Turkey slapped Twitter, Periscope and Pinterest advertising bans on Tuesday over their failure to comply with a contentious new law that requires social media companies to designate legal representatives in the country.
The law, which human rights and media freedom advocates say amounts to censorship, requires social media platforms to hold members in Turkey to deal with complaints on their websites, about content.
Companies who fail to nominate an official representative are subject to fines, followed by restrictions on ads, and could face decreases in bandwidth that would make their websites too sluggish to use.
Facebook avoided the advertising ban after it announced on Monday that it had begun the process of assigning a legal entity in Turkey, joining LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Dailymotion and the Russian social media site VKontakte, which have agreed to set up legal entities in Turkey.
“We hope that Twitter and Pinterest which have still not announced their representatives will rapidly take the necessary steps,” said Omer Fatih Sayan, the deputy minister in charge of communications and infrastructure, after the advertising bans for Twitter, it’s live video-streaming app, Periscope and on the image sharing network, Pinterest, were announced on Turkey’s Official Gazette.