Reddit Complies With Turkish Censorship, Blocking LGBTI Communities
April 2017
In 2017 Reddit complied with Turkish government censorship orders by geo-blocking subreddits, predominantly LGBTI communities, which were withheld at source under Turkey's 'obscenity' provisions.
What happened
In April 2017, monitoring group Turkey Blocks (later NetBlocks) reported that Reddit had complied with Turkish censorship orders by withholding a set of subreddits from users in Turkey. The blocked communities were predominantly LGBTI-related.
The removals were carried out under Turkey's Internet Law, which classifies certain sexual content as 'obscenity' and provides grounds for blocking. Rather than being blocked at the ISP level alone, the affected subreddits were withheld at source by Reddit and returned an HTTP 451 error, the status code reserved for content removed for legal reasons.
The incident drew attention because Reddit was reported to have complied with essentially all of the Turkish censorship requests directed at it, raising questions about how a platform that frequently positions itself around free expression navigates demands from authoritarian-leaning governments. Turkey had a long record of temporarily banning major platforms, including YouTube and Twitter, and keeping Imgur blocked.
The disproportionate targeting of LGBTI communities highlighted how 'obscenity' provisions could be used to suppress sexual-minority speech rather than only explicit material, and how a global platform's compliance choices could remove safe-space communities for users in a particular country.
Impact
Reddit's compliance removed LGBTI community spaces for Turkish users and became a documented example of a major platform geo-restricting minority speech to satisfy a government's obscenity-based censorship demands.