EngelliWeb 2025 · Research report
Digital
Lockdown
Silencing the Public in the Name of Public Order
Freedom of Expression Associationİfade Özgürlüğü Derneği
About this report¶
The Internet’s liberating potential is increasingly giving way to a more closed, surveilled and punitive digital regime. In Türkiye, the most visible manifestation of this transformation operates through the access blocking and content removal provisions of Law No. 5651. Our 2025 report, Digital Lockdown: Silencing the Public in the Name of Public Order, continues the EngelliWeb reports published between 2018 and 2024 and documents the systematic pressure that arbitrary, unsupervised, judicially imposed interferences exert on freedom of expression and freedom of the press. The decisions of the criminal judgeships of peace, in particular, lead to news and information serving the public interest being both withdrawn from circulation and erased from digital memory. The year 2025, too, enters the record as one in which “reporting the truth” was treated as a crime. Our EngelliWeb 2025 report has been prepared in precisely this environment, with the aim of exposing censored content, safeguarding public memory, and making visible that which is sought to be silenced.
As will be recalled, 2024 was the year in which digital censorship in Türkiye not only deepened but also took on a Kafkaesque dimension. The year 2025 has turned that Kafkaesque picture into a digital state of emergency targeting every segment of society on the grounds of “public order” and “national security.” In doing so, 2025 has demonstrated clearly that access blocking and bandwidth throttling are no longer exceptional measures confined to “extraordinary situations,” but have instead become a routine instrument of repression, triggered automatically at every moment of social tension. Unlike previous years, 2025 was also a year in which censorship practices diversified and spread through new channels. A multilayered digital control regime has thereby been constructed around censorship, composed of access blocking, bandwidth throttling, content removal, VPN blockings, RTÜK interventions, preliminary injunction decisions, and criminal investigations.
These developments make it clear, for those working in the field of freedom of expression in Türkiye, not only that the conditions have grown more onerous, but also that this battle is now being waged against “uncontrolled controllers”. In a system in which even the Constitutional Court’s judgments are systematically ignored, the arbitrary censorship powers of the criminal judgeships of peace are subjected to no constitutional review. This situation brings an ancient question back to the agenda: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? But who, after all, will watch the watchers? It is precisely for this reason that, as the EngelliWeb project, keeping the record of censorship, archiving what is sought to be forgotten and preserving public memory has become a still more vital task. This report not only exposes which content has been blocked or who has been sought to be silenced; it is part of a battle of memory and resistance against unchecked power itself. Notwithstanding every effort at pressure and intimidation, our activities to protect freedom of expression will continue.