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About the Freedom of Expression Association and the 2025 EngelliWeb Report

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 conducts activities 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, and to strengthen solidarity. In July 2023, İFÖD was accredited to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (“ECOSOC”) and granted special consultative status.

EngelliWeb was launched in 2008 as a civil society initiative and, until 2017, shared information and statistics with the public regarding websites blocked from access in Türkiye, along with related judicial and administrative decisions. As a fundamental resource grounded in concrete data, EngelliWeb is frequently cited by domestic and foreign media organisations, has featured in academic articles and in parliamentary questions before the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye (“TBMM”), and its statistics are regularly included in the Türkiye section of the US Department of State’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. EngelliWeb received the Special Award for Freedom of Thought and Expression from the Turkish Publishers Association in 2015 and the Deutsche Welle Bobs User Award in the Turkish category in 2016.

Since coming under the umbrella of the Freedom of Expression Association, EngelliWeb has continued its work within the Association, publishing annual reports on Internet censorship in Türkiye: the 2018 EngelliWeb Report in June 2019,1 the 2019 EngelliWeb Report in July 2020,2 the 2020 EngelliWeb Report in August 2021,3 the 2021 EngelliWeb Report in October 2022,4 the 2022 report in July 2023,5 and the 2023 report in September 2024.6 During 2024, İFÖD also submitted a report to the UN Human Rights Committee on Türkiye’s compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (“ICCPR”),7 as well as a separate submission for the Universal Periodic Review (“UPR”).8 Our 2024 EngelliWeb Report, entitled Kafkaesque Censorship in the Digital Cage, was published in September 2025,9 and most recently, our report entitled Digital Obedience Regime: Social Media Platforms and the Illusion of Transparency in Türkiye was released in January 2026.10 İFÖD’s reports attract wide attention in both national and international media, are frequently cited during TBMM sessions in which amendments to Law No. 5651 are debated,11 and are also referenced in written parliamentary questions submitted by members of parliament.12

As we have repeatedly observed in our previous reports, the Internet’s emancipatory potential is being progressively displaced by an increasingly closed, surveilled, and punitive digital regime. In Türkiye, the most visible manifestation of this transformation is the operation of 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, 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. The decisions issued by criminal judgeships of peace in particular have resulted not only in the removal of news items and information serving the public interest from circulation, but in their erasure from digital memory. The year 2025 will be remembered as a year in which “the reporting of truth” was treated as a crime. The EngelliWeb 2025 report has been prepared precisely in this environment, with the aim of exposing censored content, preserving public memory, and rendering visible what was meant to be silenced.

As will be recalled, 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 has been transformed into a digital lockdown that targets every segment of society on the grounds of “public order” and “national security”. In the process that began on 19 March 2025 with the detention and subsequent arrest of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, bandwidth throttling was imposed on X, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other platforms for approximately 42 hours. Following the protests, 995 X accounts with a combined reach of 25,8 million followers were blocked under Article 8/A. The silenced accounts included not only opposition politicians, but also student initiatives, women’s organisations, independent journalists, human rights defenders, and artists. In September 2025, following the police blockade of the CHP Istanbul Provincial Headquarters, a second round of bandwidth throttling was imposed for approximately 21 hours. Unlike earlier instances, encrypted communication applications such as Signal were also targeted, extending the reach of censorship further still. During the forest fires of July 2025, critical social media posts were labelled “manipulative” and made the subject of criminal investigation. The year 2025 has thus demonstrated, beyond any doubt, that access blocking and bandwidth throttling are no longer exceptional measures reserved for “extraordinary circumstances”, but have become routine instruments of repression, deployed automatically in response to every moment of social tension.

The legal backbone of this digital lockdown practice, Article 8/A of Law No. 5651 reached unprecedented dimensions in 2025. In previous years, this provision had been deployed predominantly against Kurdish and left-wing news websites and against opposition journalists. In 2025, its scope was radically expanded. In total, 179 decisions issued by 78 different criminal judgeships of peace sanctioned more than 6.300 addresses; collective blocking decisions targeting X accounts rose from 20 the previous year to 995, while individual news article blockings soared from 127 to 2.118. A total of 145 news websites and domain names, 1.592 tweets, 379 Instagram addresses, and 706 YouTube videos were blocked from access.

