I happened to be in Istanbul during the Gezi Park uprising in 2013.

I didn't participate in the protests, but I did manage to wander into the wrong place at the wrong time and got teargassed pretty good and hard. I sheltered from the gas and the water cannons and the soldiers with a group of protestors overnight and got to learn from them firsthand.

They were using Twitter extensively to coordinate and to find out what what was going on because state media was completely bogus. They told me the government was blocking or throttling network traffic from Twitter at the DNS and ISP level to suppress the uprising.

Twitter routinely refused or challenged Turkish government demands to take down material or to turn over logs. I remember that in 2014 the government demanded Twitter take down links to evidence of official corruption and Twitter refused.

Pre-Musk Twitter quite vigorously fought Turkish demands for censorship. Not every time, but many times.

After Musk took over, Twitter/X has been far more compliant with Turkish takedown demands. Before Turkish elections in 2023, Twitter restricted access to some accounts in Turkey to avoid threats of a wider shutdown. Musk publicly defended his decision as the "lesser of two evils".

X’s own figures (as cited by Human Rights Watch) show 86% compliance with government requests from Turkey in 2024 (https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/08/joint-open-letter-social...).

Compare that to pre-Musk times, where Twitter complied with Turkish court orders ~25% of the time (https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/313615_TURK...).

Free-speech Twitter no longer exists.

Elon fights UK, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and other democracies but turns a blind eye to every autocracy on the planet engaging in far more insidious censorship. Worse he will genuflect towards those autocrats. Interesting.

I guess the thing is that Musk does actually fight this sort of thing, but seemingly only on certain topics that align with his pretty far-out views.

It's rather hard to take that in good faith. This is "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law." kind of stuff.

Old Twitter wasn't perfect, but at least tried to be somewhat neutral and even-handed.

Can you source this claim because Twitter turned a lot of heads when it didn't comply with content restrictions elsewhere in the Mediterranean and faced website blocks (that they retained Moxie to help circumvent)...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Ara...

This is definitely not the first time post-Elon that Twitter has continued the practice of following foreign requests. AFAIK they only pushed back on Brazil when what the government requested was particularly aggressive, not unlike when Facebook pushed back against Brazil back in the day and similarly got a daily fine for not following through.

Twitter regularly banned political figures globally following government pressure. X is more consistent in applying bans regionally rather than banning accounts from the platform entirely. Post-acquisition they've expressed that they choose to do that because they deem it to be preferable to having the entire network banned in certain countries. It probably has more to do with the financial incentives than with a value judgement, but either way there's no reasonable alternative, so I find it disingenuous to frame it as evidence of Musk's dishonesty, regardless of the fact that there are other instances where moderation policies were changed arbitrarily that actually do constitute evidence of that. I understand that some people flag any comment that isn't sufficiently critical of Musk and his companies regardless of their validity, which makes it tempting to parenthesize any "softball" comment to express loyalty to the tribe, but with regards to their compliance with government censorship it's unwarranted.

imo the bigger talking point is that Twitter post-acquisition has been working pathetically to curb organic buzzes in favor of manufactured trends, even harder than its previous left-leaning management. Effect of that being observed in Turkish politics is a downstream issue to that.

Twitter's strict "fun wins" algorithm of past seem like it had been a major driver in e.g. Arab Spring.

> it’s a little bit more of a “dog bites man” than a “man bites dog” story at this point.

Not just at this point, and not just Twitter - slanting algorithms and bans for political ends is common practice, it's just usually a little more subtle:

Twitter Aided the Pentagon in Its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign - https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/twitter-milita...

On Facebook, Comments About ‘Whites,’ ‘Men,’ And ‘Americans’ Will Face Less Moderation - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/12/03/on-face...

Facebook, Twitter stocked with ex-FBI, CIA officials in key posts - https://nypost.com/2022/12/22/facebook-twitter-stocked-with-...

Emi Palmor, the former General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice is on Facebook's oversight board - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emi_Palmor

1993-1997 US secretary of Labor Robert Reich: Trump is suing Facebook, Twitter, and Google for violating his 1st Amendment rights by keeping him off their platforms. Someone should remind him that they're private companies to which the 1st Amendment doesn't apply. - https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1412826396490039296

Meet the Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook’s Content Policy - https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-fa...

Far-right Polish groups protest Facebook profile blockages - https://apnews.com/article/7ea31c13b8bf45db88430e763e594025

Polish PM calls Facebook ban on far-right party undemocratic - https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-h...

YouTube: Keeping Americans in the Dark on Islam - https://www.raymondibrahim.com/01/26/2018/youtube-keeping-am...

PPC candidate banned from Facebook and public debates - https://xcancel.com/MarcScottEmery/status/143384506948066510...

Website critical of Joe Biden banned by reddit, and even banned from private messages on Facebook - https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/hr30p3/reddit_f...

Facebook Prevents Sharing New York Post Story on Black Lives Matter Founder Patrisse Cullors' Real Estate - https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-prevents-sharing-new-york-...

Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments - https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-dele...

Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News - https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup...

