X’s Selective Censorship Fight in Turkey Won’t Help

At first, I thought a message from a friend was a mistake. He said social media was buzzing with news about 42 X accounts blocked in Turkey for allegedly engaging in "terrorist propaganda"— and my picture was included in a widely shared image. Confused, I immediately checked the reports and my email inbox. There it was: my account, with just 1,000 followers, had indeed been blocked. A mix of emotions rushed over me — a strange sense of pride that my reporting had unsettled those in power, and the bewilderment of being labeled a threat while I was a young and relatively unknown journalist. Yes, I was covering Turkey’s human rights violations and reporting on European institutions’ decisions and reactions regarding the country, but I was hardly a high-profile figure.

What happened to me was not an isolated case or about a single journalist’s voice being silenced. It was part of a much larger crackdown, one that has now escalated into one of the most significant turning points in Turkey’s modern history.

On March 19, President Erdoğan’s main rival, Istanbul mayor and presidential candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu, was sent to prison just hours before he was set to be the Republican People’s Party (“CHP”) presidential candidate. The arrest of the immensely popular Istanbul mayor sparked mass protests across the country. But as hundreds of thousands took to the streets, demanding justice, Erdoğan, Turkey’s strong president with no countervailing powers, responded with brute force — not just in the physical world but also in the digital one. While young protesters faced police batons and tear gas, the government moved swiftly to erase dissent online, using court orders to block access to 700 accounts, including those belonging to prominent dissidents and protest organizers. X announced it would challenge the Turkish government’s censorship demands.

However, this announcement did little to quell the backlash. Turkish opposition leader Ozgur Ozel urged X to reconsider its role in enforcing Erdogan’s censorship. He warned that restricting independent journalism and citizen reporting amounted to aiding an undemocratic regime and threatened X:

"This nation has dismantled the media order of past juntas. We know that you have closed hundreds of accounts saying ‘it will not be noticed anyway.’ If you continue to comply with these censorship requests, think carefully about the consequences."

Censorship at home and in the world

The government's efforts to block the X accounts of activists, journalists, and even ordinary citizens are not new. Fearful of the streets and social dissent, the Erdoğan administration has managed to control the mainstream media in Turkey, but has struggled to achieve absolute control over social media.

The government has periodically attempted to shut down access to entire social media platforms — as experienced by YouTube, Wikipedia, Roblox, and Instagram, among others — and resorted to internet bandwidth throttling, as applied again after the arrest of the Istanbul Mayor, but has been unable to prevent dissident activism.

Twitter (now X) has been and remains the primary platform for nearly all of Turkey's opposition to follow and set the agenda, especially given mainstream media's control by conglomerates tied to the Erdoğan regime. Consequently, silencing dissenting voices and prominent journalists on X was crucial for the regime. Until recently, Elon Musk prioritized compliance over freedom.

Since May 2023, the Turkish government has carried out four major waves of account bans on X, targeting journalists, media organizations, and dissidents based within the country and in exile. The first wave, launched just before the critical May 14 elections, focused on independent journalists like Cevheri Güven, who was exposing corruption allegations involving President Erdoğan. In October 2024, following the death of Turkish scholar and leader of the Gülen movement, Fethullah Gülen, a second wave saw 177 accounts — including those of exiled journalists such as Sevinç Özarslan, Adem Yavuz Arslan, Amberin Zaman and Can Dündar banned under vague terrorism charges. The third wave came in February 2025, with 126 more accounts, including my own, blocked by a single court decision for supposedly threatening national security. Most recently, in March 2025, as protests erupted over the arrest of popular opposition leader Ekrem İmamoğlu, another 700 accounts were targeted, prompting X to publicly challenge the court orders.

Selective approach

On March 26, X announced that it would appeal against the blocking of 126 accounts, including journalists Metin Cihan and Hayko Bagdat’s accounts. X stated that it had filed an individual application to the constitutional court, adding that it was “committed to protecting its users' rights to freedom of expression globally and will continue to use all available legal remedies to defend the expression of our users.”

However, X's decision to challenge only 126 account suspensions raises important questions about its selective approach. By not taking a blanket stance against censorship, the platform is signaling that it prioritizes certain voices over others. This selective advocacy undermines its commitment to free expression and leaves many, including myself, wondering why our cases were excluded from its legal challenge.

This selective approach becomes even more evident when looking at the accounts that were left out of X’s legal challenge. For example, the accounts of prominent investigative journalists like Cevheri Guven, who exposed high-level corruption within the Turkish government, and Adem Yavuz Arslan, who challenged the government's official “July 15” narrative, remain blocked without any indication that X intends to fight for their reinstatement. Both journalists, now living in exile, have played crucial roles in informing the public about Erdoğan’s authoritarian grip, yet their voices have been effectively silenced on one of the world's largest social media platforms. By omitting figures like Arslan and Güven from its legal efforts, X is not only failing them as individuals but also depriving the Turkish public of critical, independent journalism.

Conclusion

X has started to resist these censorship decisions, but the government's pressure continues, and accounts remain blocked. X's decision to stand against this censorship is seen as a critical development in the fight for freedom of expression. However, we have now reached a stage in Turkey where the mayor of Istanbul and Erdoğan's strongest opponent, İmamoğlu, has been arrested in a “political coup” and sent to prison. Musk is perhaps a little late.

Musk claims to be a free speech absolutist, and he holds the ability to unblock the accounts of numerous journalists and activists. Whether he chooses to do so will reveal the true extent of his commitment to that ideal.