Main opposition leader defends social media

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. DHA Photo

The main opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu defended the freedom of the social media and internet over the latest protests across the country, addressing his party’s parliamentary group in Ankara today.

“Media is the main skeleton of democracy. If the media is not free then the society is not free. The media unfortunately failed in the latest incidents. The society has been informed about the incidents from a few TV channels or foreign media. If you [government] had warned the media not to publish the incidents, the society will get news from somewhere else and this is called social media,” said Kılıçdaroğlu.

On June 2, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan described the microblogging website Twitter as “trouble” in a television interview. “There is a trouble called Twitter. Unmitigated lies are there [on Twitter],” Erdoğan said. “The thing that is called social media is a troublemaker in societies today.”

He criticized false tweets being posted on Twitter, saying that people were being misinformed by lies when they did not catch subsequent corrections.