Turkey blocks access to Instagram

Turkey on Friday blocked access to the Instagram social media network, the national communications authority said without explanation, following censorship accusations against the US company by a high-ranking Turkish official.

The BTK communications authority said in a post on its website that “instagram.com has been blocked by a decision on the date of 02/08/2024”, without adding further details.

Many users living in Turkey complained on the X platform that they could not refresh their Instagram feed, an issue verified by AFP journalists.

The Turkish presidency’s communications director Fahrettin Altun on Wednesday hit out at Meta-owned Instagram, accusing the platform of “impeding people from publishing messages of condolence for the martyr Haniyeh”.

Ismail Haniyeh, the political chief of the armed Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and a close ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was killed in Tehran on Wednesday in an attack blamed on Israel.

“This is a very clear and obvious attempt at censure,” Altun said on X.

According to Turkish media, there are more than 50 million users signed up to Instagram in Turkey, out of a population of 85 million.

The decision sparked mockery on other social media networks such as X.

A meme showing a congested metro station with the tagline: “X when Turks wake up to find that Instagram is blocked”, began trending on the platform.

“Instagram is blocked in Turkey, life is over”, wrote user “CringeOfMaster” alongside a picture of a grieving man.

Others mockingly asked Instagram users where they could see their doctored images now.

This is not the first time that Turkish authorities have blocked access to social media sites.

Wikipedia was blocked between April 2017 and January 2020 over two articles that alleged a link between the presidency and extremism.

That caused shock in a country where Erdogan’s government is often accused of attacking civil freedoms due to the amount of online information that became inaccessible.

In April, Facebook owner Meta suspended its Threads social network in Turkey following a decision by authorities there to prevent it from sharing information with Instagram.