Turkey’s oldest newspaper is posting under a new name this week and the switch wasn’t a branding decision. A court in Elazığ ordered X to block Cumhuriyet’s account across the country, and the paper changed its handle to stay reachable.
The Elazığ 2nd Penal Judgeship of Peace built the order on Article 8/A of Turkey’s Internet Law, the clause that lets the state cut off any content it can tie to national security, public order, crime prevention, public health, or the right to life and property. The Freedom of Expression Association, İFÖD, surfaced the ruling on June 2. The official ground was “protecting national security.”
What the court would not say is which post crossed the line. İFÖD reported no details about the actual reason and that silence does real work. A justification this broad hands the government a button it can press against almost any outlet without ever describing the offense. The newspaper is left guessing at its own crime.
Cumhuriyet answered by moving from @cumhuriyetgzt to @cumhuriyetgzt1, a workaround meant to keep its 3.4 million followers within reach.
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EngelliWeb, the censorship-tracking platform İFÖD runs, reported that once the paper abandoned the old handle, another account grabbed @cumhuriyetgzt and X then suspended it, for reasons nobody has explained.
As of that Wednesday, İFÖD said X still had not made the newspaper’s account inaccessible inside Turkey. So the order sits on the books while enforcement stalls, and the original name has become contested ground. The company usually does what these courts ask, though it has occasionally refused.
Some history sharpens the picture. Cumhuriyet has printed since 1924, longer than any paper in the country and its name translates to “republic.” Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who founded the republic itself, helped start it. The state is now blocking a publication older than the modern Turkish nation and named after it.
The same law did near-identical work a few hours earlier, against reporting the public had every reason to read. Turkey’s internet authority, the BTK, blocked four articles on the news site Kısa Dalga, again under Article 8/A. The pieces formed a dossier called “The Visa Empire,” or Vize İmparatorluğu, written by journalist Canan Coşkun. She said on social media the series wasn’t finished and more was coming. The censorship arrived first.
The reporting went after a tangible target. It traced the Turkish operations of VFS Global, the visa-outsourcing firm, alongside its local partner Gateway Management and the company’s owner, Halis Ali Çakmak.
It dug into alleged ties to former Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, allegations of a monopoly over visa appointments, a black market in slots, and fees that climbed toward 300 euros a person. The series was part of an international investigation coordinated by Lighthouse Reports, spanning 14 outlets across 12 countries. It described how VFS turned optional add-ons, things like VIP lounges, SMS alerts, courier delivery, and document scanning, into costs applicants couldn’t really avoid.
Look at what earned the national-security label here. The blocked reporting covered overpriced visa appointments and a businessman’s reach into a former minister’s orbit.
National security stretches to fit whatever the government finds inconvenient, which is the entire appeal of writing the rule that loosely. The people who decide what counts as a threat are the same people the threat-label protects.
The block didn’t make the questions go away. The visa story reached parliament when Burak Dalgın, a lawmaker from the opposition İYİ (Good) Party, put questions to Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, citing the international investigation and asking whether Turkish authorities knew what was going on. The government, in other words, censored the reporting and then fielded questions about its substance in the same stretch of days.
By the account of the Stockholm Center for Freedom, a minister has since acknowledged complaints about visa brokers, though the allegations tying former minister Çavuşoğlu to Gateway went unanswered in parliament. A state that calls a story a security threat one day and discusses its contents in the legislature is protecting itself from embarrassment.
The reporters saw the block coming. All four articles sit on the Wayback Machine, archived before the state could erase them, the kind of defensive habit journalists develop only after censorship becomes routine.
And it is routine. Turkey blocked more than 300,000 web addresses in 2024, a national record. The Media and Law Studies Association counted at least 49 social media accounts belonging to journalists and outlets blocked since January.
İFÖD logged a single February 2025 order that took down 126 X accounts at once, again in the name of national security and public order.
A renamed handle and an archived link are what’s left when a court decides a phrase outranks the public’s right to read. Cumhuriyet kept its audience by relabeling itself. Coşkun’s readers can still find “The Visa Empire,” but only by knowing to look on an American archive site instead of the Turkish web. For everyone who didn’t know to look, the censorship worked exactly as designed.
