The Facebook profile of Labour MP Keklik Yücel was removed for several hours on Tuesday afternoon shortly after she published a piece criticising ‘the long arm of [Turkish president] Erdogan’, the Volkskrant reported.

In the past weeks, Yücel has taken up the cause of Dutch-Turkish columnist Ebru Umar, who has been under house arrest in Turkey for a fortnight for ‘insulting’ tweets about president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Yücel wrote on Facebook that many Dutch people of Turkish origin did not welcome this support. She spread her message on Twitter this morning, with the hashtag #FreeEbru, and a few hours later her entire profile disappeared.

Facebook denied that the two issues were connected. ‘We want to emphasise that temporarily taking an account offline has nothing to do with the MP’s political comments,’ Facebook is quoted as saying by broadcaster NOS.

The social media platform said there are several reasons why an account may be temporarily suspended but made no further comment about the reasoning in Yücel’s case.

The PvdA issued a statement saying: ‘We find it unacceptable that a voice of the people who writes a candid story about her motives and ideas should have her profile simply taken offline. We have told Facebook this, asking it to reactivate her profile immediately.’