From Obscenity to National Security: The Anatomy of a Forty-Eight-Hour Wave of Censorship

The List Is Lengthening: From Obscenity to National Security, the Anatomy of a Forty-Eight-Hour Wave of Censorship

Image: EngelliWeb — Freedom of Expression Association

Dear Young Comrades,

Look closely at this image. There are four logos: a newspaper, a human-rights organisation, a community of academics, a legal association. There is no organisational bond among them. They do not sit in the same building, they are not fed from the same budget, they are not on the same political line. They have one thing in common: they keep a record.

Evrensel has been writing strike news for thirty-one years. Amnesty International counts the detained. The Academics for Peace have been carrying the cost of a signature for ten years. MLSA sends observers into courtrooms. All four do the same work: putting what happens into writing.

By a decision dated 13 September 2026, numbered 2026/9112, access to all four's X accounts was blocked.

In this piece we will look at that decision, at the forty-eight hours that produced it, and at what those forty-eight hours tell us. We will have three questions — and they are the same questions we used when dismantling institutional texts:

Who is on the list?
What is the ground, and who set it?
Why did entry onto the list proceed in this order?

1. Chronology: Three Days, Four Decisions

That the wave began on 12 September is a coincidence. But it is a bad coincidence, and we will not pass it without a note: the widest-scale digital purge operation against civil society in Turkey began on the forty-sixth anniversary of the coup of 12 September 1980.

Date	Decision / event	Scope
12 September 2026	Istanbul 7th Criminal Judgeship of Peace, 2026/9559<br>Mersin 4th Criminal Judgeship of Peace, 2026/9581	The websites of 11 LGBTI+ associations; 45+ accounts on X, 60+ on Instagram, 13 on YouTube, 23 on Facebook, 4 on TikTok, 4 on LinkedIn
13 September 2026	Further blocks	31–32 further X accounts, including LGBTI+ communities of universities such as Marmara, Koç, Bilgi, ITU
13 September 2026	"My Family Is Safe" operation	Simultaneous raids in 15 provinces; searches of association buildings, raids on venues
13–14 September 2026	Bakırköy 4th Criminal Judgeship of Peace, 2026/9112	59 X + 15 Instagram accounts including Evrensel, Amnesty, the Academics for Peace, MLSA, UMUT-SEN (the list published by İFÖD)

Three days. Four judgeship decisions. Fifteen provinces.

The first contradiction is right here. The Freedom of Expression Association gives the 13 September blocks in one place as "31 X accounts," in the next day's record as "32 X accounts." The figures circulating in the press are still more scattered: BirGün says "48 X, 10 Instagram, 1 site"; some sites give the total as "412 accounts" but do not show the distribution or the source of this figure. Oksijen says "73 accounts."

I am not hiding this scatter, because it is itself a finding.

No one knows for certain how many accounts were shut. The state does not say either. The only systematic count in our hands is an archive a volunteer association keeps and publishes with the note "the lists are being actively updated, you may report omissions."

If in a country you can learn how many accounts public power has silenced only from a ledger kept by a civilian association, there is a second problem beside the censorship: accountability itself has been privatised.

2. Who Is on the List? — Read the Names One by One

The news stories mention four names. In the first table İFÖD published there are nineteen names. I am taking them all here, because this is the most important section of the piece:

Account	Who
@evrenselgzt	Evrensel newspaper
@aforgutu	Amnesty International Turkey
@BarisAkademik	Academics for Peace
@mlsaturkey	Media and Law Studies Association
@umutsendikasi_	UMUT-SEN
@Alikev_org	Ali İsmail Korkmaz Foundation
@adaletsosyalizm	Lawyers for Justice
@HAKinsiyatifi	HAK Initiative
@TravmaDernek	Trauma Studies
@kadin_savunmasi	Women's Defence
@mor_dayanisma	Purple Solidarity
@ozgurgenckadin4	Free Young Woman
@mahalledelgbti	LGBTI in the Neighbourhood
@oakarsucelik, @firatfistik, @GumustasOzlem, @snyzbgl, @petrocelli1871, @benimbenkardi	journalists and individual accounts

Now stop and read this line again: @umutsendikasi_ — UMUT-SEN.