Reporter: Facebook using ex-CIA to decide misinformation policy is ‘very, very worrying’ - https://thehill.com/hilltv/3566225-reporter-facebook-using-e...

Meta: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content - https://text.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorshi...

How Facebook restricted news in Palestinian territories - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo

Old Twitter was selective in what countries it would take orders from because it would consult with the administration on a weekly basis and be told what to do. Social media explicitly changed their policies to allow for the advocacy of violence against Russians (only), which is insane.

I have no idea how people could delude themselves into thinking that was a better situation, especially during a Trump presidency that has been deporting and excluding people for speech, but it's impossible to understand the movement Democrat's value system at any particular moment.

It's of course sad that we have to rely on Mr. Free Speech Oligarch in order to debate subjects from positions that consistently poll majorities of the electorate, but I'd rely on China, Russia and Iran to talk about my problems with the US government, too. They openly hate free speech, they just support the freedom of that sort of speech (until the US likes them again.) It's the US that is desperate to abandon what is almost literally its Prime Directive and main differentiator from the rest of the world. We are popularly sovereign. We are not ruled by God through His current anointed representative bloodline, with a Parliament as a customary intermediary (which is actually a frozen conflict.)

How many years are we away from a POTUS directly passing rule to their child or spouse? We've gotten awfully close multiple times in the past couple decades. Will Democrats finally be happy that dumb people don't get to vote anymore? Do we pass from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire again, propelled by the righteous complaints of slaves and farmers about a decadent, narcissistic, do-nothing elite?

Which interestingly was almost exclusively far right accounts. He shadow banned 3-4 and kicked a few others off X premium (so they don't get paid for tweets). Which X claimed was for spamming him and others after they disagreed with him over supporting H1B visas. But he's definitely not a neutral actor so who knows. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon...

Counterpoint: shadow banning will always be necessary in any public square until mental illness is solved.

Possibly but also plausible that they just do it anyway. The post-acquisition Twitter "shadowban" a lot of contents and users in-organically and algorithmically in their attempt to change its content-novelty-meritocracy culture into cash based influence economy, with not significant, but not at all negligible, successes.

Are you saying that opposition had a puppet candidate all this time in Turkey, like you'd see in Russian elections?

He knows authoritarian countries will order what they want and that’s it, so he simply comply. But for democracies where power is more diffuse, he can afford to make a show and try to shift public opinion to whatever he wants, defying the State as much as possible.

Is it? X just follows the country’s applicable laws right?

Also the EU is not exactly innocent or a better authority - see the interference recently in Romania’s elections, where they literally annulled the votes cast by citizens, banned a candidate, and reran the elections so they would get the desired result.

It's possible to simultaneously believe that private companies should have control over what messages are shown on their own platform while also believing that exerting such control can be negative to the world.

It's the same reason libel and defamation laws exist: someone realized that countries operate better when spreading falsehoods to tarnish a party is illegal, and so laws exist to influence public discourse.

How is purchasing advertisement any more safe from free speech suppression than posting on X/Twitter, Instagram or similar? You're still subject to algorithms, and because advertisment goes through a private entity, they can instil arbitrary restrictions with some amount of effort.

you will meet assholes in your life, but if everyone you meet is an asshole, you're the asshole

think on this

Proof has never stopped these people from making claims.

There is proof, people have had their likes and retweets removed from the presidential candidates x account on multiple cases.

Also, most of the accounts tweets only have around 200k impressions, which is much lower than what the old x account(which was banned by the government) used to get.

Also another point, erdogans government is so intolerant of seeing the presidential candidate is that they've literally took down banners and posters that mention anything about him. It is "illegal" to have a banner ad that has the text "Ekrem İmamoğlu" or a photo showing İmamoğlu. Do you really think a government that goes to such extremes won't try and persuade Twitter to shadowban the presidential candidate's x account?

AI comment?

Actually no president does.

But then X just gets banned in said country

shadow ban is not part of that

What other moral standard is there besides laws? Is it that the laws of non-tyrannical countries should override those of tyrannical ones? How do you decide tyrannicalness? Or should internet companies decide what should be allowed in other countries despite those countries and their populations disagreeing? Great firewalls are the solution when nobody can agree with each other across borders but that's a pity.

Turkey has a law requiring social networks to shadowban opposition-party candidates?

That Xitter uses a complex, opaque algorithm, is why it should be banned in the first place.

The world might have people like Erdogan hold less powerful positions if large social platforms like Twitter didn't enable populism and suppression so easily.

I suggest you read the article. Officially restricting an account is one thing, but shadow banning without a court order is another. Something suspicious is happening, and the article talks about it.

The fact that it's their "stated goal" does not exempt them from criticism.

At this point I think we can safely retire “nothing burger”, can’t remember the last time it meant something other than “an inconvenient story for my narrative that I’d rather gloss over”

> Free speech isn’t free if it only applies where it’s convenient.

Man, this is true across so much of the political landscape.

"Principles" are what we enforce on others and excuse away for ourselves.

On an earth of 8 billion? And how many views are in Turkey?