Serkan Kasapoglu
Manuel
Ayşegül Şentürk
Power does not silence people in only one way. Sometimes a government orders a platform to make an account disappear; sometimes a stadium full of cheering spectators draws the world’s attention away from those whom a state would rather not have seen; and sometimes people learn to withhold their own words because speaking carries a cost. These forms of silence are not equivalent. They work through different institutions, incentives, and degrees of coercion. Yet they meet at the same boundary between visibility and invisibility: whose experiences enter public view, whose voices are heard, and which forms of exclusion become ordinary enough to escape notice.
To examine that boundary, we move from the restriction of queer organisations on digital platforms in Turkiye, to the political uses of football’s global spectacle, and finally to the quieter practice of self-censorship in the workplace. What links these settings is not a single universal censor, but the power to shape the conditions under which people can appear, speak, and be recognised.
When the Censor Wears Two Masks: Meta, Ankara, and the Struggles of the Vibrant Queer Community in Turkiye
In the week before İstanbul Pride, the accounts began to vanish. Queer organizations faced an unexpected error message while trying to access their social media accounts. Inside Turkiye, the Instagram pages of Kaos GL, İstanbul Pride Week, İstanbul Trans Pride Week, Ankara Pride, and İzmir Pride simply stopped existing.
Days earlier, fifty-seven X accounts belonging to women’s and LGBTI+ organisations—Mor Çatı’s shelter network, Lambdaistanbul, Women for Women’s Human Rights, the LGBTI+ working groups of the Human Rights Association—had been made invisible under Article 8/A of Turkiye’s internet law, on grounds of “national security and public order”. Queer dating apps followed. From outside Turkiye, the accounts remained visible. From inside, however, there is only the text: content unavailable.
In the specific socio-political situation of Turkiye, however, the question “who did this” is harder to answer than it is, for example, in cases in Europe. Formally, the Turkish state ordered it: a criminal judgeship of the peace, acting on a request from the telecommunications authority, invoking a law whose “catalog crimes”—obscenity, prostitution, threats to public order—have long served as the legal costume for homophobia. But the state never touched a single account. Rather, Meta did; X did. The censor’s hand belongs to Menlo Park and the censor’s will belongs to Ankara; the queer community in Turkiye cannot tell where one perpetrator ends and the other begins.
Meta’s transparency reports show Instagram complied with roughly 79 percent of Turkish removal requests in 2024. TikTok managed over 90 percent. X, whose owner styles himself a free-speech absolutist, received more takedown requests from Turkey than from any country except Japan and acted on more than two-thirds of them. We, however, cannot see what was removed upon these requests. The nature of the content is not specified. There are neither categories nor account lists, nor is there any indication of whether a request targeted a scam network or a trans rights collective. The transparency report withholds precisely the information that would let civil society see itself being censored.
Occasionally, however, the curtain slips. In March 2025, amid the protests over the Turkish opposition’s presidential candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu’s arrest, Meta published a case study noting that it had refused court orders against protest content—content it deemed “clearly in the public interest”—while restricting content critical of the government and content related to LGBTQ+ and feminist organisations. So, practically, Meta draws a line, and queer and feminist life falls on the disposable side. The company was fined a “substantial” sum for its refusals, which proves that the refusal is possible and compliance is a choice. When Meta blocks Kaos GL, it is not helplessly executing Turkish law; it is deciding that this particular speech is not worth a fine or that this execution is a good rationale for its own agenda, as we often see across its operations all around the world since at least December 2024.
Here the comparison with Europe becomes instructive. When Meta suppresses queer or reproductive-rights organisations in the EU—and it does, as its ignored Oversight Board recommendations and shadowbanned advocacy accounts also attest—those organisations have somewhere to go. The Digital Services Act obliges platforms to explain removals and offer appeals. National regulators can be petitioned; the European Court of Human Rights sits at the end of a long but real road. The remedy is slow and often toothless, but the architecture of appeal exists, and platforms know they are watched by an authority that does not share their incentives. That authority can, indeed, exert its law against Meta’s technofeudalist ambitions.
In Turkiye, the architecture of appeal is the censor and censor only. The judgeships that issue blocking orders are the same institutions a blocked NGO must petition for reversal—and Turkish courts almost never reverse; Constitutional Court applications take years. By the time a ruling arrives, three Pride seasons have been silenced. There is no regulator to complain to, because the regulator wrote the request. There is no domestic press to raise a strong alarm, because the independent press is also constantly blocked and censored alongside you.