UMUT-SEN is a union. It works at organising couriers, warehouse, market and construction workers; it goes to the most precarious layers of the gig economy, those left without a union, those remaining under the branch threshold. It is one of the most concrete addresses of the practice called "rank-and-file unionism" in Turkey.

What is a union's X account doing in a file opened in the scope of an LGBTI+ operation?

It has no business there. And that is exactly the point.

On the same list is the Ali İsmail Korkmaz Foundation — a foundation that bears the name of a young man killed in Gezi. There are women's organisations. There are lawyers' organisations. There is an association that does trauma work. None of these can be explained under the heading of "obscenity."

A list is understood not by the common feature of the names inside it, but by the intention of the one who wrote it. The common feature of this list is not being LGBTI+. The common feature is keeping a record, watching cases, organising workers and putting the state's violence into numbers.

3. Two Grounds, One Decision Number

The second contradiction is more important than the first.

The Freedom of Expression Association's record is very clear: the ground for blocking the nineteen accounts above is not stated. The association uses the phrase "X accounts blocked on grounds of obscenity by decision no. 2026/9112 of the Bakırköy 4th Criminal Judgeship of Peace, dated 13 September 2026" for a separate and second table — on that list of forty accounts there are names such as Kaos GL News, the TİP LGBTI+ Bureau, Sky News correspondent Alex Crawford and the Climate Justice Coalition.

The press, however, relays the same decision number (2026/9112) on the ground of "Article 8/A of Law No. 5651, the protection of national security and public order."

That is, there is a single decision number and two separate grounds in circulation: obscenity and national security.

This is not a detail. The two grounds correspond to two separate legal regimes:

	Law 5651 art. 8 — "catalogue offences"	Law 5651 art. 8/A — "delay would be prejudicial"
Scope	Specific offences listed in the Penal Code; obscenity (TPC 226) is in this catalogue	The right to life, the safety of life and property, national security, public order, the prevention of crime, public health
Who decides	The judge/court; in the investigation phase the criminal judgeship of peace	The judge — or the President of BTK directly, on the request of the Presidency/the relevant ministry
Judicial review	Decision first, implementation after	Implementation first, the judge's approval after (submitted within 24 hours)
Threshold of appeal	Relatively defined: which content, which offence	Undefined: "national security" is a sack whose contents are not stated
Meaning in practice	Morality is the shortcut of the law	Security is the bypass of the law

Attend: the ground of obscenity is the category hardest to appeal and most embarrassing to defend. When a newspaper is forced to make a defence of "I am not obscene," it has already lost ground in the first sentence. Morality is the cheapest instrument for criminalising the opposition — because it carries the debate off the ground of law onto a defensive ground of shame.

The ground of national security is still more of a shortcut: it is not defined, it is not debated, its grounds are not published.

And that these two grounds can stand side by side in the same decision is the proof that neither is the real ground.

4. Who Gave the Decision? — There Is a New Actor on the Stage

Now we come to the newest, least spoken and, for young comrades, most important part of the piece.

Evrensel's editor-in-chief Hakkı Özdal wrote this on 14 September:

"The Cybersecurity Presidency asked for our newspaper's X/Twitter account to be blocked; the company concerned notified us as well. For now access to the @evrenselgzt account from inside the country continues. But if the censorship is also put into effect in practice, we will announce our new accounts."

There are three separate pieces of information here, and all three are critical.

First: The court did not serve the decision on the newspaper. The company notified it. That is, a citizen of the Republic of Turkey can learn of the administrative act concerning him only from a notification e-mail of a private company based in California.

Second: The authority making the request is named not as the court but as the Cybersecurity Presidency.

