On Sunday a criminal judgeship of peace in Istanbul remanded Nevin Tekin and Nehir Dizdar in custody over a banner hung at Kadıköy Lisesi before a visit by the Education Minister. It read: “If there is no future for us, there is no peace for you. Yusuf Tekin resign.” The judgeship recorded, among the concrete evidence of their guilt, that they had failed to show remorse.

On Monday, Sözcü published a report on the case under the headline “Two high school students arrested for protesting Minister Tekin.” The two women are university students: Nevin Tekin at İstanbul University, Nehir Dizdar at Galatasaray University. Several other outlets carried the same error in their headlines the same day, some of them citing the ANKA news agency.

That night, police went to the homes of Ercüment İşleyen, editor-in-chief of Sözcü’s website, and Tuğba Nur Çelik, its responsible managing editor. Both were taken to the Vatan police headquarters in Istanbul after a health check, questioned, and released. İşleyen was let go at about three in the morning. No official explanation was given at the time, and prosecutors have given none since. The article has been taken down.

The offence reported is Article 217/A of the Turkish Penal Code, publicly disseminating misleading information, introduced in 2022 by the disinformation law. It carries one to three years. To make it out, the information must be false, must concern national security, public order or public health, must be disseminated with the specific intention of causing fear, panic or anxiety among the public, and must be capable of disturbing the public peace.

The information in question was the school a 19-year-old attends.

“You cannot manufacture a crime out of a reporting error, or a criminal out of a journalist,” wrote Mahmut Tanal, the CHP member of parliament and lawyer, who said the detentions were an open attack on press freedom and that the error lacked the intent the provision requires. Mehmet Ruşen Gültekin, a former Court of Cassation prosecutor, told Yeniçağ that a reporting error alone cannot constitute the offence, and asked why the two were detained at all rather than summoned to give statements.

The journalist Seyhan Avşar made the point that matters most. “There should be a limit to absurdity,” she wrote. “If there is an error in a report, and it should have said ‘university student’ instead of ‘high school student’, it gets corrected. A right of reply is published. Journalism has established mechanisms for this.”

Those mechanisms exist in Turkish law. The Press Law provides a right of correction and reply, enforceable by a judge, available to anyone named in a report who says it is wrong. Nobody suggests it was tried.

“But if the response to this is that journalists are taken from their homes at midnight,” Avşar continued, “then what we are discussing is no longer a reporting error; it is the drawing of the limits of journalism through criminal investigations. Detention this easy, a method this heavy, should not be normalised.”

Two things follow from the sequence, and both are verifiable rather than arguable.

The first is selectivity. The same wording appeared in other outlets on the same day. One newspaper’s two senior editors were taken from their beds.

The second is the direction of travel. A provision enacted to address disinformation about national security, public order and public health — and upheld by the Constitutional Court, which rejected the opposition’s annulment action by majority in November 2023 — has now been deployed over whether two students were at school or at university.

Expression Interrupted counts 27 journalists currently in prison in Türkiye. Reporters Without Borders ranks the country 163rd of 180 in its 2026 index.

Nevin Tekin and Nehir Dizdar remain in pre-trial detention. The error in the headline was about them, and correcting it does not get them out.