Two principal factors explain this explosion. The first is the legal vacuum created by the Constitutional Court’s annulment of Article 9: politicians, senior bureaucrats, and capital groups close to the government have since begun routing news concerning corruption, bribery, and nepotism allegations through Article 8/A under the guise of “national security and public order”. The second is the 19 March 2025 process: Article 8/A has been systematically instrumentalised to suppress opposition. Although the Constitutional Court identified serious “structural problems” with Article 8/A in Artı Media GmbH and expressly emphasised that the provision must be redrafted, throughout 2025 it did not adjudicate any individual application concerning Law No. 5651. The individual applications brought before the Constitutional Court in 2024 in respect of the blocking of Wattpad, Roblox, and Discord likewise remain pending.

The transformation of Article 8/A into an unchecked censorship instrument has not been confined to access blocking. The vast majority of decisions issued under this provision in 2025 were unreasoned and template-based; sanction notifications were transmitted by BTK to news websites without the underlying criminal judgeship of peace decisions attached as enclosures; decisions were served on the parties belatedly, or in breach of the right to a fair trial, were not served at all. X, for its part, complied swiftly with the 8/A decisions transmitted by BTK, rendering user accounts invisible from Türkiye, but withheld the underlying decisions from its users. This absence of transparency has been comprehensively documented in the Freedom of Expression Association’s report Digital Obedience Regime: Social Media Platforms and the Illusion of Transparency in Türkiye, published in February 2026.

Unlike previous years, 2025 was also a year in which censorship practices diversified and spread through new channels. The Radio and Television Supreme Council (“RTÜK”) made its intervention into the field of Internet broadcasting more visible: by imposing a broadcasting licence requirement on Cumhuriyet TV, the YouTube channel of Cumhuriyet newspaper, RTÜK sought to bring independent Internet broadcasting under its regulatory supervision. Following the annulment of Article 9, civil courts have begun issuing access blocking and content removal decisions by way of preliminary injunctions, relying on Article 389 and the following provisions of the Code of Civil Procedure No. 6100. The practice of Chief Public Prosecutors’ Offices launching ex officio investigations into social media posts intensified visibly in 2025. In particular, the offence of “Publicly Disseminating Misleading Information” under Article 217/A of the Turkish Penal Code has been applied with increasing frequency, especially against journalists. These developments demonstrate that censorship is no longer confined to a single statutory provision or a single institution. What is being constructed is a multi-layered regime of digital control composed of access blocking, bandwidth throttling, content removal, VPN blockings, RTÜK interventions, preliminary injunctions, and criminal investigations.

Although Article 9 has been annulled, the effects of decisions taken on the basis of that provision persisted into 2025. During 2024–2025, certain criminal judgeships of peace complied with the Constitutional Court’s violation findings, reopened proceedings, and lifted the access blocking or content removal sanctions in question. A significant number of criminal judgeships of peace, however, failed to meet this constitutional obligation: they did not reopen proceedings despite the violation findings and continued to perpetuate the rights violations. In approximately 57% of the 503 violation findings issued in Abdullah Kaya and Others, no retrial was conducted by the criminal judgeship of peace concerned. Violations of freedom of expression and freedom of the press have therefore not only continued, but have escalated into a deeper, structural crisis owing to the systematic non-implementation of constitutional jurisprudence. As we underscored in our 2023 report, the practice of non-implementation of Constitutional Court judgments has rendered constitutional review so ineffective as to vindicate the proverb “the mountain laboured and brought forth a mouse”. In particular, the failure to lift access blocking and/or content removal decisions issued at the request of senior political figures continues to raise serious questions regarding the independence and impartiality of the judiciary.

In light of all these assessments, the marked upward trend in the number of websites and domain names blocked from Türkiye, as well as in the number of news items, social media accounts, and posts subjected to access blocking and/or content removal identified and documented statistically within the EngelliWeb monitoring project, continued throughout 2025. In this context, by the end of 2025, the total number of websites and domain names blocked from Türkiye reached 1.505.484. These access blockings were implemented pursuant to 1.284.464 distinct decisions issued upon the applications of 875 different institutions.

