Turkey unblocks Instagram after nine days

Turkey began unblocking Instagram on Saturday night after banning access to millions of users for nine days.

“Following our negotiations with Instagram representatives, we will unblock access from 21:30 (18:30 GMT) after they agreed to respond to our demands,” Transport and Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloglu said on X.

According to AFP reporters, Instagram gradually became available again after that.

“From the beginning, we wanted social media platforms to respect the laws of the Republic,” Uraloglu stressed.

The platform had been blocked since the morning of August 2, for reasons that have never been fully explained.

On Saturday evening, the minister reported “content-related violations,” adding that Instagram had refused to remove thousands of posts related to “gambling, drugs and child abuse.”

Meta, the owner of Instagram, has not denied cooperation and says it has withdrawn nearly 2,500 posts in the first half of the year at the request of Turkish authorities.

Fahrettin Altun, communications director for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, accused Instagram of blocking condolence messages for Ismael Haniyeh, political leader of the Palestinian group Hamas and a close ally of Erdogan.

Haniyeh was killed in Tehran last month in an attack blamed on Israel.

Meta apologized on Tuesday for deleting social media posts by Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim about the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

The apology came a day after Anwar’s office summoned representatives from Meta to demand an explanation for the leader’s removal of Facebook and Instagram posts about Haniyeh’s death.

According to Emre Ekmekci, vice president of an e-commerce association, 60 to 70 percent of Turkey’s 85 million people have an Instagram account and about $57 million worth of business is done through the site every day.

Access to the online game Roblox, which is particularly popular in Turkey, remained blocked for a fourth day on Saturday evening.

In February, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly apologized to the US Congress as lawmakers questioned tech executives about the dangers children face on social media platforms.

The executives, convened by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, were grilled during a session titled “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis.”

AFP