The Freedom of Expression Association reported on Wednesday that access has been blocked to every social media account of Halk TV, hours after trustees took over the channel and its broadcast was stopped.

The blocked accounts are its YouTube channel, with 2.59 million subscribers; its X account, with 3 million followers; its Facebook page, with 1.5 million; its Instagram account, with 1.2 million; its TikTok account, with 256,000; and its Telegram channel, with 5,247 subscribers. The published follower figures total 8,551,247.

The legal basis given is Article 8/A of Law No. 5651, the provision for blocking on grounds of national security and public order. As with the account of Türkiye İşçi Partisi blocked the same week, the record names no judgeship, no decision date, no file number and no reason. At the time of the Association’s entry the platforms had not yet withheld the accounts in Türkiye.

Earlier that morning police raided Halk TV’s İstanbul building, kept staff out and halted live broadcasts. The Savings Deposit Insurance Fund, a state body, was appointed trustee over the channel and over companies linked to its owner. The channel’s news director, Suat Toktaş, asked for the broadcast to continue and was refused.

The İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office says the investigation concerns the channel’s owner, Cafer Mahiroğlu, on allegations of bribery, bid-rigging and laundering the proceeds of crime. It puts the alleged unrecorded bribes at 14,464,000 lira, connected to tenders at the İzmir Metropolitan Municipality. Seventeen detention orders were issued and eleven were executed. Four of the remaining suspects are abroad, one is in prison and one is being sought.

The allegations concern the owner’s business dealings. They are not allegations about the channel’s journalism, and no court has ruled on them.

When the broadcast stopped, the staff continued to work. They kept the website running and they kept posting to the social accounts. Those accounts were blocked the same day. The website is still publishing.

Halk TV is at least the tenth television station placed under state-appointed trustees since March 2025, according to a count by Cumhuriyet. TELE1 was taken over a year ago. In the 2026 World Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders ranks Türkiye 163rd of 180 countries, down from 159th the previous year, and estimates that 90 per cent of national media outlets are under government control.

The timing has been noted by others. The raid took place on the morning Ekrem İmamoğlu began a four-day defence in his corruption trial. Human Rights Watch’s Emma Sinclair-Webb observed that the last interview Halk TV broadcast before it was taken off air concerned the investment fund crisis. On 30 September the Association recorded at least 147 X accounts blocked for posting about that same crisis.

Nacho Sánchez Amor, the European Parliament’s rapporteur on Türkiye, wrote on Wednesday that after the TELE1 and Halk TV takeovers the government was seeking complete control of the media, and that “amidst detentions of journalists & broad online censorship, freedom of media & expression will soon be just a memory.”

The İstanbul Bar Association called for broadcasts to resume and urged the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund not to facilitate the seizure.

A broadcaster can be taken off air by appointing someone else to run it. Its accounts can be closed by a decision nobody has seen. The company remains, the staff remain, and the audience is gone.