How are Big Tech companies gearing up to ensure smooth and transparent operations during Turkey’s crucial parliamentary and presidential elections on 14 May 2023? ARTICLE 19 and Human Rights Watch reached out to major social media platforms, requesting details about their plans and strategies, including content moderation and handling takedown requests.
ARTICLE 19 and Human Rights Watch wrote to Meta, Telegram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube, seeking their input to enhance our analysis of Turkey’s online environment ahead of the elections. The letters posed several questions about the platforms’ preparations for the vote.
Key issues included:
- Human Rights impact assessment: Whether the platforms conducted a human rights impact assessment ahead of Turkey’s elections.
- Resource allocation: Details on staff working on Turkey, including content moderators and human rights policy experts, their fluency in Turkish and minority languages, and measures to ensure their political independence.
- Contingency plans: Preparation for potential disruptions such as throttling, sanctions, or conflicting election outcomes.
- Content moderation policies: Enforcement of policies on civic integrity, misinformation, hate speech, platform manipulation, and spam during the election period.
- Engagement with local groups: Collaboration with independent election monitoring organisations.
- Compliance with Turkish legislation: Whether the platforms complied with the October 2022 requirement to establish a local subsidiary and their general approach to requests for content takedowns and user data.
- Transparency: Publications of transparency reports on takedown requests, user data access, and compliance rates.