Solo Project|Half of Turks have never used the internet

Nearly half of the Turkish people (46.2%) have never used the internet. According to statistics, the high subscription costs are to blame. There are non-internet users in every age group, so the ageing demographics are not the problem.

Laurens Bammens

46.2% of the Turks between 16 and 74 years of age have never used the internet. Women seem to use the internet even less than men. About 55.9% of non-internet users are female. All of this was discovered in statistics by the Turkish Statistics Institute.

There is an even stranger trend going on. In 2005, over 80% of the Turkish households had internet access. In 2010, that number was bisected according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). According to USA Today, the Turkish government has blocked over 40.000 websites since 2007. The censorship might be an explanation for people not being able to access the internet anymore.

Turkey scores low compared to the rest of the OECD countries. Compare Turkey on this map.

The amount of people with internet access according to internetlivestats.org has been increasing every year with the biggest increase between 2006 and 2007 (see graph below). The growth seems to be slowing down in the recent years, even though that is a worldwide trend.

With the growth of internet users, we see more or less the same trend. The biggest increase of users was in 2002 (122%). Of course  a 3% increase in 2014 (1.195.610 new users) means more new users than the 67% increase in 2000 (949.724 new users). Numbers by internetlivestats.org.

Following the Turkish Statistics Institute, 39.2% of the Turkish households do not have access to the internet at home. The main reasons why people don’t have internet at home is because they lack the necessary skills (27.4%) or they have no idea about the internet (10%). The biggest share of families that do not have internet at home say it is because of the high costs that go with installing internet (58.7%). 42.8% say they don’t need the internet and 12% says they have access to the internet elsewhere, like their school or their workplace.

Obviously mostly young people use the internet the most often. 73% of people between 16 and 24 have used the internet in the last three months. While only 5% of people between 65 and 74.

It’s especially old people that struggle with technology. Yet only 4.4% of Turkish people are between the age of 65 and 74. Over one third are younger than 19 (33.8%). So it would be short-sighted to say the older generation is responsible for half of the population never having used the internet.