Third: There is a decision, there is not yet implementation. That is, the account has been "blocked" but is still visible. Censorship is no longer the turning of a key, it is a work order written into a queue.

What is the Cybersecurity Presidency?

It is an institution established by Cybersecurity Law No. 7545, attached directly to the Presidency. Its powers were widened by an omnibus law that passed the Grand National Assembly in July 2026. According to Euronews, a significant part of BTK's duties in the field of cybersecurity was transferred to this institution: domain-name management, digital-game platforms, and most importantly "taking a measure decision on the internet infrastructure in emergencies."

Under the heading of "cases in which delay would be prejudicial," access providers are obliged to implement decisions within two hours.

Istanbul MP Mustafa Yeneroğlu, while the bill was being discussed, put these three objections in writing: the power is undefined (which measure, in which case, is not clear); the two-hour implementation obligation in practice postpones judicial review and turns the rule of law upside down; the monitoring of source-target port data violates the constitutional secrecy of communication.

Yeneroğlu's sentence was this: "This bill is not cybersecurity, it is the transfer of the internet to the security bureaucracy."

A class reading: from a regulatory agency to the security bureaucracy

Comrade, grasp the movement here well, because it is the name of a tendency.

The power to oversee internet access is being carried from a technical market regulator (BTK) to a security apparatus attached directly to the executive (the Cybersecurity Presidency). This is not a change of the place of the power, it is a change of its quality.

BTK's language is "spectrum," "licence," "competition." A security presidency's language is "threat," "critical infrastructure," "intervention." The same act, when done in the second language, ceases to be an administrative decision that can be appealed and becomes a security necessity that cannot be debated.

This is exactly Turkey's counterpart of the parallel we marked when writing Anthropic's "critical infrastructure" move: to declare a field "critical infrastructure" is the most elegant way of taking that field out of democratic oversight.

5. "My Family Is Safe": the Class Function of Morality

The name of the operation at the source of the wave is "Ailem Güvende" — "My Family Is Safe."

According to Justice Minister Akın Gürlek's statement the operation was conducted in 15 provinces, concerning 162 suspects, 9 associations and 13 businesses. The information that reached the press is again contradictory: Medyascope reports at least 60 detentions (in Izmir 18 detentions, 16 arrests), Anadolu Agency announces that 26 suspects were caught in the Istanbul-centred operation. Associations such as Kaos GL, Pembe Hayat, SPoD, HEVİ LGBTI, Lambdaistanbul and Positive Living were targeted.

The official charges are these: "forming an organisation for the purpose of committing crime," prostitution, "producing obscene content," narcotics. In addition, about 3.36 million dollars in funds the associations received from abroad was made a subject of the investigation — whereas the Law on Associations openly permits the taking of foreign funds by a procedure of notification. The European Parliament's rapporteur on Turkey, Nacho Sánchez Amor, described the operation as "a shocking escalation."

Now read the name again: My Family Is Safe.

The name given to an operation is not a summary of the operation's legal content, it is a summary of the public feeling desired. "My Family Is Safe" says: there was a threat, your family was the target, we stepped in.

This is not a new technique. We showed it at length in the 12 September dossier: in 1980 too the coup was presented in the language of "stopping fratricide" and "protecting family values," and in the same week DİSK was shut, 53,788 strikers were made to return to work, the unions' assets were seized. Morality was then too the shortcut of the law.

Moral panic is the most economical form of governing a divided class. Because:

A category no one will want to defend is chosen.
Through that category a legal instrument is tested and normalised.
Once the instrument is normalised the category is widened.

We watched the third of these three steps take place before our eyes within forty-eight hours. On 12 September the sites of LGBTI+ associations were shut on grounds of obscenity. On 14 September, on the same ground, the accounts of a union, a newspaper and human-rights organisations were shut.

The instrument is the same instrument. Only the category widened.

