I was wondering what poular subject can i write about, when i started my blog. But evidently there will be a lot of matters to ponder on in todays world we live in. Due to a personal harassment case targeting a political figure in Turkey around the beginning of July, there was an agenda about a bill for regulating the social media usage. That bill is recently passed by the government. This post is not going to be a political one, sorry to dissappoint :) Inevitably i will beat around the political issues but i am mostly concerned about what is going to happen when these 2 concepts come together: Social media and law.
As usual in all around the world, different media organs have reflected, interpreted or explained this bill differently in Turkey. Some said social media will be banned, some said we will no longer be able to use Facebook or Twitter, some said we are declaring war agains social media giants. This is why when it comes to laws, i recommend you to read the full passage of the law to know what it acutally is. Here, i want to bring my comments into daylight about some noteworthy articles in the law. And i will try to foresee what could happen in this digital age and what can we witness from sociological perspestive. I am far from being a law expert, so correct me if i make a mistake please.
At first glance, i get the feeling that this law is passed to protect human rights and to prevent illegal activities on social media in Turkey, by regulating the concept of social media. I am not critisizing the law, on the contrary i am supporting it from human rights aspect. But i want to examine this law to be able to bring questions in your mind about todays situation all around the world.
First article mentions the media with more than 1 milyon users. This is the first question i have. Does 1M users mean it is influencial engouh? Can't you make a very big impact by organizing illegal activities or social engineering with a platform with maybe a 100k users? Is it meaningful to categorize a social media by its users count in the country?
Plus, there are number of different ideas emerging from creative people these days. Remember the chat rooms back in 90s? You may not post or share any content on this kind of app (except of your words) today but doesn't it qualify as a social media? Or games with thousands of players or platforms like Discord dedicated for games? I'm sure there are other examples too. Does this law only concern big social media platforms where you post images, videos or just copule of sentences, like Twitter or Facebook? Is this definition really enough?
Another example can be blog sites like Medium. Millions of people can reach your posts in these websites. I mean the meaning of social is very broad and somewhat vauge. Friendship or flirting apps are very popular these days. There are also fake accounts in these apps. Moreover, these apps can do serious damage to young generation. So the question rises: Is this law like a dog fight or a pissing contest?
I don't have muct to say about the representative :) You can have influencial power on all over the world these days. Thus, you may have to obey certain rules in any X country. This also has a sub-meaning for the recognition of that nation too. Plus, being able to directly apply to the media owners instead of going through slow legal processes is a thumbs up. This explains the 2nd article i guess. But then there comes sanctions.
3rd article, limitating the access to social media in case of not having a represantitive. This can backfire in any country and can also result in an inconclusive attempt to raise your voice. This is why i think some sort of penalty or issuing a fine can be a better solution. We live in a dijital age, there must be a digital ground that we can repond, instead of isolating ourselves.
According to 4th article in my list, the social media must act in a short period of time when a civil rights abuse is filed. I find this appropriate from human rights perspective but a law can regulate, it cannot educate. This is like an infinite loop where the abuser can carry on doing whatever they do and post stuff again and again.
5. article addesses fake accounts issue. This is a problem all around the world and as far as i know, there is no social media that can fully guarantee all accounts are the right owners and legit. It is hard of course but i wonder this: Because of fake accounts and impersonation, God knows how many people have suffered injustice. Who is the responsible here? The social media, or the lack of laws or the faulty execution of it?
Let me summarize the situation here. Social media is a concrete reality of our world today. The concept of socializing can turn into many different forms in dijital environments. Media is a can of worms already. If you ask me if there is a very big issue called "Media" in Turkey and all over the world before social media? i would say yes. But briefly, media means the medium that conveys information. There were written and visual media and now we have social media, thanks to the concept of socializing in digital environments. This brought 2 problematic concepts together. In a country of X, with the purpose of Y, laws are there to regulate these two together. Every law brings sanctions with them too. This may raise the question: Do you want to regulate or limitate?
I will try to dig deeper on the legal side. Wherever you go around the world, if there is some form of laws governing the people, there is also the concepts of execution of it and judgment according to it. And the relation between these 3 concepts are evidently changing from country to country, group to group or even from people to people. That is why most of the comments i have made previously are mere foresights. How will the world adjust according to the digital age? With regulations or sanctions? We will yet to see this but my opinion, both these methods are not much effective.
On the other hand, how are we going to evolve and change our understanding in these unfamiliar developments in the dijital age. Are we going to be inhibitory or embrace it and educate others with proper knowledge? There are number of policies and regulations in different countries in the world already. Social media is a tool and it is subjected to turn into any form in the hands of the people using it. I think we are not fully ready to get used to the reality of these digital inventions. I mean the whole world. Instead of thinking ahead of our time, we are trying to solve the problems and prevent furter damage after certain people are affected because of it.
I think even the human rights are not properly protected in the world. This is why i would ask these questions to anyone who tries to regulate social media: What or who are you trying to protect? From what or who are you trying to protect? There are multiple issues that are already in our agenda like civil rights, survival of nations, terror elements, hate speech, racisim ..etc. Also, every country must take their own inner and outer dynamics into account and take precautions accordingly. If you have honest answers to these questions, we can agree on you are working for the good of your country and humanity.
