Legal Regulation of Social Networks in German Law and Recommendations for Türkiye

Social networks are the platforms that present important functions in the social context today. These platforms serve in terms of individuals sharing their knowledge, views, and attitudes. In addition to expressing their opinions on a personal level, users also have the opportunity of being a group or a community and coming together with those who think like themselves. The new conditions in which reactions can be organized through these platforms can lead to result in which virtual associations are established and actions can be organized in real terms. Affairs such as the difficulty of controlling social networks and the possibility of sharing without the need for real identities cause these networks to go out of the control of states. It is also known that states try to take various steps to regulate these platforms despite the difficulty of control. States have started to implement a set of legal regulations in order to prevent the abuse and improper use of social network platforms. Although the steps towards the legal regulation of these platforms that offer extreme freedom are criticized, this is a requirement of the principles of democracy and the principles of the state of law. Preventing the chaos caused by this uncontrolled area is also the necessity of being a state. The uncontrolled operation of these areas will result in questioning the legitimacy of states. From this point forth, in the German Bundestag, Germany adopted the “Law on Improvement of Legal Practice in Social Networks” (NetzDG) on 30.06.2017. This regulation, which is expressed as the Social Network Law in the study, is handled within the framework of the law numbered 5651 in Turkish Law by comparing it with the regulations in Türkiye. Even though the German Social Network Law imposes a lot of obligations on social network enterprises according to Law No. 5651, it also stipulates high administrative penalty fines for the mentioned enterprises when they fail to satisfy these obligations. The sum of administrative penalty fines that would be imposed by the Federal Ministry of Justice can be up to 50 million Euros. In addition to this, victims whose personal rights are violated on social network platforms are provided as an opportunity to obtain their inventory data against violators from the service providers based on a court decision.