“Campaigns of lies and slander against the interests of our country, the values of our people and the privacy of our people are also a kind of terrorist attack,” Erdogan said in Ankara on Wednesday.
The legislative package is an “urgent need” – it is about preserving the security and peace of the people, just like in the physical world. The opposition, who knows how to use the “lynch culture” and the chaos on the internet to its advantage, fought back “with foam on the tongue”. The main opposition CHP party had announced the day before that it would appeal the law to the Constitutional Court. The deputy leader of the CHP parliamentary group, Engin Altay, described it as the “Stalin Act”.
The “Disinformation Act”, passed by parliament last week, contains the much-criticized Article 29. According to it, there is a risk of one to three years in prison if, for example, “false information” about the internal and external security of the country or the audience is meant to sound the alarm in sequence.
The jail term could even be increased by half if the information was shared through anonymous accounts or by a banned group. In this case, up to four and a half years in prison may be pending. It also obliges social media companies such as Twitter to share user data with the authorities – otherwise there is a risk of fines or a block.
Journalists’ associations warned that the law could become one of the toughest censorship and self-censorship mechanisms in the history of the Turkish Republic.
(SDA)