Reddit Complies With Turkish Censorship, Blocking LGBTI Communities

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 finding emerged from Reddit's own 2016 transparency report, released that month, which showed the company had complied with 100 percent of government content takedown demands during the year — a total of 21 requests worldwide. Freedom House separately recorded that Reddit honored all six requests it received from the Turkish government in 2016, resulting in the blocking of one post and five subreddits for Turkish IP addresses. 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. Reddit's transparency report did not identify which communities had been withheld, leaving researchers working with Turkey Blocks to determine what was missing; known blocked sections included r/twinks and r/gayporn. Turkey Blocks concluded that at least half of Turkey's 2016 censorship orders specifically targeted LGBTI content, and its researchers found that subreddits covering suicide, drugs and software piracy — material labelled obscene or immoral in other countries — remained available in Turkey, suggesting sexual-minority speech had been deliberately singled out.

The 2017 compliance followed an earlier, blunter confrontation. On the night of November 13, 2015, Turkey's telecommunications authority, the TIB, blocked reddit.com nationwide under Internet Law No. 5651, with an official notice citing 'technical analysis and legal consideration.' The censorship statute, enacted in 2007, allowed the regulator to block websites without court authorization, even on mere suspicion, and had previously been used to ban Twitter and YouTube. Users reported the Reddit ban operated at the DNS level, and it was lifted about a day later. Human Rights Watch had said Turkey 'has an abysmal record of protecting free expression online' and had already blocked tens of thousands of websites under Law 5651.

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. Circumvention was also becoming harder: Freedom House noted that Turkey's November 2016 blocking of Tor and popular VPN services made it more difficult for users to reach blocked websites. 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.