This content was published on August 11, 2024 – 01:36
(Keystone-SDA) After more than a week, the online platform Instagram is freely accessible again in Turkey. “The ban on Instagram has been lifted,” wrote Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloglu on the short message service X.
An agreement has 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.
Uraloglu had accused the company of allowing content that constitutes a criminal offense in Turkey, such as sexual abuse, advertising for gambling and insults against the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
57 million users
Last Friday, Instagram was finally blocked, and since then the platform can only be accessed from Turkey via protected network connections (VPN). According to media reports, around 57 million people in Turkey use Instagram.
Shortly before the ban, communications director Fahrettin Altun had accused Instagram of blocking expressions of condolence for the killed Hamas foreign chief Ismail Haniya and accused the platform of censorship.
Ankara maintains good relations with the Islamist Hamas. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met Haniya in Istanbul in April. After Haniya’s killing in the Iranian capital Tehran, the Turkish government ordered a one-day state mourning.
