The "new way of communication" which has been spreading to a wide range since the last decade of 20th century with digital transmission, Web sites, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Wikipedia, news portal, blogs, dictionaries and forums; actually indicates a new stage in human history. We're creating a "virtual world" in which both individuals and commercial firms can exist besides the physical world. We can even say that the model and duration of living in this virtual world, changes and affects the physical world. In the center of this "new model of living" is the social media whose number of actors increases every day.

Nowadays, the main channel for marketing and advertising activities is the social media as both individuals and commercial firms keep up with this model of living and take their place in the virtual world. Traditional marketing approaches and methods are now giving their place to social media marketing and digital advertising.

This new platform, which has a potential to create effective results for internet users and clients, also holds the power to destroy brand reputation and individual reputation of people in less than no time.  Since it is not possible for commercial firms and individuals to track all content about them published on the internet, to ensure continuity of this tracking process and swiftly initiate required actions, we see that this process has now become a new out-sourced service named as "Online Reputation Management" ("ORM"). ORM, consists of many administrative and legal phases such as separation of positive and negative content, analysis, responding, removing content and determining content which will be subject to legal disputes.

In the administrative phase of ORM, a wide content research is made, from dialogues in social media networks to content found in search engines, with regards to individuals, commercial firms and brands. Afterwards the negative content is reviewed, analyzed, sorted out according to importance, prioritized and the ones which damage the firm/individual's reputation and requires legal action are determined. Following this phase, the administrative or legal steps are decided according to prioritization levels.

ORM aims to prevent and deal with unauthorized user names, content of individual or corporate scandals, hate blogs, information leakages, fake account attacks and misinformation on individuals/corporates.

ORM, draws interest not only from brands and corporates but also from individuals like artists, doctors, politicians and business people. In parallel with this considerable interest, both advertising/media agencies and technology firms create new services and products to meet the need. While software companies develop new software for scanning internet platforms and apps talking with particular web sites to determine negative content; advertising/media agencies set the strategies and crisis scenarios against negative content. Moreover an evaluation is carried out for applying to legal remedies.

It is important to evaluate the nature and essence of a content published on the internet before taking legal action and to see if it falls within the limits of freedom of expression or may be deemed as criticism/opinion. All legal actions shall be based on strong legal arguments.

So what legal remedies does Turkish Law offer in case limits of basic rights and freedoms like freedom of expression, freedom of the press or right to information are being crossed?

In the legal evaluation the content is reviewed in terms of Intellectual Property Law, Civil Law, Commercial Law and other applicable legislation as well as Internet regulations. Turkish Law has many legal instruments and procedures to be used against the content infringing legal and real persons' rights.

In addition to correct legal evaluation, it is also important to determine the right order of applicable procedures and to follow procedural steps correctly. Otherwise the legal application may be rejected because of statute of limitation, lack of evidence, lack of preconditions or similar procedural deficiencies. It may be said that ORM service cannot be provided effectively and completely unless the above-mentioned software-administrative-legal support aspects are provided jointly and managed from one hand.

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