According to data from the Freedom of Expression Association (İFÖD), cited by the International Federation of Journalists, the European Federation of Journalists and the Turkish Journalists’ Union in a joint statement on 7 October, 1,270 X accounts were subject to access-blocking orders in Türkiye during September. Of those, only 115 were covered by a court decision. The legal grounds for the remaining 1,155 are unknown. Together those accounts have more than 35 million followers.

The three organisations addressed their statement not to the Turkish authorities but to X and its management. “X must not block access to the accounts of journalists and media organisations in Türkiye without a court order or an explicit, transparent and reviewable decision by an independent judicial authority,” they wrote. They added that at a time when serious concerns exist about the impartiality of judicial decisions in Türkiye, restrictions imposed on the basis of such decisions “raise further concerns about arbitrariness”.

They note that X’s own published policies state that requests to restrict content or accounts may be supported by valid legal documents such as court orders, and that affected users will be notified unless the platform is legally prohibited from doing so. They ask X to verify whether requests from Türkiye rest on an independent and explicit court decision; to refuse unilateral requests from administrative or law-enforcement bodies; to reject requests that are general, vague or disproportionate; to restrict specific content rather than entire accounts; and to publish detail on Türkiye in its transparency reports.

The case of bianet shows what a request without a disclosed basis looks like in practice. On 30 September the Bakırköy 7th Criminal Judgeship of the Peace ordered access blocking and content removal for bianet’s X account, which has 402,000 followers, on the stated ground of protecting national security and public order. Seven days later the decision had still not been served on bianet, which therefore does not know which of its reports or posts led to it. The order became public through İFÖD’s EngelliWeb project rather than through the authorities.

It is the second time bianet’s account has been blocked. The first was in March 2025, during the protests at Saraçhane that followed the detention of Ekrem İmamoğlu.

The same ruling covered the accounts of the journalists İrfan Değirmenci, Şirin Payzın, Burak Acerakis, Erdal Sağlam, Dinçer Gökçe, Sarya Toprak, Esra Tokat and Furkan Karabay. Değirmenci’s and Payzın’s accounts had already been blocked once, on 16 September.

The IFJ statement names ten further journalists whose accounts were blocked in the same period, and records that orders have also been issued concerning Kısa Dalga, Sol Haber and Evrensel. On 30 September the entire T24 website was blocked together with its X account, which has around 1.9 million followers.

“Press freedom is not merely the right of journalists to carry out their work,” the statement concludes. “It is also the right of citizens to access information from different sources, compare news reports and remain informed about developments concerning the public interest.”

Nine out of ten accounts blocked in Türkiye last month were blocked on a basis no one has been shown.