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.

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drak0n1c 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Keep in mind that Pre-2016 Twitter was markedly looser in enforcement than 2016-2022 Twitter which was increasingly run by legal and moral busybodies sensitive to the fallout of the Arab Spring, and habituated to government pressure (see Twitter Files). If anything, Twitter under Musk is a continuation of that trajectory for Rest-Of-World, but with special exemptions and protections for English language countries and issues in which he and the firm has personal awareness of and popular capital - for example, see how it stands up to the governments of Brazil and UK.

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jrflowers 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> (see Twitter Files)

Can you clarify where in the Twitter Files it says that things were run by “legal and moral busybodies”? From what I recall the “Twitter Files” were just big dumps of innocuous records that rarely (if ever) contained any sort of narrative. The “story” of what they meant was entirely constructed by folks that pretty transparently set out with the intention of making Musk look good (eg Matt Taibbi)

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pessimizer 4 days ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

	▲	jrflowers 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I like this post because it didn’t answer the question. Like “can you show me where in the text it says that?” “No but I’m real flustered that you asked. Furthermore, I just want to say: nazis”
	▲	croon 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Do you recall ever reading them... Do you? Honest question. Because there haven't actually been a release of "the Twitter Files". What was done was that Musk provided Matt Taibbi (among others) select internal emails and documents, and coordinated to selectively publicize some of those in editorialized twitter threads. And yet I've never actually seen anything resembling a smoking gun or whatever it was they were aiming for.

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jamespo 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Personal awareness of, uh-huh

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postexitus 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All material facts are correct - but let's also remember that the world in 2013 doesn't exist anymore. In 2013, the authoritarianism was not on the rise. Arab Spring gave people hope. Gezi people were not only protesting, but also enjoying their uprising, singing, dreaming. Today - all of that is gone. Most western democracies succumbed to levels of authoritarianism. Let alone the number of active wars and conflicts developed countries are perpetrators...

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marcosdumay 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> but let's also remember that the world in 2013 doesn't exist anymore

Yep. In 2013 the social networks all found out that they can sell censorship to governments all over the world and their users wouldn't even notice it.

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eptcyka 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

What is your argument exactly? The world is worse so we should be OK with that?

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marcosdumay 4 days ago | parent [-]

Exactly that thing Twitter is doing now was one of the main contributors to the world getting worse. That they and all their other competitors have been doing since then.

Free-speech Twitter was either an accident or had a very quick change of mind. And either way, expecting centralized platforms to be of any use here is deeply misguided.

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matthewdgreen 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Free speech Twitter was the result of a company that had a single business: moving Tweets to people. Musk and Zuckerberg have many interests globally, and picking fights with governments doesn’t serve those interests. Don’t cheer when a billionaire with global business interests buys a (relatively) independent media property and claims he’s bringing “free speech” because (even if he wasn’t defining the term in a distorted way to benefit his interests) he literally could not do that in a meaningful way, he’s too entangled elsewhere.

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postexitus 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Counter argument is free-speech twitter created the world of today with unchecked distribution of conspiracy theories, hate speech and fear of other. I am not arguing for censorship, but it is factually wrong that it is censorship that brought us here. The world change before Twitter.

	▲	marcosdumay 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> unchecked distribution of conspiracy theories, hate speech and fear of other No distribution going on the mainstream social networks today is unchecked. (Except for Watsup, Signal, and the ones like them.)

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postexitus 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That is not what happened. The world has changed for the worse and the social networks are the products of their time.

	▲	BlueTemplar 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Egg and chicken ? Anyway, that doesn't matter, what matters is that the people that are still using platforms are effectively collaborating with totalitarian extremists and should be shunned.

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FirmwareBurner 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> the world in 2013 doesn't exist anymore

True. For better, but mostly for worse.

>In 2013, the authoritarianism was not on the rise

Just because you didn't see it, doesn't mean authoritarian wasn't on the rise. By the time you see it it's already too late.

>Most western democracies succumbed to levels of authoritarianism.

Because they discovered how powerful and important social media is, so they're seeking to control it more than they did in 2013 because leaders in 2013 didn't fully understand the internet.

And because most western democracies aren't true democracies where people have a voice in all matters that affect them, but function on the basis of controlled opposition, where there's two maximum three major parties pretending to oppose each other but all of which are coopted by the big-money establishment, making your vote irrelevant as no matter who you vote for, housing will still keep being more expensive, etc. even though you voted for the opposite thing to happen.

And if you vote for a fringe party or candidate that's not part of the establishment, and that candidate ends up getting enough traction to alter the elections, then that candidate will be eliminated from elections using selective enforcement of the law: see France, Romania, Germany, etc. Democrats tried to to the same to Trump to get him out of the 2024 presidential race with his mugshot everywhere, but failed. Not that Trump is not part of the establishment though.

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SilverElfin 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

I don’t think this is an accurate read. From the outside you don’t really know what they fought or didn’t fight, and why. It is possible Twitter/X chose not to fight certain situations based on prior experience or precedent. But in other cases, post-Musk, they have fought government censorship. For example they continued fighting the government of India even a year after Musk acquired Twitter/X. And they also had a showdown with Brazil’s government, where it was pretty blatantly violating Brazil’s own constitution.

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trelane 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Free-speech Twitter no longer exists.

This is ironic on a posting discussing shadow bans.