Turkey’s far-right MHP seeking firm control over online news sites

Turkey’s far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) has submitted a parliamentary bill calling for increased measures against what it called manipulation in digital news platforms, Cumhuriyet newspaper reported on Tuesday.

MHP’s bill seeks tight control and censorship of Internet news sites while calling for their closure by the Information Technology Agency if they fail to fulfill the required obligations within six months, it said.

"We see that a significant part of the Internet news sites publish (news) in order to create perception and to support terrorist organizations," MHP lawmaker Halil Öztürk said.

The Speak Up Platform (Susma Platform) released its "Censorship and Self-Censorship in Turkey: December 2019 - December 2020 Report". The report said that 137 journalistic activities were targeted by government censorship, Evrensel newspaper reported last week.

The Turkish government has increased restrictions on news sites in recent years. The number of censorships on social media that Susma Platform monitored was 46 in 2020, it said.