İFÖD’s EngelliWeb 2025 Report Published: 2025 Was the Year in Which Digital Censorship in Türkiye Was Transformed into a “Digital Lockdown” Regime
31 July 2026
The EngelliWeb 2025 report, entitled Digital Lockdown: Silencing the Public in the Name of Public Order, prepared by the Freedom of Expression Association (“İFÖD”), has been published.
Prepared by Prof. Dr Yaman Akdeniz and expert researcher Ozan Güven, the report provides a comprehensive assessment of practices throughout 2025 in Türkiye involving access blocking, content removal, bandwidth throttling, the rendering of social media accounts invisible from Türkiye, the targeting of technical infrastructure services, and the non-implementation of Constitutional Court judgments.
The report is a continuation of the EngelliWeb reports published between 2018 and 2024 and documents the systematic pressure that arbitrary and unaccountable judicial interventions exert on freedom of expression and freedom of the press. In particular, it demonstrates that decisions issued by criminal judgeships of peace have resulted not only in the removal from circulation of news items and information serving the public interest, but also in their erasure from digital memory.
According to İFÖD’s 2025 report, the Internet’s emancipatory potential in Türkiye is being progressively displaced by an increasingly closed, surveilled, and punitive digital regime. The year 2025 will also be remembered as a year in which “the reporting of truth” was treated as a crime. The report was prepared with the aim of exposing censored content, preserving public memory, and rendering visible what was meant to be silenced.
Highlights of the Report
Digital Lockdown: Silencing the Public in the Name of Public Order
2024 was the year in which digital censorship in Türkiye not only deepened but assumed a distinctly Kafkaesque dimension. From the short-lived blocking of Instagram to the indefinite blocking of global platforms such as Wattpad, Roblox and Discord, these practices laid bare the absurd, unpredictable, and individually disempowering nature of censorship.
In 2025, this Kafkaesque tableau was transformed into a digital lockdown targeting every segment of society on the grounds of “public order” and “national security”. The report demonstrates that access blocking and bandwidth throttling are no longer exceptional measures reserved solely for “extraordinary circumstances”, but have instead become routine instruments of repression, deployed automatically in response to every moment of social tension.
The Number of Websites and Domain Names Blocked from Türkiye Exceeded 1.5 Million
The EngelliWeb 2025 report established that, as of the end of 2025, a total of 1.505.484 websites and domain names had been blocked from Türkiye pursuant to 1.284.464 distinct decisions issued by 875 different institutions and judgeships.
This picture demonstrates that access blocking measures in Türkiye have been transformed into a permanent, widespread, and multi-actor regime of digital control.
The 19 March Process: Bandwidth Throttling and Mass Blocking of Social Media Accounts
The process that began on 19 March 2025 with the detention and subsequent arrest of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu demonstrated how rapidly digital censorship mechanisms could be activated in response to social opposition.
The report identifies the bandwidth throttling imposed on X, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp and other platforms during this period, the mass blocking of social media accounts following the protests, and the targeting of student initiatives, women’s organisations, independent journalists, human rights defenders, artists and opposition politicians as among the most visible manifestations of the digital lockdown practice of 2025.
The second round of bandwidth throttling imposed in September 2025, following the police blockade of the CHP Istanbul Provincial Headquarters, and the targeting of encrypted communication applications such as Signal demonstrated that the reach of censorship had expanded beyond the right to receive information to encompass freedom of communication as well.
Article 8/A: From an Exceptional Measure to an Unchecked Instrument of Censorship
Article 8/A of Law No. 5651 reached unprecedented dimensions in 2025. In previous years, this provision had predominantly targeted Kurdish and left-wing news websites and opposition journalists; in 2025, its scope expanded radically.
According to the report, Article 8/A is no longer a measure confined to clear and imminent threats to national security or public order. It has become one of the principal instruments used to suppress public-interest journalism, journalists, student initiatives, civil society actors, opposition campaign accounts, and the flow of information concerning social protests.
Two principal factors explain this transformation. The first is the legal vacuum created by the Constitutional Court’s annulment of Article 9 of Law No. 5651. Politicians, senior bureaucrats, and capital groups close to the government have since begun routing news concerning allegations against them of corruption, bribery, nepotism and similar matters through Article 8/A under the guise of “national security” and “public order”. The second is the process that began on 19 March 2025: Article 8/A was systematically instrumentalised for the suppression of social opposition.