There will also be lots of misdemeanor and victims in these concepts, since they are brand new for a lot of people. There will be frauds saying you have been ticketed because of a post you have made. They may also say "if you want to stay out of trouble, don't use their apps, use ours". This way people can collect information of users and sell their data. You may get calls from fake Facebook represantatives. I am not even going into the subject of being a conscious social media user. Maybe later i can dive into that in Idea and Philosophy category.
Let's steer away from legal side for a while. This will be a bit technical, but i want to give some recent examples of social media platforms or digital contents. I have directly witnessed some of it myself and i want to prove my point. And then i will draw my own conclusions to wrap it up.
Since Facebook started the personal data privacy storm, thousands of apps and websites have been subjected to some sanctions, resulting in innocent victims. Selling data to advertisers are still one of the most commonly used methods by a lot of apps and websites, not necessarily even social ones. But it is really hard to prevent this. Sometimes when you agree the terms of service, all of the content you share may be belong to the social platform or website or app.
After the events, Facebook changed the integration infrastructure, and once more, thousands of apps and websites had to go through excruciating whilelist processes. I personally could not handle the ridiculous system and got rid of the Facebook integration altogether, so go figure. Another example. Back in the day, android apps were reqesting all the phone permissions from the get go. Then Google changed it and now apps only request permissions when they use a specific feature of the phone. So yeah, millions of apps had to get a big update again.
The same Android operating system changed the file access rights and limited it so certain folders. They say there will be a whitlist kind of process for your apps if you want to access files and folders anywhere in your phone. Note that these are digital laws and they have implemented as limitations. Even the social giants are not ready to play this game.
Ok enough technical details. I am not closely following but i know there is a ridiculous war going on between USA and China, in the form of limiting the usage of each others apps or websites. I think this is the imperialism of the digital world. Remember i asked what are you protecting, from what are you protecting? It does not look like it is about human rights or prosperity of the country.
Wikipedia was a tragic thing in Turkey. This is one of the reasons i have mentioned "why 1M users". There are tons of content on the internet dedicated to insult Turkey, but for some reason, Wikipedia is banned. Is it because it exceeds 1M daily access limit? If you ask me, this was neither a punishment nor precaution. If you want to ask about patriotism at this point, you should also acknowlegde that even this moment, somebody is posting lies or insults about my country. There is no hegemony or domination in digital world. Those concepts does not apply to a borderless environment. This "i want to be superior" logic is one of the reasons why i say we are not yet ready.
We, humankind, made mistakes while these concepts are establishing in our lives and it appears that we will be making more in the future too. Maybe we will re-discover how to use and utilise the internet while we are trying to protect human rights or our country. And then maybe we realize that we can't manage the digital world with laws that govern human world and we may try to adjust ourselves to digital world, instead of adjusting digital world for us. Political orders may regulate humans and their behaviors. Humans can regulate and use digital environments. The key in the middle is the human.
Yes, the digital world has no boundaries and it poses a real threat to especially young generation if it goes out of control and is used unconsciously. Yes there should be some sort of supervision. Youth = future, simple as that. But we can't adjust the new ages properly without thinking ahead of our time. There used to be chatrooms back in early millenia. Then technological advances brought platforms like Whatsapp kind of apps and it became social media. (It was also social and it had a media but nobody thought it this way back then.) We will have to change our definitions, lifestyles and understanding over time for sure, but can we keep up with this with governmental laws?
Also, digital environments are one of the most effective propolsive force behind globalisation. Regulating it insted of limitating, adjusting to it accordingly and using consciously instead of challenging it, would make more sense. Maybe justice should be served for those who write malicious things about Turkey on Twitter, instead of cutting Turkey from Twitter. This is also valid for any other country too.
Is what you are thinking right now :) Every new concept that we acquire in our lives breeds new ignorances too. So yes, i can only make my deductions according to my limited knowledge, experience and foresight. I would love to be a decisive person for these subjects, but right now as a citizen and a human, i see humankind is struggling with its own invented concepts. Of course there are lots of aspects of these issues too. Of course it also involves international relationships. Of course there are groups in the country who can manipulate goups of people. And of course there are matters that i am not even aware of. But as long as competent people are not making informed desicions about this, everyone will have their own critiques.
There are 3 major issues regarding social media. Fake accounts, security and of course harmful content. There are lots of meassures about the security concerns but fake accounts are pain in the butt. I can't come up with any logical method to prevent malicious content because it is useless to try to get rid of it completely. You can have it removed from the media but the owners can deliver it again and again. They used to burn libraries for cultural assimilation but this one is more durable. There is a giant virtual environment within a lot of peoples reach. Therefore it will take time to come up with a constructive solution for this.
We are trying to regulate the usage and prevent the consequent damages of the new concepts that emerge and settle in this age, through which we have no idea what awaits us. As i mentioned, there will be mistakes we make in this digital age. When it comes to laws, we will be able to evaluate them as they are executed, just like every other desicion that humankind make. Human rights must be protected and access to information must be as free as possible. I guess if we behave conscious and act collaboratively, we might have less problems. Because we are the biggest factors that shapes both the world we live in and the digital one. See you at the next post :)
Leave a comment