Turkey has passed a new law on 'disinformation' that could see journalists and social media users jailed for up to three years.
The new legislation was proposed by president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to protect the country from 'rising digital fascism and fake news', and comes as Turkey prepares for presidential and parliamentary elections next June.
It prohibits people from spreading 'false information about the internal and external security, public order and general wellbeing of the country in order to create anxiety, fear or panic among the public'.And the new law also requires messaging apps to hand over user information to the authorities when requested, while platforms such as Google or Facebook must reveal their algorithms.
Last week, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe urged the Turkish authorities not to enact the legislation, and the move has, unsurprisingly, also been condemned by human rights groups. "Coming on the heels of the Government's increased control of the media over the past few years, these new measures enable them to further censor and silence critical voices ahead of Turkey’s upcoming elections and beyond, under the guise of fighting disinformation," says Guney Yildiz, regional researcher at Amnesty International.
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