There is an interesting bargain at play here. When autocratic values are aligned, the state simply asks the platform, and the platform that has calculated the value of the Turkish ad market against the value of Turkish queers does the rest—a calculation sharpened by legal amendments that threaten non-compliant platforms with throttling and advertising bans. Kind of an outsourced repression, executed by American infrastructure, and invisible to international scrutiny (though, hopefully, not so much, with the attention we are giving to it!).
This is why the tidy distinction between “state censorship” and “platform moderation” no longer describes anything real in countries like Turkiye. The two have fused into a single apparatus with distributed liability. The state supplies the legal pretext; the platform supplies the enforcement mechanism, the opaque interface, and the transparency report that transparently reports nothing. Each points at the other. The queer organisation, caught between them, cannot even name its adversary—and an adversary that cannot be named cannot be sued, shamed, or resisted.
What would resistance require? Minimally: that platforms publish, per country, the categories and targets of government requests. That every geo-blocked page say so—”restricted at the request of the Turkish authorities, court order no. XYZ”—instead of lying about technical errors. That companies which found the nerve to refuse orders against protest content extend the same nerve to Pride content, and litigate 8/A orders to the Constitutional Court. And that European regulators recognise that a company that acts as the enforcement arm of a censoring state abroad is telling you what it is willing to become at home, the moment the incentives align.
Until then, Turkish queer civil society persists the way it always has—in VPNs, in diaspora accounts, in resistance, in community support, and in the stubborn knowledge that visibility withdrawn is not existence erased.
And we invite the readers to be precise about what happened this Pride Month. Turkiye asked. Meta and X delivered.
An account can be blocked through a legal order and a platform’s compliance. But visibility can also be lost without anything being formally removed. Where censorship determines what an audience cannot see, spectacle can determine what it barely notices. This is the political possibility behind sportwashing: those in power need not silence every critic if they can place a more compelling image in the foreground.
Sportwashing (or the benefits of hosting the World Cup)
a place of pitiless woe and of darkness
(Maugham, W. Somerset. Of human bondage 1915 XXXI)
For an animal brain, there’s nothing more distracting than a rolling ball (and I’m not talking about cats or dogs here, let’s make that clear from the get-go). If we add to this a giant stadium, filled by a roaring, diverse crowd that has travelled just to witness the world’s most beautiful (and devastating) sport, the ball’s dissuasive effects could increase exponentially. The media monopoly that owns the ball’s broadcasts eagerly sells them to the highest bidder—anonymous corporate giants.
The trick does not end with distraction. It also decides who gets to be seen. Every spectacle has its shadows, and someone is always pushed into them. Women who refuse the roles assigned to them, queer athletes who exist too openly, artists who insist on telling the wrong stories—they become inconvenient. Their voices are softened, their symbols erased, their bodies regulated. A tournament can celebrate unity while banning a rainbow armband, applauding women’s victories while silencing those who demand equality. The crowd cheers, the cameras pan elsewhere, and the silence begins to look natural. Censorship no longer needs a censor with a red pen. It only needs a bigger show.
Would you believe me if I told you that I saw this ball’s power grow so strong my nation stopped just to watch it roll? People are obsessed, and they love to see it. Its circular shape holds secrets known to snake charmers—our minds, like the snake’s, become bewildered. If we don’t train ourselves to look beyond it, we become victims of it, spectators who see but don’t watch. This is, of course, the oldest trick in the manuals of power. Juvenal called it bread and circuses (panem et circenses, for those who know Latin); the Romans perfected its effects long before FIFA discovered the revenue model it uses now throughout the World Cup. There’s something newer to this (a term more academically refined), something that happens when a government not only distracts its people with the ball, but uses the sport to launder itself vis-a-vis the entire world.
This is called sportwashing: the strategic use of sports as a reputational builder, dissolving the critics of human rights abuses, populism and international isolation in a warm bath of televised show. The World Cup is the perfect instrument for this murky operation. Not because the sport is corrupted per se (even if the FIFA gate exposed its leaders not so long ago), but precisely because it is. The power that the spectacle creates is borrowed, not created. A regime, or a democracy, that hosts the World Cup does not create the joy of the game; it merely stands beside it and hopes the television frame is wide enough to capture them both. The best example of this is Qatar 2022, the one that forced the word “sportwashing” into every conversation. A state of fewer than half a million people, built on migrant labour under conditions that more than a few human rights organisations described as modern slavery, hosted the most-watched event in human history. Even when the criticism was loud, when the ball rolled, the mouths kept talking, but no one listened to them.
