Just read that a major news site in Turkey blocked over 400,000 articles in a single year

I was looking up info on press freedom and found a report from a group called P24. It said that in 2023, a big Turkish news site had more than 400,000 of its articles blocked by court orders. That number is hard to even picture. It's not just one story getting taken down, it's a whole library of news that people can't see. On one side, you could say the courts are just following the law. On the other, it looks like a way to bury history and stop people from knowing what's going on. It makes me wonder if this is really about security or just control. Has anyone else seen stats from their own country that show how much gets hidden?

2 comments

2 Comments

linda6581mo ago

That "whole library of news" line really hit me because it's exactly how I feel about what's happening here in India too. We don't have 400,000 articles blocked in a year but I remember trying to look up a protest that happened in 2020 and every single news link was dead or redirecting to a different story. It's like the internet has these black holes where stuff just disappears. My cousin is a journalist and she told me about how they have to self-censor now just to keep their license, so it's not even just court orders, it's the fear of what might happen. You wonder if the public is even aware of how much they're not seeing, because you can't miss what you never knew existed in the first place. I think this kind of thing chips away at trust slowly until nobody believes anything anymore.

brookerobinson1mo ago

Exactly! That fear your cousin talks about is the worst part, isn't it? I saw the same thing happen with a local environmental story here, where all the big news sites just quietly dropped it after a week. It creates this weird silence where you know something is wrong but can't point to the proof anymore. You're so right about the trust being chipped away, because then you start doubting everything you do read. It feels like we're all just getting a cleaned-up story instead of the real one.