Turkey on Thursday enters a new era of tight social media restrictions that threaten to erase the local presence of Facebook and Twitter should they fail to take down contentious posts, AFP reports.

The legislation was rammed through parliament by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling AKP party and follows the government's crackdown on opposition newspapers and television channels.

Under the new rules, platforms with more than one million daily users must open offices in Turkey that can deal with local court decisions to remove offending content within 48 hours.
If not, they face advertising bans, fines of up to 40 million Turkish liras (US$5.1 million), and -- crucially -- bandwidth reductions of up to 90 percent, making the platforms effectively unusable.

They also require social media companies to "take necessary measures" to store user data locally, although binding legislation to that effect was taken out of the final version of the draft law passed in July.

Access to websites and content has already been partially restricted in the nation of 83 million people.

Twitter last year listed Turkey -- along with Russia and Japan -- among the top three countries responsible for 86 percent of all requests to take down posts.

Both Facebook and Twitter refused to comment when asked by AFP if they would comply with the new rules.

Erdogan is openly suspicious of the internet and once branded Twitter a "menace" for helping mobilize 2013 anti-government protests which threw up one of the biggest challenges to his party's rule.

Many Turks, especially the young, get much of their news on social media since most of the regular news outlets are owned or controlled by pro-government companies.

"There are a lot of cases of domestic violence against women and murders that we don't see on TV," Ayse Nur Akyuz, a model and self-described "influencer" with 47.000 Instagram followers, told AFP.

"News about them spreads on social media in five minutes."

Everyone from high school students, cartoonists and reporters to a former Miss Turkey model have landed in court for tweets and other social media posts deemed offensive to the president.

The new legislation gained momentum after Erdogan became enraged in July by online insults of Finance Minister Berat Albayrak and his wife Esra, the president's daughter, following the birth of their fourth child.