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Part Two: Legal Obligations and Evaluation of Transparency Reports

Introduction

The radical amendments to Law No. 5651 have fundamentally altered the legal landscape for Internet publishing and Social Media Platforms in Türkiye. The regime has shifted from a “content-oriented” control mechanism to a “platform-oriented” regulatory model, underpinned by severe sanctions.

Initially, Law No. 7253 (adopted in 2020) imposed foundational obligations: appointing a representative, hosting data locally, responding effectively to user applications, and publishing regular transparency reports. These duties were significantly tightened by Law No. 7418 in 2022, which introduced strict stipulations. Representatives who are real persons must now be Turkish citizens, while legal-entity representatives must be structured as a “branch”. Furthermore, administrative and financial liabilities have been vastly expanded.

The objective of this legal transformation was clear: to strip social media platforms of their passive status as mere “hosting providers” and forcibly integrate them into Türkiye’s legal system as directly accountable “interlocutors”, answerable to administrative and judicial requests.

Through these regulations, foreign-sourced platforms with more than one million daily accesses from Türkiye have been saddled with critical responsibilities. These range from designating an authorised representative and hosting user data locally to responding to user applications with justifications within 48 hours, and maintaining a public ad library.

While the legislator cloaks these measures in the rhetoric of “protecting user rights” and ensuring “digital transparency”, the Freedom of Expression Association and other civil society organisations warn of a darker reality. They highlight the risk that, under the shadow of crippling sanctions such as 90 per cent bandwidth throttling and advertising bans, these regulations are transforming platforms into unwilling components of the state’s censorship apparatus.

In this section, we scrutinise the compliance performance of the principal social media platforms shaping Türkiye’s digital public sphere: X, Meta (Facebook & Instagram), YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Dailymotion, and VKontakte, alongside the local actor, Ekşi Sözlük. Our analysis transcends a mere checklist of formal requirements (e.g., confirming the establishment of a company); instead, it interrogates the functionality of these structures, the data quality of transparency reports, and the actual practices regarding the protection of user rights.

In this context, we seek answers to the following fundamental questions:

  • Legitimacy vs. Compliance: Are the representatives appointed by the platforms genuinely authorised and accountable interlocutors as per the letter of the Law, or are they merely “shell” structures established to circumvent legal necessity?

  • Data Quality: Do the published transparency reports offer meaningful, disaggregated, and auditable data regarding applications made under Article 9 (personal rights) and Article 9/A (privacy), or are they bureaucratic exercises glossed over with generic statistics?

  • Handling of Rights: How do platforms actually handle applications regarding violations of “personal rights” and “privacy”?

  • Constitutional Compliance: Do platforms continue to process applications based on Article 9 (personal rights violations), despite the Constitutional Court’s decision annulling the legal provision?

  • Ad Transparency: To what extent do “Ad Library” implementations and content removal practices meet the transparency and accountability standards envisaged by the Law?

The platform-specific analyses that follow reveal, through concrete data, precisely how these entities attempt to navigate the tension between the intensified legal pressure in Türkiye and their own commercial interests. They have adopted diverse strategies, ranging from “total obedience” (TikTok, Meta) and “resistance” (YouTube’s non-data sharing policy) to “indifference” (LinkedIn).