Late on 20th April, a bill passed by Turkish lawmakers has an element to limit access to social media platforms by children under the age of 15, state media reported.
The law is the most recent in an international movement of safeguarding the youth against perilous Web usage.
It was a week after a 14-year-old boy killed nine students and a teacher in a gun attack in a middle school in Kahramanmaras, southern Turkey. Police are investigating the online activity of the perpetrator, who also died, in a bid to uncover his motivation for the attack.
The bill will compel social media platforms to install age-verification tools, offer parental control options and ensure companies respond promptly to harmful content that users post.
The only thing that the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, needs to do is to accept the bill within 15 days to pass it into law. He spoke in the wake of the Kahramanmaras killings about the need to mitigate the online risks to children’s safety and privacy.
He said in a televised address on Monday, “we are living in an era where some digital sharing applications are corrupting the minds, and social media platforms have to become cesspools.”
The main opposition party, which is the Republican People’s Party or CHP, has criticised the proposal, stating that children should be safeguarded not with prohibitions but through rights-based policies.
Digital platforms and platforms (YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and others) would also have to block children under the age of 15 from creating accounts and implement parental controls that would manage the access of children to their accounts.
The online game companies will also be obliged to have one of them in Turkey so as to make sure that they comply with the new rules. The possible punishments are the reduction of internet bandwidth and fines by the communications watchdog in Turkey.
The Turkish government has had a recent history of blocking websites as it has developed into a form of protest. Online communications were extensively blocked during last year’s protests in support of the jailed opposition mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu.
The first restriction on social media access by children under 16 was in December, in Australia, where social media companies blocked access to approximately 4.7 million accounts that were determined to belong to children.
Earlier this year, Indonesia started to enforce the introduction of a new government regulation that prohibits children under the age of 16 from accessing digital platforms that may expose the children to pornography, cyberbullying, online scams and addiction.
Others, such as Spain, France and the United Kingdom, are also taking or considering action to limit access of children to social media as concerns continue to rise that children are actually being harmed by exposure to uncontrolled social media content.
