On September 24, 2026, Turkish authorities blocked the X account of Yaman Akdeniz, a law professor at Istanbul Bilgi University and co-founder of the Freedom of Expression Association (İFÖD), Turkey's leading monitor of internet censorship. The order came under Article 8/A of Internet Law No. 5651, the provision that lets Turkey's Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) restrict access on grounds of national security and public order (Turkish Minute).
Akdeniz is not a marginal figure. He was among the applicants whose case led Turkey's own Constitutional Court to rule, on April 2, 2014, that a blanket ban on Twitter violated the free-expression guarantee in Article 26 of the Turkish Constitution — the ruling that forced regulators to restore the platform nationwide. Twelve years later, he says he has not been told which court ordered his own account blocked, or why. "I do not know under which decision and on what grounds my account was blocked," he said. "Since the decision has not been served on me, I cannot pursue legal remedies." He has said he will not open a replacement account and intends to fight the order.
A Provision Built for Speed, Now Used at Volume
Article 8/A was added to Law No. 5651 in 2015 precisely because ordinary judicial blocking orders were considered too slow for genuine emergencies: it lets the BTK president impose the restriction immediately and seek a criminal magistrate's approval within 24 hours, with the judge required to rule within 48. That is a defensible design for narrow, time-critical harms — a live bomb threat, doxxing that endangers someone's safety, or content actively enabling a crime in progress. The Official Gazette text that created Law 5651 and the consolidated version housing Article 8/A are the underlying legal basis for every one of these orders (Resmi Gazete, Mevzuat.gov.tr).
What has changed is scale and target. Akdeniz's account is one of at least 194 X accounts — belonging to economists, journalists, academics, and politicians with a combined following of roughly 12 million — blocked by Istanbul and Ankara prosecutors this month, after the Capital Markets Board ordered the liquidation of 131 investment funds and Turkey's benchmark stock index fell more than 8% in a week (Stockholm Center for Freedom). Separately, a September 12 police operation against LGBTI+ organizations blocked or restricted more than 180 social media accounts and websites, including Amnesty International Türkiye's, which was informed by X on September 14 that its account had been blocked under the same Article 8/A, again without receiving the underlying court order (Amnesty International).
The Case for the Rule — and Where It Breaks Down
There is a real regulatory interest here, and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than waved away. Speculative claims about capital-market instruments genuinely can trigger panic selling that harms ordinary retail investors — that is the stated basis for the fund-related blockings, and market-manipulation rules exist in every serious financial jurisdiction, including the United States and the EU. A state also has a legitimate interest in preventing content that facilitates imminent violence or terrorism, which is the paradigm case Article 8/A's 24-hour mechanism was designed around.
But the instrument being used is disproportionate to that interest in an obvious way: it blocks an entire account, not a post. Turkey's own Constitutional Court said exactly this about the 2014 Twitter ban — that blocking a whole platform to reach specific unlawful content lacked a foreseeable legal basis and was a severe intervention on expression. Applying whole-account blocks to a law professor who monitors censorship, a 105-year-old human rights organization, a legal-aid group for journalists (MLSA), and academics with no connection to capital markets or the LGBTI-crackdown allegations is not a narrowly tailored response to any single harm — it is the same blunt instrument the Court already found unconstitutional, redeployed at greater scale.
The due-process failure compounds the proportionality problem. Under Article 8/A, a magistrate is supposed to review the BTK's action within 48 hours — a check meant to prevent exactly this kind of overreach. Yet neither Akdeniz nor Amnesty Türkiye has been able to obtain the court decision against them, which makes the 48-hour judicial safeguard unreviewable in practice. Freedom House's Freedom on the Net 2025 report already scored Turkey 31 out of 100 — "Not Free" — citing repeated account and platform blocking during 2024–25 (Freedom House); the September pattern suggests the trend is deepening, not correcting.
What Proportionate Regulation Would Look Like
None of this requires Turkey to abandon legitimate interests in market stability or public order. It requires narrowing the remedy to the harm: notice-and-cure for specific posts rather than account-wide blocks, automatic publication of the underlying court order to the affected party, and a functioning appeal path that doesn't depend on a decision the target was never served. Until then, Article 8/A will keep functioning less like an emergency valve and more like a standing instrument for silencing whoever a prosecutor decides is inconvenient — market critics one week, human rights monitors the next.