6. The Law of the List's Widening

In our 11 September piece we had set down a sequence: the target list of the apparatus of surveillance and repression widens along the line terrorist → migrant → dissident → worker; because once the apparatus has been legitimised it has no inner brake that will stop itself.

In that piece this was a finding of a tendency. Today it is a case record.

Official narrative	Class reading
We are protecting children	What is protected is not the child, it is a category of ground it is embarrassing to object to
We are fighting obscenity	Obscenity is, among Law 5651's catalogue offences, the door with the lowest judicial threshold
We are protecting national security	"National security" is an undefined sack whose contents are not explained and which makes appeal impossible
We targeted particular criminal organisations	On the list there is a union, a newspaper, a foundation, a lawyers' organisation
These are isolated, judicial decisions	Four judgeship decisions in three days, simultaneous operations in 15 provinces: this is coordination
It is a judicial decision, the administration does not interfere	The company notified the newspaper of the decision as a request of the Cybersecurity Presidency
The decisions are in accordance with the law	The text of the decisions is not published; the grounds are not served on those concerned
There is no interference with freedom of expression	The interference is not with expression, it is with the infrastructure of communication — that is, with the capacity to organise

Let us linger on the last row, because the thesis of the piece is there.

7. Censorship Is, Before a "Rights Violation," a Matter of Infrastructure

The liberal frame reads censorship as a rights violation: the state has interfered with the individual's freedom to express an idea. This reading is not wrong, but it is incomplete — and where it is incomplete it is ineffective.

The Marxist frame asks this: is what is being blocked an idea, or a tool?

Evrensel's shut X account is not a "view." It is a distribution channel that carries strike news to its followers. UMUT-SEN's account is not a "thought"; it is the door through which a courier, a warehouse worker, makes contact with the union. MLSA's account is not an "opinion"; it is the call mechanism by which it is announced which hearing will be seen on which day.

What is blocked is not speech, it is the infrastructure on which speech is carried. And a class's being able to constitute itself as a class depends exactly on this infrastructure. If workers are in the same factory they speak in the corridor; if they are in different cities, on different platforms, distributed under different employers' algorithms, their only surface of contact is these channels.

Censorship is the operation of cutting a class's contact with itself.

And here the second layer comes in.

The state gives the decision, the company carries it out

None of this decision becomes real unless X and Meta implement it. "Withheld in Turkey" is not a court seal, it is an API call. A flag changes on a company's server and eighty-five million people become unable to see an account.

That is, today's censorship regime stands on two legs:

The state's power to decide — 5651, 7545, the Cybersecurity Presidency.
The private monopoly's capacity to execute — a single company's being able, by changing a single database field, to cut a whole country off from a voice.

Without the second the first cannot work at this speed and at this scale. To silence a newspaper at the level of the press would have required a raid, an ink embargo, pressure on the vendors — it would have taken weeks and every step would have been visible. Today it takes two hours and no step is visible.

We have always discussed the concept of digital enclosure from the side of production: the closing of data, of knowledge, of the general intellect into private property. Here is the counterpart on the side of consumption and circulation. So long as the infrastructure of communication is in private property, every right over that infrastructure is a permission conditional on the owner's cooperation.

That is why our demand cannot be "let X not block us." Our demand is to defend the public and common character of the infrastructure of communication. This is not a romantic wish, it is the most concrete problem of organisation: a union cannot entrust its contact with its member to an American company's compliance policy.

8. Who Are Those on the List? — Short Notes for Young Comrades

Some of you may be hearing these names for the first time. Briefly:

Evrensel newspaper (1995–). A newspaper published for thirty-one years, with working-class journalism at its centre. One of the most systematic followers of strike, workplace-death and union-organising news. Upon the blocking decision the newspaper called its readers to solidarity with the statement "in our thirty-one years of journalistic life we have not bowed to any pressure."