Untransparent, Unreasoned and Template-Based Decisions
The report finds that the great majority of decisions issued under Article 8/A were unreasoned and template-based; that sanction notifications transmitted by BTK to news websites did not include the relevant criminal judgeship of peace decisions as enclosures; and that decisions were served on the parties concerned belatedly or were not served at all.
The report also assesses X’s practice of swiftly complying with Article 8/A decisions transmitted by BTK by rendering user accounts invisible from Türkiye, while refraining from forwarding to users the decisions on which the censorship rests. This absence of transparency aggravates violations of freedom of expression, renders effective avenues of objection dysfunctional, and causes censorship to operate through a closed and opaque mechanism.
Article 9 Was Annulled, but Censorship Migrated Elsewhere
The Constitutional Court’s annulment of Article 9 of Law No. 5651 did not bring an end to the censorship mechanism applied on the grounds of alleged violations of personality rights. The report demonstrates that, following the annulment of Article 9, censorship was reconstructed under different legal labels through Articles 8/A and 9/A and through preliminary injunction decisions issued by civil courts.
Accordingly, allegations of violations of personality rights began in 2025 to be processed through the concepts of “national security”, “public order”, “privacy”, and preliminary injunction mechanisms. The report shows that the broad field of interference previously provided by Article 9 has been reproduced through different channels, and that censorship has not disappeared; it has merely migrated.
Technical Infrastructure and Digital Services Were Also Targeted
In 2025, access blocking decisions were no longer confined to news items and social media content. Technical infrastructure services, eSIM providers, gaming and streaming platforms, dynamic DNS services, archiving tools, and other digital services also became targets of sanctions.
The report assesses blocking decisions targeting Netlify, archive.today, Duck DNS, Amazon IVS infrastructure, eSIM providers and various digital services as evidence that access blocking is evolving from the targeting of individual content towards the disabling of infrastructure layers. This development deepens the problem of over-blocking, affecting not only the content ostensibly targeted but also numerous legitimate services and users relying on the same infrastructure.
Constitutional Court Judgments Were Not Implemented: The Erasure of Digital Memory Continued
The report also addresses the non-implementation of the Constitutional Court’s violation judgments concerning Article 9 of Law No. 5651 as a separate structural problem. In a significant proportion of the violation findings issued in Abdullah Kaya and Others, the criminal judgeships of peace concerned failed to conduct retrials, did not lift the access blocking and content removal sanctions, and thereby allowed the violations to continue in practice.
This demonstrates that violations of freedom of expression and freedom of the press have not merely continued, but have escalated into a deeper structural crisis owing to the systematic non-implementation of constitutional jurisprudence. The report shows that the practice of non-implementation of Constitutional Court judgments renders the individual application mechanism ineffective, makes censorship decisions permanent, and allows the erasure of digital memory to continue.
“Censorship Is No Longer Confined to a Single Statutory Provision”
The central finding of the EngelliWeb 2025 report is that digital censorship in Türkiye is no longer confined to a single statutory provision, a single institution, or a single type of sanction. Access blocking, content removal, bandwidth throttling, the rendering of social media accounts invisible from Türkiye, VPN blockings, RTÜK interventions, preliminary injunction decisions, and criminal investigations have together developed into a multi-layered regime of digital control.
İFÖD emphasises that, for freedom of expression and freedom of the press to be protected, access blocking powers must be limited and subjected to oversight; decisions must be made transparently available to the public; Constitutional Court judgments must be implemented without delay; and access blocking must be used only as an exceptional and proportionate measure subject to judicial review.
Information About the Press Release
The report EngelliWeb 2025: Digital Lockdown: Silencing the Public in the Name of Public Order was prepared by Prof. Dr Yaman Akdeniz, Faculty Member at Istanbul Bilgi University Faculty of Law, and expert researcher Ozan Güven.
Report Web Address: https://ifade.org.tr/en/reports/engelliweb-2025/
Reference for the Report: Freedom of Expression Association (İFÖD), EngelliWeb 2025: Digital Lockdown: Silencing the Public in the Name of Public Order, July 2026, ISBN: 978-625-90146-2-3, https://ifade.org.tr/reports/EngelliWeb_2025_Eng.pdf
About the Freedom of Expression Association: The Freedom of Expression Association (“İFÖD”), headquartered in Istanbul, was established in August 2017. The Association focuses on the prevention and elimination of violations of the right to freedom of expression without discrimination based on language, religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, political opinion, or other grounds.
In this regard, it was established to provide legal assistance to individuals whose right to freedom of expression has been violated or placed at risk, to undertake research, training, and national and international cooperation for this purpose, to strengthen solidarity, and to contribute to securing the rights of those affected.