Turkey's Justice Ministry finalised a draft amendment to Internet Law No. 5651 in April 2026 that would require users to verify their identity through the state e-Devlet portal before opening an account on any platform with more than one million daily users in the country — X, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook among them. Justice Minister Akın Gürlek framed the measure as a way to "sanitise the country's social media space" and ensure that "people do not operate anonymously," citing cyberbullying, disinformation, illegal betting and hate speech as the harms it targets, according to reporting by Biometric Update. A parallel bill adopted the same month would bar children under 15 from social media entirely.
This is the part worth noticing: "hate speech" appears in the justification, but the operative provision is not a narrower definition of incitement. It is the end of pseudonymous speech for tens of millions of accounts.
The case for acting is real
The strongest version of Ankara's argument deserves a fair hearing. Anonymous accounts do amplify targeted harassment, coordinated abuse, and incitement against minorities — harms that fall hardest on the vulnerable and that platforms have been slow to police. Turkey is also a genuinely diverse society with a history of communal violence, and incitement to hatred is not a hypothetical risk. A government that says it wants accountable speech and safer feeds for children is not, on its face, acting in bad faith. Identity friction demonstrably reduces some categories of throwaway-account abuse, and 3% of global turnover is a penalty large enough to make platforms take the obligation seriously rather than treat it as a cost of doing business.
The problem is not the stated goal. It is that Turkey already has a hate-speech statute, already has an enforcement record, and that record is the reason to doubt the new tools will be used proportionately.
Turkey already criminalises hate speech — and uses it broadly
Incitement to hatred is covered by Article 216 of the Turkish Penal Code, which punishes "provoking the public to hatred or hostility" with six months to three years' imprisonment. The Council of Europe's Venice Commission examined Article 216 in its 2016 opinion and warned that its vague wording and weak "clear and imminent danger" threshold invited abuse against protected expression. A decade later, that warning has aged badly: in 2025–26 prosecutors have increasingly deployed Article 216 as a de facto blasphemy charge and against consumer-boycott calls — the kind of political instrumentalisation that turns a hate-speech law into a speech-suppression tool.
The online layer is governed by Law No. 5651, the Internet Law first enacted in 2007 and repeatedly expanded. Platforms above the one-million-user threshold must appoint a local representative, answer takedown and complaint orders within 48 hours, and face advertising bans and bandwidth throttling of up to 90% for non-compliance, as the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation documents. The 2022 "disinformation law" (Law No. 7418) bolted on Article 217/A of the Penal Code — one to three years for spreading "misleading information," with the sentence raised by half when the post comes from an anonymous account. The German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) warned that the offence's vague drafting hands prosecutors broad discretion to criminalise criticism.
The enforcement record undercuts the rationale
If these laws were narrowly aimed at incitement, the docket would look like incitement cases. It does not. The European Commission's 2025 Türkiye report counted 4,590 disinformation investigations under the 5651/7418/Article 217 framework, with 56 targeting media professionals and 33 people arrested. The same body of monitoring, summarised by bianet, found that more than 1.2 million websites and URLs were blocked between 2014 and 2024 without independent judicial oversight, while dozens of journalists remained in detention. The Council of Europe's human-rights commissioner has called for amending or repealing the relevant provisions, including Article 216 itself.
Against that backdrop, ending anonymity is not a scalpel aimed at hate speech. It is a database. Once every account is tied to a verified national identity held by the regulator BTK, the marginal cost of investigating, blocking and prosecuting a critic falls to near zero — which is precisely the capability a 1.2-million-URL blocking record suggests will be used.
A proportionate alternative exists
None of this requires choosing between unmoderated abuse and an identity mandate. Proportionate design would: define the targeted hate-speech offence narrowly around incitement to violence, with the Venice Commission's "imminence" test written into the statute rather than left to prosecutors; route blocking and removal orders through independent courts with published reasons and a fast appeal; and pursue abuse through platform-level tools — verified-but-pseudonymous options, friction on new accounts, transparency reporting — rather than a mandatory link between every user and the state. The EU's Digital Services Act shows that platforms can be held to enforceable notice-and-action duties without forcing identity disclosure as the price of speaking.
The test of a hate-speech law is whether it shrinks the space for incitement or the space for dissent. Turkey's 2026 amendment, layered on a framework that has blocked over a million URLs and investigated thousands for "misleading information," is built to do the second. Naming hate speech in the preamble does not change what the operative clause delivers: the end of anonymous speech, enforced by a regulator with a documented appetite for using it against journalists and critics.