Amnesty International Turkey. The Turkey branch of the global human-rights organisation founded in 1961. In Turkey its own directors have also been tried: in the 2017 Büyükada case the then chair of the Turkey branch, Taner Kılıç, remained in detention for months.

Academics for Peace. On 11 January 2016 they issued the declaration "We Will Not Be a Party to This Crime" with 1,128 signatures; on 20 January the number of signatures reached 4,491 (2,212 of them from Turkey). The balance sheet: 406 academics were dismissed by decree-law, the State of Emergency Commission reinstated only 15 of them; 822 academics were tried in 56 courts, convictions came in 204 files. The Constitutional Court, on 26 July 2019, found a violation of freedom of expression for 10 academics; then 568 acquittals followed.

Read this table again, comrade: the Constitutional Court said violation, 568 people were acquitted — but most of those dismissed did not return to their posts. The legal victory did not turn into institutional reinstatement. This is the most bitter confirmation of the thesis that rights reside not on paper but in organised power. And today the account of the same people is being shut again.

MLSA (Media and Law Studies Association). An association that gives legal support to journalists, does hearing observation and keeps the most systematic database of press cases in Turkey.

UMUT-SEN. A rank-and-file union that works at organising couriers, warehouse, market and construction workers. One of the structures we took as a reference when discussing practices of crossing the branch threshold in the Computing Worker's Handbook.

When you put these five names side by side, the logic of the list becomes clear: these are the structures in Turkey that keep a record, watch cases, give numbers and organise workers.

9. What Is Being Covered Over?

The last question of a piece should always be this: which silence does this noise close?

In the week this wave took place, the following were happening in the same country:

Schools opened. Education inflation is 53.44 percent year on year, 102.69 percent in higher education — CPI is 31.51 percent. According to Eğitim-İş's calculation the cost of starting a high-school student at school is 81,524 TL; even the cheapest stationery list is 28,113 TL, that is, a full net minimum wage. (The Bell Does Not Ring the Same for Everyone)
İHD's 2025 report was sitting on the table: 77 percent of the deaths recorded in Turkey are workplace murders. (İHD 2025 Report)
No grade of teacher is above the poverty line; 71,757 hourly-paid teachers work at a per-lesson wage.
1,470,694 children are out of school.

None of these was announced under the heading "My Family Is Safe." For none of them was a simultaneous operation conducted in 15 provinces. For none of them did an urgent decision come out of a criminal judgeship of peace.

The family is not really safe. But what constitutes a threat to it is not the accounts on the list, it is the property relations that had that list written. What takes a child out of school is not a social-media account, it is an 81-thousand-lira school expense. What scatters a family is not an association, it is a father who goes to work in the morning and comes home in the evening in a coffin.

The function of moral mobilisation is exactly this: to shift the source of insecurity from property onto culture.

10. Concrete Tasks

Comrade, your reading this piece and becoming angry is of no use. So long as anger is not turned into organising it is a mood, and it passes within a week. These can be done:

