In 2000, the government set up the Telecommunications Authority “to perform the regulatory and supervision duties in the electronic communication sector.” The agency was restructured in 2008, taking on a new name: the Information and Communication Technologies Authority. It operates under the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure.
In 2016, following a failed coup attempt, Turkey shut down the Department of Telecommunications and Communications (TİB) — Turkey’s leading internet censor — and handed all of its authority to the BTK.
In the aftermath of the alleged 2016 coup attempt, the authorities claimed that “TİB was used as a hub for FETÖ [The Fethullah Gulen Terrorist Organisation] for surveillance and wiretapping purposes.”
As such, with the new powers, BTK went from being a regulatory body to an authority with surveillance powers that included “the authority to take any measure it deems necessary to uphold ‘national security and public order; prevent crime; protect public health and public morals; or protect the rights and freedoms’ and inform operators, access providers, data centers, hosting providers and content providers of the said measure, who then need to take action within two hours.”
In Turkey, some twenty entities have the power to censor content online, and blocking news websites fully or partially is a common practice. Turkey introduced the infamous Law no. 5651, aka the Internet Bill, in 2007. The bill was amended in 2014, 2015, and 2020 and enables authorities to block access to various websites, individual URLs, Twitter accounts, tweets, YouTube videos, and Facebook content.
Most recently, on December 14, 2023, the BTK blocked the new domain name of a popular website, Ekşi Sözlük (Sour Dictionary), which is a user-contribution-based collaborative hypertext dictionary. The original domain name was blocked for access in February 2023.
This year's Freedom on the Net report, by Freedom House, ranked Turkey “not free.”