The Freedom of Expression Association (İFÖD) reported on 28 September 2026 that access had been blocked to at least 150 X accounts under Article 8/A of Internet Law No. 5651, on the stated ground of protecting national security and public order. The association had initially counted 55 and revised the figure upward as it identified further accounts.

Those named include the news outlet Bizim TV, the BirGün reporters Meral Danyıldız and Sarya Toprak, the ANKA news agency court reporter Esra Tokat, and the lawyers Sena Yazıbağlı and Tuncay Koç. İFÖD said X had already made some of the accounts invisible to users in Turkey.

According to İFÖD, the accounts belonged largely to users who had posted about three subjects: the investment fund crisis, the murder of the child Narin Güran, and the Furkan movement, a religious group whose leader, the preacher Alparslan Kuytul, is in prison.

Sarya Toprak wrote that she had received no formal notice of the order against her account, and said she suspected her posts in support of LGBTI+ rights were the reason. The authorities have not publicly linked the decision to those posts. Esra Tokat announced a second account after learning her original one had been blocked.

The order follows others. On 26 September at least 80 accounts were targeted, including those of the news website Kısa Dalga and the journalist Hilmi Hacaloğlu. In the week before that, İFÖD recorded 194 accounts blocked in connection with investigations into online commentary on the financial markets; Turkish outlets, citing the İstanbul 1st Criminal Judgeship of Peace, put the figure at 246. On 17 September the İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office announced restrictions on 419 accounts, framed around obscene content and the protection of children, among them accounts belonging to journalists, women’s organisations and rights groups.

Taken together, the September orders cover well over eight hundred accounts.

The financial-markets blocks arise from the collapse of a segment of Turkey’s investment fund market. On 17 September the Capital Markets Board ordered the liquidation of 131 funds belonging to seven portfolio management companies. Central registry figures put the number of individual investors in those funds at 455,758. The liquidation period was subsequently extended from three months to six. Company executives were remanded in custody, and in a separate investigation into social media posts sixteen people were remanded.

The judgeship’s blocking order described the posts as speculative content liable to cause fear and panic among investors.

İFÖD also reported that access was blocked to three news reports on the fund crisis, published by Gazete Pencere, Evrensel and Sözcü. According to that reporting, one of the three concerned Bulls Portföy, fifteen of whose funds are in liquidation, and recorded that Neslihan Mumcu, wife of the then deputy minister of culture and tourism Batuhan Mumcu, was among the shareholders of Bulls Yatırım Holding. The same reporting states that earlier blocks on social media posts and news reports had been imposed at Mumcu’s application.

Article 8/A of Law No. 5651 is the expedited procedure, permitting access to be restricted on request with judicial confirmation afterwards. It is the same provision used on 13 September to block the accounts of Amnesty International’s Turkey branch, the newspaper Evrensel, the Media and Law Studies Association and Academics for Peace.

Under X’s country-withholding system an account remains available elsewhere while disappearing for users in Turkey, which removes a reporter from most of their domestic audience while leaving the account formally intact.

A provision written for urgent threats to national security has been applied this month to court reporters, lawyers, economists and people posting about a child’s murder and a collapsed investment fund.