Take the archive seriously. EngelliWeb is a knowledge commons. Read the list, report what you see missing, share it where it spreads with the source shown. A censorship's first defeat is its becoming countable.
Ask for the text of the decisions. If the number of a court decision is known but its grounds are not published, there is a gap of publicity there. If you are a law student, a lawyer, a journalist: turn the demand that the texts of the decisions be published into an institutional demand.
Support the blocked institutions directly. Subscribe, donate, volunteer. When a newspaper's social-media access is cut, what keeps it standing is the number of subscribers. This is the least romantic and most useful form of solidarity.
Build the alternative channel in advance. If an organisation's only channel of communication is on a company's server, that organisation is that company's hostage. An e-mail list, its own website, RSS, Matrix/Signal groups, a printed bulletin — these are not nostalgic, they are a backup strategy. They are built today, they are needed tomorrow.
Keep your own data in your own place. A structure that has no domain of its own, no archive of its own, no backup of its own, loses its history too on the day it is shut. This is the organisational counterpart of the privacy question we discussed in our KVKK piece.
Do not do solidarity by category. The calculation "the snake that does not touch me may live a thousand years" is arithmetically wrong in the face of the law of the list's widening. A unionist who is silent when LGBTI+ organisations are targeted finds his own union on the same list forty-eight hours later. This is not a concrete prediction, it is an event lived this week.
Put your union onto this agenda. Put onto the branch agenda, as an item, the question "in whose hands is our infrastructure of communication with the member?" If the answer is "Meta's and X's," this is an organisational security hole and it needs to be written into the decision book.
Use the legal paths of appeal and put them on the record. Decisions of the criminal judgeship of peace can be appealed; most are refused. But every refused appeal is a step that opens the road to the Constitutional Court and the ECtHR, and more importantly it is a record. In the Academics for Peace case the Constitutional Court's 2019 decision was built upon hundreds of individual applications.
Force the instruments of parliamentary oversight. A written question, a motion for inquiry, a call to a commission — none of these is sufficient by itself, but they put into the official record how many requests the Cybersecurity Presidency has made.
If you are a computing worker, take on the technical load. Setting up a mirror site, taking an archive (wget, ArchiveBox, saving to the Wayback Machine), giving infrastructure support to blocked institutions — these fall within your direct class task. This is the most concrete form of the practice of "dual power" we discussed in the Computing Worker's Handbook.
Build the international link. The blocking of Amnesty's Turkey branch is a matter for international reporting. The European Parliament rapporteur's statement is a beginning; a case record can be made through union and academic international ties.
Write the piece, keep the record. This piece itself is an example. Keeping a record is the cheapest and most resistant act against being shut. An account closes; a text multiplies.

Last Word

Dear Young Comrades,

In this country the cost of shutting an account today is a decision number and two hours. To make a newspaper invisible to eighty-five million people is as easy as the changing of a database field.

But note this as well: the only reason this wave can be known is that someone kept a ledger. The text of the court decision was not published. The ground was not served on those concerned. An official statistic was not announced. Whatever we have in our hands comes from a list an association kept as a volunteer, with the note "you may report omissions."

This also explains why record-keeping is being shut. The one who counts is silenced, because the number carries the debate off the ground of morality onto the ground of material reality.

That is our job as well: to count, to write, to record, to multiply. To put a figure under every claim, a source under every figure. And to do this without entrusting it to a single channel that can be shut.

The list is lengthening. What will prevent its lengthening is not a court decision, it is those on the list recognising one another and standing by one another.

Comradely.

Knowledge belongs to everyone. And keeping a record is the form of labour that property fears most.

Related Pieces

The repressive apparatus and surveillance

Two Towers, One World: Twenty-Five Years of September 11 — the law of the target list's widening: terrorist → migrant → dissident → worker
12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup — the founding example of class operations presented on moral grounds
The Panopticon's Doorkeeper — the function of declaring "critical infrastructure" as taking out of oversight
The Palantir Manifesto — techno-fascism's infrastructure of surveillance
Reading the İHD 2025 Report Through a Class Lens
Who Is Selçuk Mızraklı

Data, privacy and digital commons

KVKK's "80s Trend" Warning and Privacy in the Digital Age
The Revolt of Crystallized Labor — the concept of digital enclosure
"We Stopped Them All": Dismantling an Institutional Statement Sentence by Sentence

Labour and organising

The Computing Worker's Handbook — the branch threshold, UMUT-SEN practice, dual power
Gig Economy Dossier — algorithmic management and platform capitalism
The Bell Does Not Ring the Same for Everyone — the figures of poverty as schools open

The line of reaction and racism

Sources

Primary record

News

Legislation and legal frame

Academics for Peace data

Knowledge Commons, Democratic Education Dossier, Part 58 and Data Appendix F.5 (sources: Milliyet 2018 compilation, CHP state-of-emergency report, Constitutional Court decision of 26.07.2019)