Ankara/AFP/Reuters

 

Twitter executives met Turkish government officials for talks yesterday amid accusations of tax evasion by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and a row over content on the social media site.

They are the first direct talks since Ankara banned access to the site last month over leaks on the social network implicating Erdogan's inner circle in corruption, and accusations by the government that Twitter ignored various court orders to remove some links deemed illegal.

"We will specifically ask Twitter to follow court orders," Tayfun Acarer, the head of Turkey's Communication Technologies Institution (BTK), was quoted as saying by the private NTV television as he headed to the meeting in the capital Ankara.

After hours of talks, which were attended by Colin Crowell, Twitter's head of global public policy, Acarer described the meeting as "positive", but said that they would not make any statement.

Ankara had to lift the highly criticised ban on April 3 after its top court ruled the blockade breached the right to free speech.

But Erdogan voiced sharp criticism of the Constitutional Court ruling and on Saturday accused the micro-blogging site of tax evasion.

"Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are international companies established for profit and making money," Erdogan said. "Twitter is at the same time a tax evader. We will go after it."

"We will deal with them. They will come like every international company and comply with my country's constitution, laws and tax rules," CNN Turk reported Erdogan as saying.

The government urges San Francisco-based Twitter, which has no operational base in Turkey, to open an office and pay Turkish taxes.

The government estimates that Twitter generates $35mn a year in advertising revenue in Turkey, none of it taxed by Ankara.

"Twitter should have an office in Turkey," Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkey's minister for European Union affairs, said yesterday.

"People should have the right to defence when they go to court and should be able to challenge (court decisions) at a higher court," he told reporters in Ankara.

The ban on Twitter was among a wider crackdown on social media ahead of local elections held on March 30, in which Erdogan's Justice and Development Party scored a crushing victory despite graft claims.

A similar ban on YouTube, which was imposed in March after the video-sharing site was used to spread an audio recording of high-level security talks on Syria, remains in place despite two court rulings.

Ankara's Nato allies and international human rights groups have deplored the bans as a setback to freedom of expression in Turkey, which has long harboured ambitions of joining the EU.

Because of its nature as a public broadcast medium and its viral network model, where information can spread exponentially through "retweets", Twitter has been viewed as a particularly destabilising force by some governments.

The social media site was blocked for roughly four years in Iran following protests during its 2009 presidential election and has also been banned in China since 2009.

Turkey said at the time of the ban that access would be restored if Twitter appointed a local representative, paid tax and agreed to block specific content when requested.

Like many technology companies, Twitter uses a non-traditional but highly tax-efficient business structure.

Its international headquarters are in Dublin but it also has offices in cities from Amsterdam and Paris to Rio de Janeiro and Seoul, according to its website, where staff market advertising services to mainly business customers.

However, customers in countries like Turkey, Germany and Britain transact directly with the Dublin-based Twitter International Company, terms of business on its website show.

Staff in subsidiaries in countries like Germany and Britain market the company's advertising services to local customers and these subsidiaries are funded by payments from other Twitter companies, like Twitter International, their accounts show.

This structure can ensure that Twitter subsidiaries in such countries report little profit and pay little tax.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which has been charged by the G20 with devising a blueprint to crack down on corporate tax avoidance, has criticised such structures, as have parliamentary investigations in the US and Britain.

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