How reporters are experiencing censorship on social media

In mid-January, a number of journalists were notified by Twitter that a Turkish court had issued an order for their tweets to be removed after a judges complaint called the tweets defamatory. Many of the tweets were about a controversial court case he launched against police officers whose wiretapping investigation he had previously approved, and many of them mentioned the judge by name. Aysun Yazc, a court reporter for the daily newspaper Taraf, deleted her tweet after receiving an email from Twitter.

As a correspondent, I just shared a piece of news that was true with my followers. Sharing this kind of news with people is my job, Yazc said. Her colleague, Tarafs political editor Dicle Batrk, received a similar notification and did not delete her tweet. She says its still visible. Days later, Batrk received another email from Twitter informing her that the company may still have to remove it.

Examples of media-related censorship on social media keep piling uplast week, Facebook withheld images of the Prophet Muhammad for users in Turkey, reportedly acting in response to a court order. Social media companies dont break down their data on withheld content showing whether journalists are specifically targeted by government removal requests. But the notifications that Yazc and Batrk received point to wider evidence that journalists are experiencing censorship on social media. Where this kind of censorship occurs, it isnt isolated: In Turkey and Russia, where journalists have been impacted by removal requests on social media, theyre under pressure in other media too.

Turkey is a standout example of how gag orders (sometimes called injunctions or reporting bans) are used to stifle media coverage of breaking news. Over the past year, gag orders therewhich prohibit reporting in broadcast, print, and online mediahave coincided with removal requests on Twitter and Facebook. And Elif Akgl, freedom of expression editor for the Istanbul-based news website Bianet, said the governments use of reporting bans has spiked in that time.

There have been a lot of media bans in the last 10 years, but most concerned coverage of family courts. But when we talk about bans on political issues, there were a lot more of those in 2014, Akgl said.

But political injunctions on reporting arent limited to Turkey: Last June, Wikileaks revealed, for example, that an Australian court had issued a super-injunction (which prohibits reporting on the injunction itself) on bribery allegations against politicians from other countries.

When governments issue gag orders, social media companies can find themselves on the defensive: Though beholden to users, they sometimes comply with foreign governments requests to remove allegedly illegal content. Freedom of expression activists have criticized Facebook and Twitter for complying in countries where they do not have offices or are not subject to jurisdiction, because when court-ordered reporting bans are enforced by social media companies, through withholding journalists or their sources accounts or content, an important source of information is endangered in already restricted media environments. During the 2009 presidential elections in Iran, (the countrys press status was rated not free last year by Freedom House) media outlets from outside the country relied on news shared by Twitter users there.

Adrian Shahbaz, a researcher with Freedom Houses Freedom on the Net project, says in recent years, there have been prominent cases of media coverage being prohibited on specific topics in the UK, Israel, and Brazil, where courts have granted government-issued injunctions about topics ranging from discussions held in parliament to prominent arrests and corruption investigations. But theyre hard to enforce online.

Now governments are looking to in some cases create new laws and in other cases enforce laws that have in the past only been applicable to print media. The overall trend is that internet freedom is declining and peoples freedom to express themselves on social media is declining, Shahbaz said.

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How reporters are experiencing censorship on social media