Turkey’s National Communications Authority said without explanation on Friday it had blocked access to the Instagram social media network, following accusations of censorship 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 dated 02/08/2024”, without adding any further details.
Several users in Turkey complained on the X platform that they were unable to refresh their Instagram feeds, a problem confirmed by AFP journalists.
Turkish presidential communications director Fahrettin Altun on Wednesday took aim at Meta-owned Instagram, accusing it of “preventing people from publishing condolence messages for the martyr Haniyeh.”
Ismail Haniyeh, the political head of the armed Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and a close ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was killed on Wednesday in an attack in Tehran that has been blamed on Israel.
“This is a very clear and obvious attempt at slander,” Altoon said on X.
According to Turkish media, more than 50 million users are registered on Instagram out of Turkey’s population of 85 million.
The decision was followed by other social media networks such as X.
A meme showing a crowded metro station, with the tagline: “X is when Turks wake up in the morning and find Instagram is blocked”, began trending on the platform.
“Instagram is blocked in Turkey, life is over,” user “CringeOfMaster” wrote alongside a photo of a grieving man.
Others jokingly asked Instagram users where they can see their edited photos now.
This is not the first time that Turkish authorities have blocked access to social media sites.
Between April 2017 and January 2020, Wikipedia was blocked due to two articles that alleged a link between the presidency and extremism.
This caused an uproar in the country where Erdogan’s government is often accused of attacking civil liberties due to the unavailability of information online.
In April, Facebook-owned Meta suspended its Threads social network in Turkey after authorities there blocked it from sharing information with Instagram.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
