Blocking access to the social media accounts of people imprisoned pending trial has become a routine practice over the past year. Yet both the law and the Constitutional Court say access-blocking measures should be limited to the specific posts cited as criminal evidence. The current practice creates a chain of rights violations

ALİ SAFA KORKUT

Social media influencer Fatma Soydaş became widely known in Turkey after a trend video she filmed with Said Hatipoğlu, the son of theologian Nihat Hatipoğlu, was posted on March 14. The video quickly went viral, and Soydaş nearly doubled her number of followers.

But as her popularity grew, Soydaş became the target of some social media users. Some of her images were made obscene using artificial intelligence tools and circulated online. Soydaş filed a criminal complaint with the Küçükçekmece Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office of Istanbul on June 15, but this did not stop the images from spreading.

On July 21, Soydaş was arrested and imprisoned pending trial on charges of “publishing obscene images” and “publicly denigrating the religious values adopted by a section of the public.” Her Instagram and TikTok accounts were then blocked by a decision issued the same day by the Ankara 5th Criminal Judgeship of Peace.

Soydaş, however, is not the first person whose social media accounts were blocked after being arrested or imprisoned pending trial.

Journalist Furkan Karabay was arrested on 15 May 2025 over a video he posted on YouTube and his social media posts and was imprisoned pending trial the same day. Karabay, who was accused of “insulting the president” and “exposing identities of persons who took part in counterterrorism efforts,” had his X account, @FurkannKarabay, blocked the following day. His friends then opened a new account on his behalf, but access to that account was also blocked on 26 May 2025.

Journalist Fatih Altaylı was arrested on 22 June over a video published on his YouTube channel and imprisoned pending trial on a charge of “threatening the president.” On 7 August, an access-blocking decision was issued against Altaylı’s YouTube channel.

On 11 November 2025, pro-government social media influencer Furkan Bölükbaşı was arrested and imprisoned pending trial over a post about President Erdoğan on a charge of “assassination and physical attack against the president.” His X account, @furkanbolukbasi, was blocked the next day.

Journalist Yıldız Tar was also targeted by the same practice. Tar, who was imprisoned pending trial on 25 June, had his X account, @yildiz_tar, blocked on 27 June. The X account of musician Haluk Levent, the founder of the social aid and solidarity association AHBAP, @haluklevent, was also blocked six days after he was imprisoned pending trial on 16 July.

As these examples show, blocking access to the entire social media accounts of people imprisoned over various accusations based on their posts has become a routine practice. But this raises a number of questions:

Constitutional Court: Freedom of expression violated

There are three different legal grounds for access-blocking decisions under Law No. 5651. In this article, however, I will focus on Article 8/A, which was cited as the basis for the access-blocking decisions issued against the accounts discussed here.

Although Article 8/A is often assumed to be limited to the grounds of “national security” and “the protection of public order,” it also allows the removal of online content and/or the blocking of access in urgent cases on grounds such as the protection of the right to life, protection of life and property, the prevention of crime and the protection of public health. It would therefore not be accurate to say that online accounts can never be blocked under any circumstances.

But the mere fact that a measure is provided for by law does not automatically make every instance of its application lawful. The real question is whether the interference is genuinely necessary in the specific case.

Indeed, paragraph 3 of Article 8/A provides that blocking decisions issued under this article may concern a specific “publication, section or part,” such as a URL. In other words, it allows only the blocking of the content alleged to constitute a violation. The article states that a wholesale blocking decision may be issued only where it is technically impossible to block access to the content in question or where the violation cannot be prevented by blocking access to that content.

In the cases discussed in this article, however, it was technically possible to block access to the posts cited as criminal evidence. Dozens of social media posts are blocked every day without the accounts that posted them being blocked. Moreover, at least in the cases discussed here, blocking access to the relevant posts would have prevented the alleged violation. Since the people in question had already been imprisoned pending trial before their accounts were blocked, it was no longer technically possible for them to continue these alleged “violations.”

Although all of these accounts were blocked on the grounds that they violated national security and public order, the decisions did not specify, as required by the relevant provision, which part of which content, or which expression or element in that content, posed such threats. Nor did they establish the existence of an urgent situation.

In its Baransav and Keskin Kalem Publishing and Trade Inc. judgment of 26 September 2019, the Constitutional Court held that access-blocking decisions must explain which part of which content gives rise to the circumstances listed in Article 8/A and for what reasons. The Court also stated that a link must be established between the blocking of a social media account and the post subject to the blocking decision, and that the existence of an urgent situation must be demonstrated. It further held that where an entire social media account is blocked on the grounds that the violation cannot be prevented by blocking access to the specific content, reasons must be provided; otherwise, the measure amounts to a “disproportionate interference.”

On the basis of these same shortcomings, which are also present in the access-blocking decisions concerning the accounts discussed in this article, the Constitutional Court found that the blocking of the X account @barantursunvakf, belonging to the Baran Tursun Foundation, under Article 8/A over a single post violated the right to freedom of expression.

A single decision, a chain of rights violations

In other words, blocking the entire accounts of the people discussed in this article over their posts is unlawful in many respects. But the issue does not end there. An account-wide block not only makes thousands of other posts, whose lawfulness has never been challenged, inaccessible; it also deprives the person of the personal channel through which they would share their future expressions. If the blocked account belongs to a journalist, the measure also violates not only the journalist’s freedom of the press and expression, but also the public’s right to receive information.

The presumption of innocence cannot be left out of this discussion either. Imprisonment pending trial is not a conviction. A person may ultimately be acquitted at the end of the proceedings. Nor is an access block a penalty; it is an interim measure. For this reason, it would not be accurate to say that every access block violates the presumption of innocence. But erasing the entire digital presence of someone whose guilt has not yet been established, as if every post on their account were part of the alleged offense, does bring this principle into question.

This is precisely why the principle of proportionality exists. If the problem is a specific post, that post should be targeted with this principle in mind. Otherwise, as in the examples discussed here, access blocking ceases to be a preventive measure and turns into a method of digital silencing. The Constitutional Court’s approach, which requires consideration of narrower measures in access-blocking cases, points exactly to this problem.

The issue, then, is not that accounts suspected of containing criminal content should never be interfered with. Content that genuinely constitutes a crime or creates a clear and imminent danger may be addressed within the framework of the law. But a person’s arrest or imprisonment pending trial does not automatically render all of their past posts unlawful.

This is the real concern raised by the recent examples: a measure that should be exceptional has become a routine practice that restricts a person’s digital freedom after their physical liberty has already been restricted. Yet the framework set out by the Constitutional Court, and the one I have tried to outline in this article, is clear: When access blocking is imposed without concrete reasoning and without explaining why a less restrictive measure would be insufficient, it leads to violations of many fundamental rights, above all freedom of expression.