: “We have to protect our data with local and national software and develop it according to our needs. Let’s not forget that Turkey’s data will stay in Turkey thanks to local and national solutions. “
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However, government critics fear that the Turkish WhatsApp alternative BiP could make it easier for the government in Ankara to monitor citizens. “The Turkish app has no advantages over foreign services,” Internet expert Yaman Akdeniz told SPIEGEL. It is a myth that domestic offers are safer. Rather, government authorities could more easily retrieve data from users in Turkey if they were stored by a Turkish company.
“The Turkish authorities obviously want to be able to access user data easily and centrally. The more users there are on a national service, the better for them, ”Akdeniz said. However, it remains to be seen whether the citizens of Turkey will actually switch to domestic services permanently. Akdeniz sees the new social media law as a greater threat to freedom of expression.
New social media law threatens freedom of expression
This has been in effect in Turkey since October 1st. It obliges social networks with more than a million daily users to name responsible persons in Turkey who delete content from the platforms after court orders. Violations can result in fines, advertising bans and, ultimately, a restriction on data transfer of up to 90 percent.
Facebook has meanwhile announced the appointment of a representative in Turkey. WhatsApp has also announced that it will postpone the introduction of its new data protection rules by more than three months. So far you had to agree to the new conditions by February 8th in order to continue to use the service. Now the new data protection guideline will not apply until May 15th.
However, other social media platforms have so far resisted the controversial law in Turkey. Twitter, Persicope and Pinterest are now feeling the consequences for the first time. They were banned from advertising in Turkey earlier this week.
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