Türkiye Blocked 400+ Journalist and Rights Group Accounts

Key Takeaways

• The İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office confirmed that 419 social media accounts and one link had been blocked following work by its Cybercrime Investigation Bureau, with accounts described as sharing "obscene content."
• The wave began on September 12th with LGBTI+ organizations including Kaos GL, Velvele, and numerous activists and rights defenders, under orders from the İstanbul 7th Penal Judgeship of Peace and the Mersin 4th Penal Judgeship of Peace.
• By September 14th, blocking orders had expanded to cover Evrensel newspaper, Amnesty International Türkiye, Academics for Peace, the Media and Law Studies Association, Lawyers for Justice, and named journalists including İrfan Değirmenci, Şirin Payzın, and Fırat Fıstık.
• Women's organizations including the Federation of Turkish Women's Associations and the Women's Coalition were also subject to blocking orders.
• The Freedom of Expression Association (İFÖD) is monitoring and documenting the restrictions; Türkiye had already blocked more than 1.26M URLs by the end of 2024.

Three Days, 400 Accounts, One Justification

On September 12th, Turkish authorities began blocking social media accounts belonging to LGBTI+ organizations, activists, and rights defenders, including Kaos GL and Velvele. The orders were issued by the İstanbul 7th Penal Judgeship of Peace and the Mersin 4th Penal Judgeship of Peace. 

By September 13th, a further 32 accounts had been added, including LGBTI+ and gender-related university groups. By September 14th, the list had expanded to include Evrensel newspaper, Amnesty International Türkiye, Academics for Peace, the Media and Law Studies Association, Lawyers for Justice, UMUT-SEN, the Ali İsmail Korkmaz Foundation, the HAK Initiative, and several named journalists.

The İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office confirmed the total on September 15th: 419 social media accounts and one link restricted following coordinated work by its Cybercrime Investigation Bureau. The stated justification for all of it was the same — the accounts had been identified as sharing "obscene content," and the work was carried out to "protect families, children and young people from all forms of abuse."

Amnesty International Türkiye isn’t an obscene content provider. Neither is Evrensel, a left-leaning Turkish newspaper. Neither are the journalists named in the orders, nor the Federation of Turkish Women's Associations. The legal label applied to every account in the sweep is identical, regardless of what the account actually publishes.

What "Obscene Content" Covers in Practice

Türkiye has a well-documented history of using broadly worded content rules to restrict speech that has nothing to do with their stated purpose. The Freedom of Expression Association's EngelliWeb project had already counted more than 1.26M blocked website addresses in Turkey by the end of 2024. 

Courts issue blocking orders on application from prosecutors, and the process moves quickly — the three-day escalation from LGBTI+ groups to Amnesty International happened through the same legal mechanism, applied repeatedly by the same type of court.

The wave began with LGBTI+ organizations, a category of targets that’s politically low-cost in Türkiye’s current environment. It expanded within 48 hours to encompass independent journalism, international human rights organizations, academic freedom groups, women's organizations, and labor groups. 

The justification — obscene content, protection of families — didn’t change as the targets did. That’s not a sign that all of these accounts were found to be sharing the same kind of material. It’s a sign that the legal label is functioning as a catch-all that can be applied to whatever the prosecutor's office decides to sweep up next.

The Timing Matters

This wave of blocking orders arrived in the same week that the Turkish government confirmed it’s building a state-run age verification system through e-Devlet, its government identity portal, to enforce new social media restrictions for under-15s. That system was framed as a child protection measure. 

So were this week's blocking orders. Both use the same infrastructure — Turkish courts, the Information and Communication Technologies Authority, compliance demands on platforms — and both are justified in terms of protecting children and families.

The Freedom of Expression Association, the organizations named in the orders, and the journalists targeted have not been accused of anything that a neutral reading of "obscene content" would describe. What they share is that they are civil society organizations, independent journalists, and international human rights bodies operating in a country where the legal tools for restricting speech are broad, fast, and not meaningfully reviewable before they take effect. 

Platforms that fail to comply with Turkish authorities face fines, advertising bans, and bandwidth restrictions — which means the accounts are gone before any appeal can be heard.

Türkiye’s record isn’t a series of isolated incidents. It’s a system producing predictable outcomes, documented account by account by organizations like İFÖD precisely because no single order is likely to attract enough attention on its own.