For three weeks, Turkey’s “My Family Is Safe” crackdown has gone after LGBTQ+ associations, bars, activists and their lawyers. This week it reached one of the country’s best-known independent newsrooms.

An Istanbul court has ordered access to T24, its website and its social media accounts, blocked over content prosecutors call “LGBT propaganda”, the Justice Ministry said on Wednesday, Reuters reported.

The short version

  • Who: The Istanbul 1st Criminal Court of Peace, acting in the investigation the state calls Ailem Güvende, “My Family Is Safe.”
  • What: T24’s website and social accounts blocked. Prosecutors say it published 118 pieces of content amounting to “LGBT propaganda” over the past year.
  • How: Under Article 8/A of Turkey’s internet law, with the order sent to the Cyber Security Presidency to carry out, Turkish Minute reported. The court issued it on September 29.
  • What’s next: T24 said it hadn’t received official notice and would appeal. Its lawyers were due to file on Thursday, according to Reuters.

Why T24 matters

T24 isn’t a niche blog. It was founded on September 1, 2009 by journalist Doğan Akın, and its contributors have included Hasan Cemal, a winner of Harvard’s Nieman award. Turkish Minute put its audience at roughly 1.9 million followers on X, 268,000 YouTube subscribers and 238,000 on Instagram.

The Justice Ministry gave some examples of the 118 items, but a full public list, and an explanation of how each one allegedly broke the law, wasn’t immediately available, Turkish Minute noted.

That gap is the whole story. When nobody can see the line, every editor has to guess where it is.

What journalists are saying

T24’s editor in charge, Candan Yıldız, didn’t soften it. “We are really experiencing a digital state of emergency,” Yıldız told Reuters. “An authority is telling journalists: you can report these stories, but you cannot.”

Yıldız Tar, editor-in-chief of the LGBTQ+ outlet Kaos GL, whose own accounts were blocked earlier in the crackdown, said the ruling “creates the image that writing about LGBTQI people in an objective way is a crime.” And more simply: “It’s not propaganda. It’s about basic journalism.”

T24 itself said it had “for some time been subjected to a campaign of defamation and lynching on social media,” and denied receiving outside funding, noting that repeated government audits had found none. Editorial coordinator Gökçer Tahincioğlu wrote that “such a harsh decision can be handed down against an institution employing dozens of media workers and journalists as a result of a carefully orchestrated smear campaign.”

A group of Turkish and international journalism organisations, including the Journalists’ Union of Turkey, the Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA) and the International Press Institute, called the closure “a grave attack on our profession.”

T24 isn’t alone

Istanbul’s chief prosecutor’s office says it has blocked 419 social media accounts under the same investigation. According to Turkish Minute, those include Kaos GL, the news site Velvele, Amnesty International Turkey, MLSA, the newspaper Evrensel, the soL news outlet, and journalists Şirin Payzın and İrfan Değirmenci.

Notice the pattern. The crackdown started with the people doing LGBTQ+ advocacy. Now it’s reaching the people who report on it, and the groups that defend those reporters.

How we got here

If you’ve been following along, this is the next step in a fast sequence:

  • September 12–14: Coordinated raids on LGBTQ+ groups, HIV organisations, bars and homes in five cities. We covered the raids here.
  • September 15: Courts sent at least 31 people to pre-trial detention, and police detained scores of people waiting outside Istanbul’s Çağlayan courthouse. Our report.
  • Since then: Kaos GL’s leadership swept up, freelance journalist Tuğba Tekerek detained (the Committee to Protect Journalists says simply for doing her job), and a widening list of blocked accounts. Background here.

The government says the operation is aimed at protecting children and family values. The European Union has urged Ankara to uphold freedom of expression and media freedom, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has called for the detainees’ immediate release, and Human Rights Watch has warned the crackdown threatens fundamental rights and the rule of law, Reuters reported.

Context that matters: Turkey sits 163rd out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ 2026 press freedom index, down from 159th in 2025.

Why this matters beyond Turkey

“Propaganda” laws have a predictable path. Russia’s started with “minors,” then widened. Hungary’s arrived as “child protection.” In each case, the vague word does the work: nobody can say exactly what’s banned, so publishers, broadcasters and ordinary people start cutting LGBTQ+ people out of the picture on their own.

What happened to T24 shows how that plays out in practice. A mainstream newsroom with millions of followers can be switched off over a count of articles that hasn’t been made public. The chilling effect lands on every other editor in the country before any appeal is heard.

The part to hold onto

T24 is appealing. Journalists are speaking on the record, by name, to international wire services, which is its own kind of courage right now. And more than sixty organisations across Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East have signed a joint statement demanding releases, access to lawyers, and protection for the data seized in the raids.

Turkish queer communities have outlasted Pride bans since 2015. They’re doing what they’ve always done: documenting, organising and refusing to disappear. Reporting on them is not propaganda. It’s the job.

We’ll follow T24’s appeal and the wider “My Family Is Safe” cases as they move through the courts.