There are 54 million social media users in Turkey

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Click to read the article in Turkish / Kurdish

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said yesterday (July 1) that his Justice and Development Party (AKP) social media should be either "completely eliminated or controlled" and that they would submit a bill to "control" it.

The party has prepared a nine-article law proposal, which is currently being examined in terms of international legislation, Gazete Duvar reported.

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In May, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), an allied party of the AKP, submitted a law proposal to obligate citizens to access the internet with their ID numbers.

In 2018, more than 110,000 accounts were examined by the police and more than 7,000 people were detained over their social media posts, according to the Ministry of Interior. 

Turkey had previously banned some of the most-used websites in the world, including Wikipedia, Twitter and YouTube.

In yesterday's speech, Erdoğan also accused social media companies by "not taking the financial burden" of their operations, contrary to what they do in other countries.

There are currently more than 54 million social media users in the country of 83 million, BBC Turkish service reported, citing the "Digital in 2020" report by the We Are Social and Hootsuite companies. 

Here are facts about internet usage in Turkey:

• There are 62.7 million internet users in Turkey as of January 2020, four percent higher than the same month in 2019. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat), 81.8 percent of the men and 68.9 percent of the women in the country use the internet.
• The average time spent on the internet is 7 hours and 29 minutes. Turkey is among the 15 countries with the longest time of both daily internet usage and social media usage.
• In Turkey's most visited websites list by SimilarWeb, YouTube is second, Facebook is third, Twitter is fifth and Instagram is sixth.
• WhatsApp is the most common messaging application.
• There are currently 54 million social media users in Turkey. This is equal to 64 percent of the country's population.
• Most used social media platforms are Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp. Instagram is sixth, TikTok is seventh, Snapchat is 12th, Twitter is 13th, according to the Global Web Index.
• Turkey has the 10th most Facebook users in the world with 37 million accounts. In other words, 56 percent of the people over 13 used Facebook.
• As of April, there are 13.6 million Twitter users in Turkey, the sixth highest in the world, according to Statista. Eighteen percent of the eligible people use Twitter.
• Netflix previously announced that it has over 1.5 million subscribers in Turkey. (TP/VK)