Global tech companies are helping the Turkish government censor online speech and identify critics by complying with large numbers of takedown and data requests while offering little public transparency about how they do it, according to a new report by a Turkish rights group, Turkish Minute reported.
The report, titled “Dijital İtaat Rejimi: Türkiye’de Sosyal Ağ Sağlayıcıları ve Şeffaflık Yanılsamas“ (Digital Compliance Regime: Social Network Providers and the Illusion of Transparency in Turkey), was authored by Professor Yaman Akdeniz and researcher Ozan Güven and released by the Freedom of Expression Association (İFÖD).
According to the report, Turkey’s social media rules have turned major platforms into part of the country’s censorship system through fines, advertising bans and the threat of slowing access to their services. It says the result is a system that can remove posts, block accounts and demand user information while keeping the process hard for the public to track.
The report focuses on Turkey’s main internet law, Law No. 5651, which was amended in 2020 and 2022 to impose new obligations on what the law calls “social network providers.” Those obligations include appointing a local representative, responding to court and government requests, publishing “transparency” reports and, in some cases, sharing user information with authorities.
Rights groups say the laws are used to suppress dissent and control news coverage in a country where major television channels and newspapers are aligned with the government.
İFÖD’s report cited figures from its EngelliWeb monitoring project showing that more than 1.26 million website addresses from Turkey had been blocked by the end of 2024.
The report says the same approach is now aimed at social media platforms and online services. It points to long-term access blocks in Turkey affecting services such as Wattpad, Roblox and Discord since 2024.
Meta and TikTok cited for high compliance
The report says Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has one of the worst records in Turkey for user rights.
It says Meta has increased the rate at which it grants Turkish government requests for user information, topping 80 percent in recent reporting periods. In one period cited in the report, Meta granted 3,360 of 4,121 government information requests, or 82 percent, sharing data such as account and connection information with Turkish authorities.
The report says Instagram also complied with about 80 percent of content removal requests from Turkey in 2024.
TikTok is described as the most compliant platform in the group’s review. The report says TikTok complied with government requests to remove content or block access at rates above 90 percent, including a figure of 92.65 percent cited for one period.
The authors argue that platforms are putting business interests ahead of user rights by accepting government demands rather than challenging them in court or publishing detailed explanations.
Google’s ‘shadow’ control
The report draws a contrast with Google, which owns YouTube. It says Google’s compliance rate with Turkish government requests for user information is effectively zero outside emergency cases involving threats to life.
But it says Google has a different kind of power: control over what people see through search results, recommendations and traffic flows.
The report claims that some news sites critical of the government have suffered steep drops in reach that the group links to algorithmic decisions rather than court orders. It describes this as a form of “shadow” censorship because content is not formally banned but becomes hard to find.
The authors say platforms do not disclose the criteria they use to promote or demote content, leaving the public unable to understand why certain journalism reaches users while other reporting disappears from feeds and search results.
X faulted for opaque reporting
The report also criticizes X, the platform owned by Elon Musk, for limited and irregular transparency reporting.
It says that during a wave of protests after the detention of İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, authorities moved quickly to block access to more than 700 X accounts. The report says X also used geographic restrictions that made hundreds of accounts, including İmamoğlu’s, inaccessible from Turkey.
A legal framework built on pressure
The İFÖD report points to penalties such as large fines and the threat of “bandwidth throttling,” which can make a platform slow or unusable inside Turkey, as a major driver of platform compliance.
Once the throttling threat became a formal enforcement tool, some platforms increased cooperation with government information requests, according to the report.
Platforms have continued to remove content by citing legal provisions that Turkey’s Constitutional Court had already struck down, the report says, calling it evidence that company practices and government demands have outlasted legal limits.
‘Transparency’ reports that do not explain much
Turkey’s social media law requires regular transparency reporting, but the report says those filings have become a box-checking exercise.
Platforms often publish broad totals without breaking down the types of requests, the legal basis, the outcomes or how often they reject government demands. In some cases, platforms report Turkey-specific data in a way that cannot be compared with their global reports.
This prevents meaningful public oversight and makes it harder for journalists, researchers and users to understand the scope of removals, blocks and data handovers, according to the report.
Turkey was ranked the lowest-scoring country in Europe for online freedoms, according to a 2025 report from the Washington-based Freedom House. Turkey has a score of 31 in a 100-point index, with scores based on a scale of 0 (least free) to 100 (most free) and is listed as “not free.”
