Turkey's telecom watchdog BTK blocks Eksi Sozluk, one of the country's biggest social media websites, after blocking Twitter following the recent earthquakes
Context & Ripple Effects
The block extends a familiar BTK sequence: after the earthquakes, Twitter was cut off and only came back once officials 'reminded' it of its obligations on takedowns and disinformation, per NetBlocks' monitoring of the restricted restoration. What distinguishes this move is the target — Ekşi Sözlük is a domestic platform, showing that being Turkish offers no exemption from the blackout lever.
The corpus shows this tool deployed repeatedly across a decade: threats over a newspaper account in 2015, simultaneous blocks of Twitter, YouTube and Facebook over a hostage photo that same year, a Reddit ban under the censorship law, and throttling during the 2016 coup attempt — with Instagram added to the list in 2024 for non-compliance.
First-order effects
- Ekşi Sözlük loses access to its Turkish audience at the moment of peak disaster-related traffic, hitting both its reach and its ad-supported economics.
- Turkish users lose one of the country's biggest discussion venues while still navigating the aftermath of the earthquakes, with Twitter's access already limited.
Second-order effects
- Foreign platforms operating in Turkey now see the restored-but-compliant Twitter arrangement as the price of staying online — accept takedown demands or join Ekşi Sözlük offline, a trade Instagram later faced explicitly.
- Domestic sites and forums have an incentive toward preemptive moderation and self-censorship, since the block arrives without a negotiation channel the way it does with global platforms.
Third-order effects
- If the decade-long pattern holds — targeted threats, multi-platform blackouts, crisis-driven throttling, then platform-specific bans — platform blocking becomes routine governance infrastructure in Turkey rather than an emergency measure, pushing platforms toward a structural comply-or-lose-market calculus.
- A recurring cycle of block-then-negotiate shifts leverage to regulators who can extract compliance concessions before restoring access, entrenching censorship law as a standing feature of the market.
The trend: Turkey's regulator is normalizing platform blackouts as a repeatable crisis-governance instrument, converting each restoration into leverage for content-control concessions.