On 12 October 2026, 21 organisations, including Human Rights Watch and Article 19, urged social media platforms to resist Turkish orders to block accounts. According to Human Rights Watch's statement, the Turkish digital-rights group İFÖD documented orders to block at least 1,270 X accounts in September 2026, with a combined following of 35 million. Those orders reached journalists, academics, NGOs and activists. The same statement says X complied with at least 90 percent of them by geo-blocking the accounts inside Türkiye.
The case for the state's position
Governments have a real interest in removing content that incites violence, spreads child abuse imagery or runs fraud. Turkey's government cites public order and crime prevention. A platform with millions of Turkish users that ignores local court orders also invites a harder question: why should a foreign company decide which national laws it follows? Under that argument, compliance is the price of operating in a market.
That argument has force when orders are specific, reasoned and reviewable. The September orders appear to be none of those things.
What the orders actually look like
The HRW statement says most blocking decisions in September and October invoked Article 8/A of Türkiye's Internet Law. It describes that provision as allowing blocks on grounds including "national security and public order." Access to the independent news site T24 and its X account was blocked on 29 September 2026, and the website has been inaccessible since 30 September. The order cited preventing crime and protecting public order but, in the groups' words, gave no explanation of how the content posed a threat.
A block that cannot be tied to a specific threat is not proportionate regulation. It is a tool for removing journalism. AP-syndicated coverage adds that journalists reporting on a Turkish investment-fund scandal involving a senior ruling-party figure face growing pressure, and that two were recently arrested for allegedly spreading misinformation.
The platform's dilemma is real
X says it complies under legal pressure while challenging the orders in court. In August it said that refusing could bring "severe sanctions, including throttling of the entire platform in Türkiye." That threat is grounded in Turkish law. As EFF explained in 2022, Turkey's disinformation law requires removal within four hours of a court or regulator order. Companies that miss the deadline can be throttled, in the same way the 2020 law allowed bandwidth cuts of up to 90%. EFF also notes the law carries up to three years in prison for publishing "false information" with intent to instigate fear or panic.
This is why blaming the platform alone misses the point. Throttling an entire service punishes every Turkish user, including those who rely on it to read the independent reporting that is being blocked. A company weighing a 90 percent bandwidth cut against 1,270 account blocks faces a real cost on both sides.
Precedent: this is not new
The groups made much the same request before. A joint statement of 4 March 2024, ahead of municipal elections, urged platforms to "resist complying with blocking orders that restrict access to protected expression." It cited a January 2024 Ankara court order listing 210 items across five platforms. The scale has grown since then, from hundreds of items to over a thousand accounts in a single month, which suggests that quiet compliance has not reduced demand for blocking.
What proportionate practice would look like
The 2026 statement itself offers a workable list. Platforms should:
- refuse arbitrary Article 8/A requests;
- notify affected users and provide them with the orders;
- publish transparency data on Turkish requests and compliance;
- engage with Turkish civil society;
- review and restore wrongly restricted accounts.
HRW wrote to X and Meta before publication. According to the statement, neither had provided public explanations of their responses and neither had replied. X's court challenges are welcome, but they are not a substitute for telling users what was blocked and why.
The pro-innovation argument is that open platforms thrive when rules are predictable. A regime where a single vague clause can remove a news outlet gives platforms an incentive to over-comply and withdraw investment from the market. Narrow, reasoned and appealable orders would serve both Turkish law enforcement and the open internet.
The bottom line
The fault lies mainly with the orders, not the platforms' reluctance to resist them. But geo-blocking at a 90 percent compliance rate, without public explanation, leaves users to discover censorship on their own. The minimum standard should be disclosure: notify the user, publish the order and appeal it. Turkey should replace open-ended public-order grounds with specific, judicially reasoned findings.