Turkey is tightening internet censorship ahead of key local elections in May, fueling fears that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government is moving to further curtail civil liberties, the Financial Times reports today.
The documents, presented to the media, show that the national Agency for the Supervision of Information Technologies and Communications (BTK) last month ordered Internet providers to disable access to dozens of virtual private networks.
At the same time, the social network X announced this week that it had "taken action" against 15 posts based on the court decision, which also applies to several of X's rivals.
X said he could have faced a ban from working in Turkey had he not complied with the court order.
Turkey has a population of 85 million, and human rights organizations and Turkey's Western allies have expressed fears that Erdogan is rolling back democratic norms in the country.
Erdgan has been in power for two decades.
In Turkey, VPN services are under attack, "which only happens in the most authoritarian regimes," said Andy Yen, chief executive of Proton VPN, which is under fire from Turkish regulators.
Jen believes that Turkey's new attempt to restrict access to popular VPN services puts the country side by side with Iran and Russia.
According to him, logins to Proton VPN increased dramatically around the time of last May's presidential election, and after the catastrophic earthquakes in February when government censors briefly blocked access to IX.
BTK told ISPs to block 16 VPN services, including TunnelBear, Surfshark and CyberGhost, and to report regularly on their progress on the task, the documents said.
BTK is currently not responding to a request for comment.
With the help of a VPN, users bypass national censorship walls by running their online traffic through encrypted virtual tunnels.
BTK's activities against VPN services were first reported by Deutsche Welle, and they came about after the number of domestic and foreign websites banned or censored by the Turkish authorities increased.
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