Turkish authorities have moved to curb online visibility for LGBTQ voices, blocking more than a dozen accounts belonging to rights groups and activists on the X social media platform, according to a watchdog.
The Ifod media watchdog said the list of affected accounts includes the Kaos GL rights organisation and lawyer Levent Piskin.
Many of the X accounts, which collectively draw tens of thousands of followers, could not be viewed in Turkey without using a VPN, the AFP news agency reported.
Turkey’s LGBTQ community has repeatedly faced pressure from officials, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan publicly denouncing the community as a “deviant movement” of “perverts”.
The latest restrictions follow a similar action in June, when Turkey blocked about 40 X accounts associated with feminist or LGBTQ groups.
And the clampdown on social media is not limited to LGBTQ-related content: last year, Turkish authorities convinced X to block more than 700 accounts critical of the government during a surge of protests sparked by the arrest of Istanbul’s opposition mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu.
