Istanbul 1st Magistrates’ Court and “My Family is Safe” operation #homophobia #biphobia #transphobia lgbtqnation.com
Turkey’s recent crackdown on its LGBTQ+ community and the media continued this week with the shutdown of one of the country’s leading independent news websites
On Wednesday, Turkey’s justice ministry said it had shut down the website and social media accounts of T24 for what it called “LGBT propaganda,” Agence France-Presse reports
T24’s foreign news desk editor Buse Sogutlu confirmed to AFP that the outlet’s entire website — not just its coverage of LGBTQ+ issues — has been blocked in Turkey in what she described as a blow to “pure journalism” by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authoritarian regime
According to EngelliWeb, a project of the Istanbul-based Freedom of Expression Association that tracks internet censorship in Turkey, the Istanbul 1st Magistrates’ Court ordered the shutdown on Tuesday. DW Türkçe, the Turkish-language news service of Germany’s international public broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, reports that the court determined that T24 had published “content aimed at weakening the Turkish family structure”
“As part of the ‘My Family is Safe’ investigation… the website and social media accounts of online news portal T24, which has produced 118 pieces of content constituting LGBT propaganda over the past year, have been shut down,” Turkey’s justice ministry said in a statement[…]
Turkish authorities launched the “My Family is Safe” operation in mid-September as part of Erdogan’s “Decade of Family and Population” initiative, aimed at addressing falling birth rates and an aging demographic in the country, according to Reuters. Over the weekend of September 13, police raided LGBTQ+ bars, the offices of LGBTQ+ associations, and the homes of activists across 12 provinces, resulting in dozens of people being detained. According to AFP, prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for more than 160 people. Authorities have also reportedly blocked access to dozens of websites and social ?media accounts linked to LGBTQ+ organizations and activists