President of RTÜK, Ebubekir Şahin, made a statement to the newspaper Yeni Akit, in which he claims that there is a gay character in Netflix’s Turkish-made Aşk 101 series, and stated that they started working quickly after the task of supervising internet broadcasting was given to the RTÜK Supreme Board and they talked about their redlines with the broadcast platforms. Şahin said that their redlines are quite clear and that they will not tolerate broadcasts that are against the national and moral values of the society and that may adversely affect the physical and spiritual development of children and young people.
The full text of Şahin’s statement to Yeni Akit is as follows:
“After the task of organizing and supervising on-demand broadcasting over the Internet was given to our Supreme Council, we quickly completed the regulation work. Licensing processes are progressing. In this context, we came together with local and foreign select-watch platforms from time to time and conveyed our red lines to them with our demands and expectations. We do not have any problems in communicating with international and domestic brands. We have also established our control mechanisms. The experts of our Monitoring and Evaluation Department closely follow the field of on-demand publishing as well as other publications. Due to our duty, our eyes are on them. When necessary, we first warn them verbally. We also saw that they took our verbal warnings into consideration. We carefully monitor the latest debates in this field, especially in the social media, and in the public. At this point, we made the necessary contacts with the relevant platform managers and made our warnings. In a statement they made on social media, they stated that the allegations about the characters of the series were unfounded. Otherwise, our stance is clear and unambiguous. As RTÜK, we have emphasized that we will not tolerate possible broadcasts that are against the national and moral values of our society. It is not possible for us to turn a blind eye to broadcast content that may adversely affect the physical and mental development of children and young people. Our red lines are clear, we act with the authority we receive from the relevant law, which was put forward by the will of the people. As the RTÜK administration, we are determined not to allow any broadcast content that will disturb our society.”