By the final match between France and Argentina, the conversation had moved almost entirely into the game. The charmer’s power of the ball played while the snake swayed. Here we should resist the comfortable narrative that presents sportswashing as merely the vice of Gulf petrostates or brutal dictatorships (the best examples for this are Argentina 78, a cup that was being played less than one kilometre away from an illegal detention centre where people were tortured and disappeared and those World Cups that Italy won under the surveillance of the now feared and then somehow loved duce). Looking ahead, the 2026 World Cup, happening right now and hosted across North America (Mexico, Canada, and the United States of America), presents a different—and in some ways more disturbing—context. This tournament asks us to examine what Western democracies may seek to wash away. For instance, the Trump administration decided to co-host a tournament that promotes peace while simultaneously carrying on an aggressive deportation regime and contributing to the shredding of the international order. The ugliness is not always hidden from our eyes, yet the spectacle continues.
Perhaps, and just perhaps, this is the most refined form of sportwashing ever achieved (even when “the cup” still needs to compete with inconvenient truths, such as the teacher’s hunger strike we see in Mexico now). The spectacle only needs to be more compelling than the issues surrounding it, and a World Cup almost always is. The snake charmer does not need violence to silence the crowd; he simply needs to play louder. This doesn’t mean that we should not watch it (I certainly do), but there’s a difference between a spectator who sees and one who watches, and that difference, as small as it might seem, is exactly what the hosts are counting on to wash their sins.
Spectacle redirects the public gaze, but the politics of visibility also operates before a word ever reaches an audience. Not every silence is ordered from above or drowned out by a major event. Sometimes the risk of being heard is enough for people to adjust what they say, or decide not to speak at all. The question of who feels able to become visible then enters the workplace, where authority and social expectations are negotiated in everyday encounters.
How to Spot the Chameleon
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive
Audre Lorde (1978). A Litany for Survival. Poetry Foundation.
While researching censorship and visibility recently, I found my thoughts drifting toward a more pervasive version of it. Self-censorship is what we impose on ourselves. It appears in many parts of life, but it is especially common in the workplace. Over my five years in the professional world, I have noticed a growing reluctance among employees to speak to power. Like a chameleon blending into its surroundings to avoid danger, people often read the room and adapt accordingly. They suppress their original thoughts as speaking up risks conflict, punishment, or exclusion. However, when people stay silent, they remain disconnected from one another, unable to challenge problems collectively or advocate for change.
Though it’s hard to confess, I recognize this tendency in myself too. In meetings, I often find myself rehearsing comments internally, weighing the mood of the room and worrying about how my words will be received. By the time I decide it is safe to speak, the conversation has already moved on. So, I become a little less visible and ponder how I can spot the chameleon within.
Self-censorship appears to be an individual problem at first. It seems like a matter of confidence, personality, or communication style. But looking at silence as just a personal flaw is to ignore the systemic pressure that forces certain people to stay quiet. We all learn early which stories are acceptable to tell and which emotions are excessive. By the time people enter professional life, silence has often become less a decision than a habit rehearsed across classrooms, families, media, and cultural institutions.
This dynamic does not affect everyone equally. For instance, gender still shapes who gets listened to or interrupted. Women are still expected to prove themselves more than their male colleagues. Deep-seated gender stereotypes don’t disappear even when women climb into managerial roles. Many women learn to blend in before they even realize they are doing it, and they are routinely silencing themselves. Adapting begins to feel like common sense rather than compromise, and its consequences accumulate over time. Seen this way, self-censorship is a structural outcome rather than a personal choice.
In today’s world, organizations increasingly rely on measurable indicators of contribution. Ideas are voiced in meetings and documented in reports. By contrast, valuable insights that remain unspoken often disappear from view. When people consistently censor themselves, they may not only be withholding ideas; they may also be reducing their presence in these systems. When workplaces routinely question certain voices more than others, silence becomes a predictable response. Over time, it can translate into diminished visibility and fewer opportunities.
Like a chameleon, most of us attune to our surroundings in order to remain safe and unthreatening. What makes self-censorship so difficult to confront is that it often appears rational. For many of us, silence is not a failure to navigate workplace culture; it is a way of surviving it. Yet the strategies that reduce immediate risk can gradually increase long-term costs, especially when they erode visibility and recognition. The challenge, then, is to examine ourselves and the systems we participate in as well. It requires looking at everything together as our shared reality. We need to be open with one another, with full honesty. I confess it is difficult to place myself under the spotlight, and just as difficult to be fully invisible to others.
Photograph: Iqro Rinaldi