Social media companies are unlikely to fully comply with a new Turkish law requiring them to remove "disinformation" content and share user data with authorities, analysts say, raising the possibility of possible disruptions to platforms before next year's elections, Reuters reports.

Facebook, Twitter, Google and others must fully comply with the law by next April or they will face possible ad bans and eventually reduced bandwidth, putting the companies in a dilemma ahead of next June's election.

Analysts and consultants say the companies have global privacy standards they are unlikely to violate in Turkey because it could set dangerous precedents for other countries seeking control over social platforms.

"Some of these companies are not likely to comply with the law," said Sinan Ulgen, founding partner at Istanbul Economics, a regulatory and legal consultancy.

The law, which took effect this week, requires companies to share user information with authorities if they post content that constitutes a crime, including misleading information.

Social media companies are required to appoint Turkish representatives. They face a bandwidth restriction of up to 90 percent immediately following a court order if the representative fails to provide information to authorities.

Critics of the law say it could tighten government control over social media, one of the last bastions of free speech and dissent in Turkey after 20 years under President Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party.

The AKP and allied nationalists supported the law. The opposition called it "the censorship law" and said it could affect the June parliamentary and presidential elections, which polls show Erdogan could lose.

The law has largely been criticized for imprisoning social media users and journalists who spread "disinformation," but it also builds on legislation imposed on social media companies in 2020, with much harsher measures.

For example, companies will be "directly responsible" for "unlawful" content and tags if they don't remove them within four hours of authorities' request.

Social networking sites are already strictly monitored, and people are often sued for posting, for example, criticizing the Turkish invasion of Syria or insulting the president.

A recent investigation by Reuters showed how pressure from authorities and self-censorship have turned the mainstream Turkish media into a tight chain of subjugation to government-approved headlines.

Until now, social media companies have been able to comply with the 2020 law by creating legal entities in Turkey that they could easily pull out if pressured, said Yaman Akdeniz, a cyber law expert and professor at Istanbul's Bilgi University. Those laws were a "soft transition," but now the government has made them much more serious with the new bill, he added. "If you accept all of these, you become a part of the law enforcement because the expectation is that you assist in everything," he said.

Companies could be fined up to 3 percent of their global revenue if they don't comply with the law, and they could also face a ban on advertising.

Akdeniz said authorities probably won't immediately impose sanctions such as regulation, but will start with smaller steps such as fines. However, he said the possibility of tougher measures poses an ongoing threat to companies.

Sezen Yesil, director of public policy for Meta in Turkey and Azerbaijan, told a parliamentary commission in June that there is uncertainty about how the laws will be implemented.

Pelin Kuzey Karaman, Google's director of government relations and public policy in Turkey, told the commission that the company has made "the maximum efforts" to comply with the 2020 law. "Unfortunately, these efforts we have made at the maximum level only 1-1/2 to 2 years ago will almost be wasted... with the draft bill. As Google, we truly see this as a saddening development," she said.

Under the new law, network service providers such as Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp, which is ubiquitous in Turkey, must also establish a local company. The law places them under the jurisdiction of the Information and Communication Technology Authority (ICTA), which can block them if they operate without permission.

"I think (the law) is like a wish list - they put whatever they can think of in there," Akdeniz said. "There is an attempt to regulate social media platforms that could be a model law for authoritarian regimes."