Facebook has not handed over user data to Turkish authorities during the country's ongoing anti-government protests, the company said in a Wednesday statement.

Facebook's comments follow a Turkish government minister's claim that Facebook was "in cooperation with the state" while Twitter was refusing to supply user data, per NPR.

Read Facebook's full statement below:

Facebook has not provided user data to Turkish authorities in response to government requests relating to the protests. More generally, we reject all government data requests from Turkish authorities and push them to formal legal channels unless it appears that there is an immediate threat to life or a child, which has been the case in only a small fraction of the requests we have received.

We are concerned about legislative proposals that might purport to require Internet companies to provide user information to Turkish law enforcement authorities more frequently. We will be meeting with representatives of the Turkish government when they visit Silicon Valley this week, and we intend to communicate our strong concerns about these proposals directly at that time.

Reuters also reported that Turkish authorities are asking Twitter to set up an office in the country to facilitate cooperation between the microblogging service and the government. Turkey's Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, has previously called Twitter a "curse" filled with lies.

The social media back-and-forth comes as some Turkish lawmakers call for stricter rules on social media use following weeks of protests.

Facebook and Twitter alike have long been a refuge for Turks seeking a platform to express unpopular viewpoints largely unmolested by censorship. They have grown increasingly important during the recent demonstrations, serving as crucial tools for Turks to share information as local media failed to adequately cover the protests when they began late last month.

Facebook's rejection of the Turkish official's claims also comes as the company is under fire for alleged cooperation with a recently revealed National Security Administration user surveillance program known as PRISM.

Should Facebook and Twitter cooperate with the Turkish government? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Apple are denying reports they give the National Security Agency and FBI secret "back door" access to their servers in a program called PRISM.

The companies' statements closely match one another and allow a notable degree of semantic wiggle room.

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Facebook’s “I’m Voting” app was credited in a study with convincing 340,000 Americans to vote in 2010, and the social network brought it back for 2012’s national elections. Although we don’t yet know what effect Facebook had on voter turnout this year, the social network has released some interesting facts about which Facebook users carried out their civic duty.

The findings were published last Friday in a note authored by Eytan Bakshy, a member of Facebook’s Data Science Department. Of the roughly 168 million Facebook users in the United States, 9 million used the app to declare their intention of voting.

According to the study, more women than men reported that they were voting. As Bakshy points out, however, this doesn’t mean that females are more politically engaged than their male counterparts. Instead, it’s reflective of the fact that women are more willing to share on Facebook than men.

“The answer is much simpler: as shown in the chart [below], women are disproportionately more likely to share in general on Facebook. Compared to comments, likes, and status updates, voting has the same amount of gender imbalance as we see in other forms of communication.”

It wasn’t just women who were more forthcoming with their information than their counterparts. Liberals— those whose declared political affiliation ranges from “very liberal” to “Democratic”— voted at a higher rate.

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Sorry, democracy fans. The world's largest virtual nation, a billion citizens strong, just officially became an oligarchy.

You probably weren't even aware of it, but until Wednesday, you had voting rights on Facebook. The site used to put major changes to its governing documents — that is, the rules for how it treats your information and your privacy — up for a vote.

The last time this happened, however, so few virtual citizens came out to vote that it made the U.S. midterm elections (with their average 40% voter turnout) look like a triumph of participation.

In June, the company proposed two alternative versions of its statement of rights and responsibilities, and let users vote on them for a whole week. A mere 342,632 cast their ballots.

That was roughly 1 in every 2,600 users — or 0.038% of Facebook's population at the time.

So in the future, Facebook said Wednesday, it would let users comment on proposed changes to the governing documents, but not vote.

"We found that the voting mechanism, which is triggered by a specific number of comments, actually resulted in a system that incentivized the quantity of comments over their quality," corporate VP Elliot Schrage wrote in a statement (italics his).

"Therefore, we’re proposing to end the voting component of the process in favor of a system that leads to more meaningful feedback and engagement."

Of course, the true power at Facebook lies where it has officially resided since the IPO: with its shareholders. And specifically with founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who controls a plurality of voting shares.

But giving users the option to vote, even if that option wasn't much used, gave the site more of a fig leaf that suggested it was out to accomplish a "social mission," as Zuckerberg's IPO letter put it. The next time a major change is proposed to Facebook privacy settings that users don't like, they will have one less outlet to complain about it.

As political pundit Joni Mitchell once put it: Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?

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