Turkey has blocked Roblox, an online game popular among teenagers, a week after freezing access to Instagram amid censorship allegations against the tech giant.
The move late Wednesday came amid growing condemnation of social media by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who accused online platforms of “fascism” and blamed them for failing to remove posts that authorities deem offensive.
Roblox, a platform that allows players to create their own games, has been downloaded more than 41 million times since its launch in Turkey in 2015.
Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc said Roblox was blocked because it “contains content that causes child abuse.” Prosecutors in Adana are investigating Roblox.
Since Friday, access to Instagram has been blocked in Türkiye.
The US platform responded to the government’s allegations by announcing that it had deleted more than 2,500 posts in the first six months of the year at the government’s request.
Erdogan said on Monday that social networking platforms “cannot even tolerate photos of Palestinian martyrs without immediately banning them.” His communications chief added that Instagram had blocked the posting of condolences over the killing of Hamas politician Ismail Haniyeh.
Turkey may continue its crackdown on social media after the head of the parliamentary commission on digital platforms, Hüseyin Yayman, said there had been calls to block TikTok.
“People who see me on the street stop me and tell me, ‘You will go to paradise if you turn off Tiktok,'” Yayman told the DHA news agency.
Istanbul Mayor and opposition politician Ekrem Imamoglu sharply criticized the authorities’ actions and called them “unimaginable.”
“Those who make these decisions have no idea about the new world, the economy and technology,” Imamoglu wrote on the social media platform X.
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