The social networking platform X of Mask suspended many accounts belonging to opposition officials in Turkey amid extensive civil riots in the country after the arrest of Mayor of Constantinople, Imamoglou According to Politico.
Elon Musk, a self -proclaimed patron of freedom of speech who said he had acquired X to restore freedom of speech on the platform, suspended the accounts of Ekrem Imoglu’s supporters, and already on the X platform, users were “very limited”.
Opposition demonstrations spread despite the ban on the government’s rallies for four days.
Much of the opposition activity has focused around universities, and many of those associated with demonstrations, They now find their accounts X have been suspendedreporters say.
The majority of the accounts they suspended were “universities associated with university activists, who basically shared information about demonstrations, locations for students to go,” Yusuf Can, a coordinator and analyst in the Middle Eastern Center, told Politico. Many of these accounts are “base activists” with their fans reaching a few tens of thousands, Can said.
Elon Musk is now suspending accounts of opposition figures in Turkey for reporting on the massive protests against Erdoğan’s autocratic regime following the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor.
“Free speech absolutist” my a$$ pic.twitter.com/TPoq3LNZir
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) March 22, 2025
Some accounts appear to have been suspended only in Turkey and not in the rest of the world. Activist Ömer Faruk Aslan created a second account to avoid censorship. “Yesterday, my account was blocked by a court ruling because the tweets exceeded 6 million views,” he said.
Turkish Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya told x that Authorities have found 326 social media accounts inciting hate72 of which were abroad. A coordinated action between cyberspace and security authorities led to the arrest of 54 suspects related to social media accounts, Yerlikaya said.
Yerlikaya said on Saturday that 343 people were arrested during the night in a third night protest against the arrest of İmamoğlu. The arrests were made in Constantinople, Ankara, Smyrna, Adana, Antalya, Konia and several other cities, according to media reports.
Account suspensions are likely to be legal, as Turkish law allows such actions if the government requests it. A 2022 law on social media gives the government a huge and vague power to suppress the content.
Musk has done it again
This is not the first time X has limited access to content in the country. In 2023, when Erdogan was a candidate for re -election, X restricted the content “to ensure that Twitter remains available to the Turkish people”, according to the worldwide government account.
Musk himself said that “the option is to strangle the twitter as a whole or to limit access to some tweets.” He said X would publicly publish the Turkish government’s demands.
At the same time, access to social media such as X, Tiktok, Instagram and YouTube has been confined to Turkey, according to the Netblocks Internet Observatory.
The X accepted about 86% of government demands to remove content in the second half of 2024 in Turkey, compared to 68% in the first half of the year, according to its transparency reports. While the percentage of requests is lower than in the European Union, which reached 90 percent in the second half of 2024, the Turkish authorities submit about six times more requests for the abolition of content per capita.
X did not respond immediately to an comment request.