A Turkish court on Thursday sentenced social media influencer Bekir Aslan to prison for social media posts allegedly “disseminating the propaganda of a terrorist organization,” the T24 news website reported.
The İstanbul 13th High Criminal Court sentenced Aslan, known online as “Basel,” to one year, six months in prison for three posts on X. The court lifted the judicial supervision measure requiring Aslan to check in regularly with the police but ordered that his ban on traveling abroad remain in place.
For prison terms of less than two years, Turkish courts hand down suspended sentences, where the defendants do not serve time unless they commit a similar offense within the next five years.
One tweet posted by Aslan featured a banner reading ‘DEV-GENZ,’ a play on DEV-GENÇ (Devrimci Gençlik, ‘Revolutionary Youth’) with a nod to Gen Z, which prosecutors said signaled membership in the banned Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP-C) because it mimicked the name of the group’s youth wing, DEV-GENÇ.
The second post referenced Group Yorum, a folk protest band known for its politically charged lyrics and criticism of the Turkish government. The government has banned its concerts since 2016 and blocked access to its videos on YouTube.
The third tweet included the phrase “We are waging the people’s war.”
Aslan was arrested on April 11 and held in pretrial detention for 77 days before being released at his first hearing on June 26.
The posts were shared during protests following the detention of İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, a senior member of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and his party’s presidential candidate for the next election. İmamoğlu was detained on March 19 and arrested days later on corruption charges criticized as politically motivated. His arrest, widely seen as targeting the biggest political rival to longtime President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the 2028 presidential election, sparked Turkey’s largest nationwide protests in decades.
During the demonstrations nearly 2,000 people, including teenagers, students, lawyers, journalists, union leaders and human rights defenders, were detained nationwide.
Aslan also faces another case in which he was indicted for “insulting the president” over a post he shared on X on July 7. He was arrested on July 9 and released three months later pending trial. In that case, prosecutors are seeking four years, eight months in prison.
The ruling has drawn criticism from rights groups and observers, highlighting the broader climate of repression of social media expression and political activism in Turkey.
