Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s media office and the country’s defense ministry told reporters they were leaving WhatsApp Inc., joining a global flight of the popular messaging app over new terms of use they have raised. privacy issues.
The presidency will move its WhatsApp groups to the BiP encrypted messaging application, a unit of Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri AS on January 11 said in messages to the groups. The Ministry of Defense followed the same Sunday. The change coincides with Erdogan’s broader campaign against social media platforms that activists say seeks to stifle dissent.
Changes to effective WhatsApp terms and services on February 8 will allow you to share data with the parent company Facebook Inc. users they must accept the new terms, which would allow for more specific advertising, or they may lose access to their WhatsApp accounts.
WhatsApp’s rival signal reports increasing pains as new users increase
The push to monetize WhatsApp with more intensity has come at a time when Facebook’s revenue growth is almost minimal. Although courier has jumped more than 50% in many of the countries most affected by the coronavirus, according to the company, these increases they haven’t translated into more advertising dollars because popular services are not platforms where Facebook has a robust advertising business.
With WhatsApp data protection about to weaken, the world’s richest man, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, has launched a call to switch from WhatsApp to Encrypted Signal, which leads to an increase in new users of this service.
Turkcell reported a similar pattern in Turkey, with approximately 1 million new users joining BiP Messenger in the last 24 hours, according to a company statement on Sunday. The app has been downloaded more than 53 million times since it was launched in 2013, Turkcell said.
Erdogan’s office, in its statement, urged journalists to switch to BiP. He Wealth Fund of Turkey had a majority stake in Turkcell, the country’s largest mobile operator, in 2020.
Turkey tightens control of social media after Erdogan called for foul
The rejection of WhatsApp by Erdogan is his latest move against social media giants, which Turkey recently fined for not appointing local representatives as required by a new law. Activists who accuse it of increasingly authoritarian forms say the necessary appointments are part of a wider effort to gain more control over the platforms, with Turkey threatening to make them unusable nationally if they do not comply.
Turkish authorities regularly arrest social media users on charges such as insulting Erdogan and banned Wikipedia for three years until a court ruled a year ago that the restriction violated freedom of expression. Access to Twitter Inc. has been blocked.
Chinese-owned TikTok, which was part of the companies, including Facebook that was fined, agreed last week to appoint a local representative.
(Updates with the Ministry of Defense also abandon WhatsApp, adding context to Facebook’s fourth-quarter revenue)