The Turkish government has equipped itself with a vast arsenal of digital censorship tools that it has repeatedly used to silence dissenting views online. Over the past nine years, there have been thousands of prosecutions of journalists, political opponents, and others for criticizing the president and the government online or even just sharing or liking critical articles on social media.
The government also frequently blocks websites critical of the ruling party or individual ministers. As of December 2021, over half a million domains had been blocked. Social media platforms that reject government demands for user data or content removal could face hefty fines or bandwidth restrictions that would render their platforms effectively unusable in Turkey.
The Turkish government has a well-established track record of temporarily throttling access to popular social media networks at times of political unrest or when it anticipates criticism, as it did in the aftermath of the devastating February 2023 earthquakes.