Automattic’s Turkish Delight: A Rare Win Against Erdogan’s Censorship

The real fight for free speech means more than just doing “that which matches the law.” It means being willing to stand up to extremist authoritarian bullies, even when the odds are stacked against you. Challenging regimes where a single satirical post, a meme, or a critical blog can put someone behind bars requires bravery. But sometimes people have to fight, because it’s the right thing to do.

And every once in a while you win.

The notoriously thin-skinned authoritarian Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sued thousands of people for the crime of “insulting” him (or comparing him to Gollum).

He has jailed journalists for criticizing his government and claims that social media (not his own authoritarian rule) is a “threat to democracy” for allowing his critics to speak.

It won’t surprise you to find out that his government is frequently looking to silence people online.

Elon Musk complied, but the makers of WordPress, Automattic (which also host Techdirt), fought back. Like ExTwitter, Turkey regularly demands Automattic remove content critical of Erdogan. After a demand to remove a critical blog in 2015, Automattic went to court. And while it lost initially, basically a decade later it has prevailed:

With the support of the blogger, we swiftly appealed the First Instance Court’s decision on the basis that such a restriction was an undue interference in freedom of expression. Unfortunately (but not surprisingly), this argument was rejected.

At Automattic, we firmly believe in the importance of freedom of expression—and we weren’t about to let this clear attempt at political censorship go by without a fight. Given the nature of the allegations involved, we decided to strike back, and petitioned the Turkish Constitutional Court. While the prospects of success seemed low, we were fully prepared to take the case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg if necessary.

Eight years after we submitted our original appeal, we finally received word that the Constitutional Court had accepted our arguments, and unanimously concluded that both the user’s freedom of expression (as provided for under Article 26 of the Turkish Constitution) and their right to an effective remedy (as provided for under Article 40) had been violated. 

According to Automattic, this is a rare and surprising outcome. Turkish courts have rejected similar attempts by the company, but the company hasn’t stopped fighting these fights and, at least in this case, succeeding.

Do not underestimate the significance of this outcome. Victories of this kind in Turkey are rare, and prior to this case, we had spent almost $100,000 USD appealing 14 different takedown orders, without any success.

At Tech Policy Press, Burak Haylamaz explores how Turkey’s “Internet Law” has been widely abused:

…the Turkish government has employed various tactics over the last decade, including content or website access blocking and removal, bandwidth restrictions, and internet throttling to censor critical media and quell government criticism. By the end of 2022, a total of 712,558 websites and domain names, access to 150,000 URL addresses, 9,800 Twitter accounts, 55,000 tweets, 16,585 YouTube videos, 12,000 Facebook posts, and 11,150 Instagram posts were blocked in Türkiye. These decisions are imposed by various authorities, most effectively through recourse mechanisms before the criminal judgeships of peace, which are carefully framed within the legal system.

It’s especially notable that the main law Turkey relies on for this broad censorship was directly modeled on similar “internet regulations” in Europe (especially Germany’s NetzDG law, which partially inspired the DSA across the EU).

This ruling in favor of Automattic is significant because it puts at least some guardrails on the government’s abuse of the law. However, there are limits. As Haylamaz explains, the Constitutional Court had called out the censorial problems with the law years ago, but left it up to the Turkish Parliament to address, which it did not do.

Finally, with no progress, the Constitutional Court again stepped up to call out how these laws conflict with free expression and to declare them unconstitutional, though for some reason the law stays in place until October.

As Haylamaz further explains, this ruling on the law hasn’t stopped Turkish officials from issuing more blocking orders:

One might assume that the criminal judgeships of peace would cease issuing access-blocking and/or content removal decisions based on Article 9 of the Internet Law, or at least consider the interests of online platforms and content authors, especially after the article was deemed unconstitutional. However, this is simply not the case in Turkish politics and courtrooms. The criminal judgeships of peace continue to issue access-blocking and/or content removal decisions based on Article 9 of the Internet Law, despite its unconstitutional status. This comes as no surprise to many, especially after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan expressed his discomfort with the Constitutional Court’s internet-related decisions and announced his intention to closely monitor them.

It’s good to see Automattic taking on the impossible task of fighting censorial, authoritarian governments and winning. It would be nice to see more companies follow suit.