Musk slammed for ‘double standard’ in Turkey as X shuts down dissidents’ accounts

Tech mogul Elon Musk is under fire from Turkish dissidents over moves to shut down X accounts aligned with the demonstrations and opposition against the country's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The X owner has a “double standard,” Can Dündar, former editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet, one of Turkey's oldest daily newspapers, told POLITICO. While Musk was talking free speech at the U.S. election, he was collaborating with an autocratic regime to censor speech, he said.

Istanbul and other major cities have been roiled by anti-government protests by students, democratic activists and other dissidents for weeks, following the arrest of Erdoğan's main political rival, presidential candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu.

In response, Erdoğan has taken social media platforms in his crosshairs. His government has issued a spate of gag orders to take down accounts.A spokesperson for Facebook's parent company Meta said on Tuesday it had been fined for not complying with shutdown requests from the Turkish government.

Musk — not someone known for biting his tongue — has kept quiet on the protests, with his X account making little mention of the Turkish turmoil.

By contrast, the tech entrepreneur has meddled in European politics in the past year. He criticized United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer for his handling of protests last summer and comparing the U.K. to the Soviet Union. He called the European Union's former digital affairs chief, Thierry Breton, a "tyrant of Europe." And recently he lashed out against a French court verdict finding far-right leader Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzlement and blocking her from a 2027 presidential run.

X said after the protests began that it had been ordered by the Turkish government to suspend some 700 accounts.

Dündar's account was suspended along with 177 others last October within a broad shutdown of online accounts.

X said last week it had challenged a shutdown order in the country's Constitutional Court. However, the order in question, seen by POLITICO, predates the protest by weeks. X did not respond to a question from POLITICO as to whether it has appealed any more recent government orders. The firm said in a post it "objects" to multiple court orders, it didn't clarify which orders and how it was objecting to them. One person at the firm, granted anonymity to disclose confidential information, said it had filed six challenges to government orders in total at Turkey's Constitutional Court.

X has complied with requests from Erdogǎn's government to intervene in the past. Ahead of the 2023 Turkish elections, X restricted access to content — a decision Musk personally defended.

Some years back, X would have "just ignored these demands, they would send a letter to us to tell us this [government] request [to suspend accounts] was made" but they wouldn't heed it, said Metin Cihan, an independent journalist whose X account was also suspended in February before the current protests began.

Cihan said that policy changed after Musk took over X in 2022.

Musk also met with Erdoğan in 2023, with the Turkish president asking him to build a Tesla factory in the country, Reuters reported. The two at the time also discussed licenses for Turkey from satellite internet provider Starlink, a subsidiary of Musk's SpaceX.

YouTube, Facebook feel pressure too

Two Turkish gag orders seen by POLITICO were based on the grounds of national security and public order, and contained little explanation to justify the shutdowns.

Turkish law does not require prior judicial review of such orders when they are issued as emergency measures. Article 8A of Turkey's internet law, invoked in the orders seen by POLITICO, "cannot be considered as providing the necessary procedural guarantees in order to protect the right to freedom of expression on the internet," experts at the human rights organization Council of Europe have said.

In the first half of 2024 Google reported that 29 percent of Turkish government orders for content removal had been issued on national security grounds — the highest percentage since 2019. The tech firm removed at least 28 percent of overall content subject to takedown requests, it said.

Beyond X and Facebook, Google's YouTube is one of the few free-speech options left to journalists and opposition figures. Dündar lamented what would happen if YouTube also bends the knee.

YouTube steered POLITICO toward existing online documentation on how they handle government requests to remove content.

The Turkish government has been putting pressure on the firm, saying last September that journalists on the platform must be licensed. 

YouTube said in a email it had established processes to review government requests in line with the applicable laws and its own policies. It declined to comment on how it will implement the policy requiring journalists to be licensed.

While platforms wrestle with Ankara's requests, their legal efforts — like X's court challenge — could prove meaningless. The Constitutional Court takes one to three years to rule, and sometimes even longer, Istanbul Bilgi University law professor Yaman Akdeniz wrote on X.

According to journalist Hayko Bağdat, whose account was also recently suspended, challenging gag orders in court is "not enough" because Turkey's judiciary is filled with Erdoğan loyalists.