The methodology of this study comprises the daily scanning of approximately 290 million domain names and 46 million news articles drawn from 180 different news websites; the real-time monitoring of whether 180 different domain names including Wikipedia, YouTube, X, Facebook, and a portion of Türkiye-based news websites are blocked from access; the identification and analysis of access blocking decisions recorded in the Lumen database, using its Application Programming Interface and the tools developed by Lumen for researchers; the analysis of access blocking notifications transmitted by certain news websites to the İFÖD team; and the systematic measurement of access latency to specific platforms in order to detect bandwidth throttling.

As in previous years, the 2025 EngelliWeb Report has been prepared by Prof. Dr Yaman Akdeniz (Istanbul Bilgi University, Faculty of Law) and expert researcher Ozan Güven. We extend our thanks to the Lumen database, which has made a significant indirect contribution to this study.13 Finally, we are deeply grateful to Assoc. Prof. Can Cemgil, who read the final version of this work from beginning to end with great care and contributed valuable insights throughout the project.

  1. EngelliWeb 2018: An Assessment Report on Blocked Websites, News Articles and Social Media Content from Türkiye, (Freedom of Expression Association Publications, July 2019), https://ifade.org.tr/reports/EngelliWeb_2018_Eng.pdf ↩

  2. EngelliWeb 2019: An Iceberg of Unseen Internet Censorship in Türkiye (Freedom of Expression Association Publications, August 2020), https://ifade.org.tr/reports/EngelliWeb_2019_Eng.pdf ↩

  3. EngelliWeb 2020: Fahrenheit 5651: The Scorching Effect of Censorship (Freedom of Expression Association Publications, October 2021), https://ifade.org.tr/reports/EngelliWeb_2020_Eng.pdf ↩

  4. EngelliWeb 2021: The Year of the Offended Reputation, Honour and Dignity of High-Level Public Personalities (Freedom of Expression Association Publications, December 2022), https://ifade.org.tr/reports/EngelliWeb_2021_Eng.pdf ↩

  5. EngelliWeb 2022: The Constitutional Court in the Shadow of Criminal Judgeships of Peace (Freedom of Expression Association Publications, November 2023), https://ifade.org.tr/reports/EngelliWeb_2022_Eng.pdf ↩

  6. EngelliWeb 2023: The Symbol of Injustice in Turkey: Criminal Judgeships of Peace and Internet Censorship (Freedom of Expression Association Publications, September 2024), https://ifade.org.tr/reports/EngelliWeb_2023.pdf ↩

  7. İFÖD, Submission to the 142nd Session of the UN Human Rights Committee for Consideration of the State Report of Türkiye https://ifade.org.tr/reports/IFOD_CCPR_Submission_2024.pdf ↩

  8. İFÖD, Submission to the 4th Cycle of the UN Human Rights Council for Consideration of the State Report of Türkiye During the 49th Session (Apr–May 2025) https://uprdoc.ohchr.org/uprweb/downloadfile.aspx?filename=13943&file=EnglishTranslation ↩

  9. EngelliWeb 2024: Kafkaesque Censorship in a Digital Cage: Silencing the Truth by Judicial Hand (Freedom of Expression Association Publications, September 2025) https://ifade.org.tr/reports/EngelliWeb_2024.pdf ↩

  10. Digital Obedience Regime: Social Media Platforms and the Illusion of Transparency in Türkiye (Freedom of Expression Association Publications, January 2026) https://ifade.org.tr/reports/SocialMediaReport.pdf ↩

  11. See TBMM Justice Commission Records of 23.07.2020; TBMM Records of 28.07.2020; 11.02.2021; 06.04.2021; 13.10.2021; 10.12.2021; 24.03.2022; 23.03.2023; 06.04.2023; and 11.12.2024. ↩

  12. See, for example, Written Parliamentary Question submitted by Gülüstan Kılıç Koçyiğit, no 6867, 12.08.2024; Written Parliamentary Question submitted by Meral Danış Beştaş, no 2172, 26.09.2023. ↩

  13. See https://www.lumendatabase.org/ ↩