On 29 September 2026, the Istanbul 1st Criminal Court of Peace ordered access blocked to the website of T24, one of Turkey's best-known independent news outlets, along with all of its social media accounts. Those include its X account of about 1.9 million followers, a YouTube channel of about 268,000 subscribers and an Instagram account of about 238,000 followers, according to Turkish Minute. The order rests on Article 8/A of Law No. 5651 and had to be implemented within four hours. Prosecutors cited 118 items published over the past year that they characterise as "LGBT propaganda."
The case for the state's position
The strongest argument for Article 8/A is speed. Online harms such as child exploitation, incitement to violence and threats to public order can spread within hours, and a slow notice-and-takedown process can leave them up long after the damage is done. A judge-supervised fast-track is also a real improvement over purely administrative blocking, and the statute does require judicial involvement. Governments may also legitimately want to protect minors and family life, and courts can reasonably be asked to enforce that.
But speed is a reason to build narrow tools, not wide ones. What happened to T24 is the opposite of narrow.
What the order actually does
The order is not aimed at 118 articles. It shuts the whole outlet: a newsroom that, by its own account, employs dozens of journalists and media workers. T24 said such a decision was handed down "as a result of a carefully orchestrated smear campaign." Even if every one of the 118 items were unlawful, a URL-level removal would address them. Whole-site and whole-account blocks also remove years of unrelated reporting on the economy, courts, corruption and elections.
Turkey's own framework says this should be the exception. The Council of Europe's media-law observatory notes, in its account of the Wikipedia case, that Article 8/A allows blocking an entire website only where it is "technically impossible to remove only the URLs" containing the illegal content (Merlin, Council of Europe). Nothing in the public reporting suggests removing 118 articles from a news site is technically impossible. Taking down the outlet's X, YouTube and Instagram presences goes further still: those platforms host separate, lawful content and let readers reach reporting even when a site is blocked.
A pattern, not an incident
The T24 order is part of the "My Family Is Safe" (Ailem Güvende) investigation. In September, the Bakırköy 4th Criminal Court of Peace also invoked Article 8/A, citing national security and public order, to block accounts belonging to Amnesty International Turkey, the newspaper Evrensel, the Media and Law Studies Association, Academics for Peace, several journalists and LGBTQ organisations, as Turkish Minute reported on 14 September. The same investigation involved raids on associations and bars and more than 60 detentions. The brief for this analysis puts the September account blocks at 419, a figure we could not confirm from the sources we could open.
The free-expression monitor IFADE counts 1,786 Article 8/A decisions between 2015 and 2025 covering more than 33,836 internet addresses. Decisions fell from 471 in 2022 to 71 in 2024, then rebounded to 179 in 2025, when blocked addresses exceeded 6,300 (IFADE Engelliweb 2025). A tool built for emergencies is being used in volume, and the 2026 batch suggests the trend is still rising.
Why this fails proportionality
The Constitutional Court has already pushed back on Article 8/A. On 26 December 2019 it ruled that the three-year Wikipedia ban, which was based on that article, violated freedom of expression, and ordered it lifted (MLSA). The reasoning of that decision, that wholesale blocking of an information platform is a drastic interference needing strong justification, applies with more force to a news outlet. Press freedom is not only the interest of T24's writers; readers have an interest in receiving information.
The content-based ground matters too. "LGBT propaganda" is not a defined legal category in the way incitement to violence is. Whether an article is advocacy, reporting or simple coverage of a lawful community is exactly the question an independent court should weigh article by article after a hearing, rather than answering with a four-hour switch-off of the speaker.
What proportionate reform would look like
- URL-first, site-last. Require courts to state, in the order, why URL-level removal is technically inadequate before blocking an entire outlet.
- Notice and a hearing for news publishers. A media outlet should be heard before, or within days of, a total block, with an automatic review date.
- No blanket account blocks. Orders should specify the content and accounts at issue rather than every channel a publisher runs.
- Publish the orders. Transparency on decisions and the identified content lets the public, platforms and higher courts check them.
There is an innovation cost as well. Platforms asked to comply within four hours, often with sweeping orders, face rising compliance risk in Turkey. Sweeping orders push users toward VPNs and make the market less predictable for digital businesses and investors. The Turkish legal system already has the principle that fixes this, as the Wikipedia judgment shows; the T24 order is a test of whether the lower courts apply it. Appellate and constitutional review should find that a news outlet cannot be switched off on the basis of a few of its articles.