On 30 September 2026, Istanbul's 1st Criminal Judgeship of Peace, acting on a request from the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office, ordered access to the news portal T24 blocked, according to bianet. The court cited 118 columns from the past year as "LGBTI+ propaganda". The order came inside a wider campaign. Per the Electronic Frontier Foundation, courts have blocked the websites and social accounts of many feminist and LGBTQ+ organisations, activists and media outlets, affecting hundreds of accounts, since mid-September.
The case for the government's position
The strongest argument for Ankara is that every state regulates some expression, and that legislatures may legitimately protect children and public morals. Turkey's government frames its "Decade of the Family" programme as a policy choice about social values, and prosecutors say they are pursuing alleged organised crime, not speech. Homosexuality itself is not illegal in Turkey, as the EFF notes. Courts also need fast tools against content that is truly unlawful.
That argument has to be tested against what the orders actually do.
What the record shows
The operation, which authorities call "My Family Is Safe", began on 12 September. bianet reports that more than 100 people were taken into custody and 82 were jailed pending trial, mostly on "obscenity" charges. Amnesty International counts at least 116 people detained across 15 provinces. The sources differ on the numbers, but they agree on the pattern: offices and homes raided, and phones, laptops and other devices seized.
The EFF says the case rests on Penal Code Article 226 (obscenity) and Article 220 (criminal organisations). Leading a criminal organisation carries five to ten years in prison, and membership two to five. The EFF reports that the investigation documents do not identify which posts or publications are allegedly obscene. If so, defendants cannot rebut the charge and courts cannot test it. Reuters, as republished by Internazionale, reports that T24's cited content included articles from Kaos GL. Its editor, Yildiz Tar, says that work was objective reporting. T24's editor in charge, Candan Yildiz, called the situation "a digital state of emergency".
The T24 order is also notable for its remedy. Blocking an entire news site and its social accounts over 118 items, with a separate removal order for each item, treats a publisher's whole archive and future output as forfeit for a sample of its content. Turkish law offers narrower tools. The cited legal basis for the T24 order is not specified in the sources I could verify, so this article does not claim which provision was used.
Strasbourg has already said this is wrong
In Ahmet Yıldırım v. Turkey (application no. 3111/10, 18 December 2012), the European Court of Human Rights unanimously found an Article 10 violation. A Turkish court had blocked all of Google Sites to stop one offending page, which cut off an academic's unrelated site. The ECtHR held that prior restraints require "the most careful scrutiny" and that a legal framework must ensure "both tight control over the scope of bans and effective judicial review". It also found that the domestic courts never weighed whether a less far-reaching measure could target only the offending content.
The parallel is direct. The ECtHR objected to collateral damage from overbroad blocking and to the absence of any proportionality analysis. A site-wide block justified by 118 items, in a case where the offence is described only as "propaganda" or "obscenity", raises both problems. It does so against a publisher who is the object of the order, not an innocent bystander, which makes the proportionality question harder for the state to answer, not easier.
The blocking machinery is accelerating
The trend is toward speed over scrutiny. The İFÖD EngelliWeb 2025 report, as published by İFÖD, counts 179 decisions under Article 8/A of Law 5651 in 2025, issued by 78 criminal judgeships of peace. That compares with 71 decisions by 35 judgeships in 2024. The number of blocked addresses rose from 828 to more than 6,300. Blocked X accounts rose from 20 to 995. Article 8/A allows blocking where delay would be harmful, on grounds such as public order and national security, with judicial review compressed into days. When the volume of such orders rises roughly eightfold in a year, the review is unlikely to be doing much work.
What proportionate regulation would look like
A pro-innovation, pro-speech approach does not require denying the state any role. It requires four things:
- Specificity. Orders should name the exact URL or post and the statutory provision it breaches, so the affected publisher can contest it.
- Least-restrictive means. Item-level removal should be the default. Whole-site and whole-account blocks should need a documented finding that narrower measures cannot work.
- Prompt, adversarial review. The target of an order should be heard, not only notified after the fact.
- No conflation of reporting with the conduct reported. Publishing news about a minority or its advocates is not the same as promoting anything.
There is also a practical cost. Turkey's digital economy depends on platforms, publishers and developers trusting that rules are predictable. A system where a sweeping order can reach an entire newsroom, on a theory the defendants cannot see, raises risk for every Turkish publisher and every foreign platform that operates there. The chilling effect reaches well beyond LGBTQ+ organisations.
T24's lawyers said they would appeal. The appeal, and the outcome of the pretrial detentions, will show whether Turkish courts apply the proportionality discipline that Strasbourg required in 2012. Until then, the better reading of the evidence is that these blocks are broader than any legitimate aim requires.