The Freedom of Expression Association (İfade Özgürlüğü Derneği, İFÖD) reported on 30 September that its EngelliWeb monitoring project had identified at least 147 further X accounts blocked in Türkiye that day, all of them belonging to users who had posted about the investment fund crisis.

The 147 accounts İFÖD was able to identify have around 2.65 million followers between them. Five have more than 100,000 followers, seventeen more than 50,000, and thirty-six more than 10,000.

Those blocked include people working in finance and the capital markets, economists, academics, technical analysts, traders and investors, and lawyers. İFÖD names the accounts of finance specialist İris Cibre, technical analyst İbrahim Babadağı, equities investor Gürdal Hançer, academic Rıdvan Özturgut, lawyer Tugay Bek and writer Hüseyin Edemir.

İFÖD’s entry does not identify the judgeship that issued the orders, a decision number or the legal provision relied on. Earlier waves this month were made under Article 8/A of Law No. 5651, which allows access blocking on national-security and public-order grounds and is executed before any adversarial hearing.

This is the fifth wave recorded in September. On 17 September 419 accounts were blocked; on 22 September, the day the Capital Markets Board’s liquidation of 131 funds became public, İFÖD counted 194 accounts and Turkish outlets 246; at least 80 followed on 26 September and at least 150 on 28 September, the latter including Bizim TV, reporters from BirGün and the ANKA agency, and two lawyers. News reports on the crisis by Gazete Pencere, Evrensel and Sözcü have also been blocked.

The liquidation affects 455,758 individual investors. The Istanbul 1st Criminal Judgeship of the Peace has ordered blocks over posts characterised as “speculative posts capable of causing fear and panic among investors”, and sixteen people have been remanded in custody. The same reasoning appears in the custody decision for journalist Ali Tarakcı, which cited “the atmosphere of economic outrage created by the post”.

Those whose accounts have been blocked over the past two weeks are, in the main, the people who analyse markets for a living.