Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s press office and the country’s defense ministry told reporters they are leaving WhatsApp Inc., taking a global flight from the popular messaging app because of new terms of use that have raised concerns about the privacy.
The presidency will move its WhatsApp groups to the BiP encrypted messaging app, a unit of Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri AS, on January 11, he said in messages to the groups. The Defense Ministry did the same on Sunday. The move coincides with Erdogan’s broader campaign against social media platforms that, according to activists, intend to suppress dissent.
Changes to WhatsApp terms and services as of February 8 will allow data sharing with the parent company Facebook Inc. users must agree to the new terms, which would allow more targeted ads, or lose access to their WhatsApp accounts.
WhatsApp Rival Signal reports growing pain as new users increase
The push to monetize WhatsApp more strongly came at a time when Facebook’s revenue growth is close to a record high. Although messages have increased by more than 50% in many of the countries hardest hit by the coronavirus, according to the company, these increases it didn’t translate 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, made a call to switch from WhatsApp to encrypted rival Signal, leading to an increase in the number of new users of this service.
Turkcell reported a similar pattern in Turkey, with about 1 million new users joining BiP Messenger in the past 24 hours, according to a company statement on Sunday. The app has been downloaded more than 53 million times since it launched in 2013, Turkcell said.
Erdogan’s office, in its statement, urged journalists to switch to BiP. O Turkey Wealth Fund took a majority stake in Turkcell, the country’s largest mobile operator, in 2020.
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WhatsApp’s dismissal of 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 him in increasingly authoritarian ways say the required appointments are part of a broader effort to gain more control over the platforms, with Turkey threatening to make them inadmissible internally if they do not comply.
Turkish authorities regularly arrest social media users on charges of 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. was hampered.
China’s TikTok, which was among the companies that were fined, including Facebook, agreed last week to appoint a local representative.
(Updates with the Ministry of Defense also shutting down WhatsApp, add context about Facebook’s revenue in fourth place)