Popular social media giant Twitter will appoint a representative to Turkey in line with a controversial social media law after the company and others were slapped with advertising bans for failing to comply with the law, according to a report in the pro-government Sabah daily on Friday.
The law — which human rights and media freedom groups say amounts to censorship — compels social media companies with more than 1 million users to maintain representatives in Turkey to deal with complaints about content on their platforms.
Companies that refuse to designate an official representative are subjected to fines, followed by advertising bans, and could face bandwidth reductions that would make their platforms too slow to use. The ban is on selling online space for ads, which is a prime source of revenue for social media companies.
Sabah claimed, based on social media sources, that Twitter decided to appoint a local representative to avoid the bandwidth reduction as well as the advertising ban.
In addition to Twitter, Periscope and Pinterest were also subject to advertising bans in January.
Other popular social media companies such as Facebook and YouTube already announced their plans earlier to abide by the new social media law.
Pinterest is the only social media platform that has not yet decided to appoint a local representative to Turkey.