A Third Account, the Same Playbook
On August 3, 2026, X went dark inside Turkey for @CAOIletisim11 — the presidential campaign account of jailed Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, run by his Presidential Candidacy Office and followed by roughly 225,700 people. The account, which had already been renamed after previous blocks, was restricted under an Istanbul court order issued July 29 citing Article 8/A of Law No. 5651, Turkey's internet law, on grounds of national security, public order and crime prevention (Reclaim The Net). X said it disagreed with the order but complied because Turkish law "forces us to," while formally challenging it in court and warning that non-compliance risks "severe sanctions," including throttling the entire platform in Turkey (Reclaim The Net).
This is not an isolated incident. İmamoğlu's original X account, with nearly 10 million followers, was blocked in Turkey in May 2025, shortly after his March 19, 2025 arrest on corruption and terrorism-related charges he denies. Meta and YouTube have separately complied with Turkish government requests to restrict content tied to him (Middle East Eye). Each time a new account emerges to keep his presidential campaign visible, Ankara gets a fresh court order and the cycle repeats.
The State's Case, Stated Fairly
Turkish courts are not wrong that platforms operating in a jurisdiction owe some deference to domestic law, and every democracy reserves narrow, court-supervised authority to restrict speech that poses a genuine, imminent threat — incitement to violence, active coordination of unrest, or content that could get people killed. Turkey is currently a tense political environment: İmamoğlu's arrest triggered nationwide protests, and Freedom House documented a 42-hour nationwide slowdown of social media access during the unrest that followed (Freedom House, Freedom on the Net 2025). A government can plausibly argue that a court order restricted to one contested account, rather than the wholesale platform blackouts Turkey has also used, is a narrower and more proportionate tool.
Why the Order Doesn't Hold Up
That framing collapses on its own facts. The Istanbul order does not identify a single offending post; it cites only the abstract risk that content "could" disrupt public order. Vague, undefined triggers like "national security" and "public order," applied without naming the specific content at issue, are exactly what the Council of Europe's Venice Commission flagged as a structural flaw in Law No. 5651 — warning that the statute lacks adequate proportionality safeguards and meaningful judicial oversight before access is cut (Venice Commission, CDL-AD(2016)011). The European Court of Human Rights reached a similar conclusion nearly a decade ago in Cengiz and Others v. Turkey, ruling that Law No. 5651 did not authorize blocking access to an entire platform over objections to a fraction of its content, and that Turkey's blanket blocking approach violated Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECtHR, Cengiz and Others v. Turkey).
The geo-blocking itself undercuts the security rationale. The account remains fully visible to the rest of the world — only Turkish users are cut off. If the content genuinely threatened national security or public order, restricting it to one country makes little sense; what it accomplishes is denying Turkish voters, specifically, access to a jailed opposition candidate's campaign messaging ahead of a presidential race. Yaman Akdeniz, a Turkish freedom-of-expression academic, has separately questioned how genuinely X is contesting these orders, calling the company's appeals "very selective" even as it publicizes its compliance (Middle East Eye). Whether or not X's legal challenges are sincere, the underlying orders target one man's shifting online presence with mechanical regularity — a pattern that looks far more like content moderation weaponized against a specific political rival than a generalizable security policy.
The Broader Cost
Turkey's Freedom on the Net 2025 score from Freedom House sits at 31 out of 100 — "Not Free" — with the report separately noting Turkish authorities blocked Instagram entirely for nine days in August 2024 over a single removed post (Freedom House, Freedom on the Net 2025). X's own warning that it could face platform-wide throttling for refusing one account-level order is a rational read of that track record, and it illustrates the coercive leverage Article 8/A gives Turkish courts over any platform that wants to keep operating there. That leverage is precisely the point: it lets the state extract compliance from global platforms without ever having to litigate the underlying speech on the merits.
A proportionate framework — the kind Turkey's own Constitutional Court and the ECtHR have gestured toward — would require courts to identify specific unlawful posts, weigh less restrictive alternatives, and allow adversarial challenge before an account disappears, not after. Absent that, each new İmamoğlu account will simply be blocked under a new name, and the law will keep functioning less as a public-order statute than as an on-demand tool for silencing a jailed presidential candidate one rebrand at a time.