A politician smashed his mobile phone with a hammer while speaking in parliament.
Burak Erbay, a Turkish opposition lawmaker, destroyed the mobile device during his speech in the parliament on Wednesday 12 October.
He is a member of the opposition Republican People’s party which currently stands as the main opposition party in Turkey.
A video released of Erbay shows him aggressively hammering the phone, showing the members of parliament and then dropping the phone to the side.
The incident was in protest against a proposed government-backed bill which aims to combat online “disinformation”.
Erbay opposes the law and spoke to parliament while hammering the phone, saying: “There goes unionism only have one freedom left. The smartphone in your pocket, which has Instagram, Facebook and YouTube that you can communicate with.”
“Today's October 12. If the law passes through parliament, you can break your phones and throw them away like this” he says, as he drops the phone to fall.
“My young brothers and sisters. You needn’t use them anymore”
As per the legislation, journalists and social media users could be jailed for up to three years for spreading fake news.
This would also require social media networks and internet sites to release details of users suspected of “propagating misleading information”.
Critics of the bill, say if passed, the law would infringe the rights of press freedom and lead to widespread censorship.
In coalition 22 press freedom organisations, said that bill “provides a framework for extensive censorship of online information and the criminalisation of journalism, which will enable the government to further subdue and control public debate in the lead up to Turkey’s general elections in 2023”.
The bill also suggests that if anonymous accounts are used to spread disinformation then the sentence can be increased by up to half.
Journalist Emre Kızılkaya, head of the Turkish branch of the Vienna-based International Press Institute - one of the organisations to condemn the bill said: “It criminalises what the authorities call disinformation without defining what that actually means.
“A judge will decide how to define disinformation and intent, which really gives arbitrary powers to the government to criticise journalism.”
Turkey currently ranks 149 out of 180 countries on Reporters without Borders world press freedom index for 2022, an organisation that defends the imprisonment of journalist and media personnels.
Turkey stands ahead of India, both countries where the majority of the media is under governmental control.
