In the past decade, Twitter — rebranded as “X” — earned a reputation as a platform for protest and dissent. But today, from Ankara to Islamabad, that same platform has increasingly become a tool of soft power in the hands of authoritarian leaders. Governments are leveraging X to suppress dissent, promote official narratives, and manipulate public opinion on a massive scale.
Nowhere is this trend clearer than in Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, where social media once gave voice to opposition but is now tightly patrolled. And since Elon Musk’s late-2022 takeover of Twitter, experts say the platform’s reduced content moderation and weakened trust and safety policies have only emboldened these regimes.
Turkish Twitter user İrem still remembers the eerie quiet on her timeline the day after devastating earthquakes struck Turkey in February 2023. “Suddenly, my feed went blank – no tweets, nothing,” she recalls. It wasn’t a technical glitch: the Turkish government had briefly blocked access to Twitter amid mounting criticism of its disaster response. Within a day, Ankara restored access, but only after reportedly extracting assurances that certain content would be restricted. This incident was a stark reminder that in Turkey, access to X can be turned on or off like a tap, depending on what suits those in power.
Erdoğan once called social media “the worst menace to society,” but he and his ruling party have learned to bend it to their will. In the run-up to Turkey’s pivotal 2023 elections, Twitter (X) became a battleground for information – and the government wasn’t shy about tipping the scales.
Just two days before the May 14 vote, Turkish users noticed that several prominent opposition accounts had gone dark. Twitter’s Global Government Affairs team admitted it “took action to restrict access to some content” in Turkey, citing a legal order and the need to keep the platform available nationwide. In effect, criticism of Erdoğan was hidden from Turkish eyes, even though those tweets remained visible to the rest of the world.
U.S. Congressman Adam Schiff lambasted the move, saying Twitter was “acquiescing to the demands of [Turkey’s] autocratic ruler” on the eve of a critical election. Free-speech advocates noted the bitter irony: Elon Musk, who had styled himself a “free speech absolutist,” was now complying with an authoritarian censorship request at a crucial democratic moment.
This election-eve censorship was not an isolated case. Over the years, Erdoğan’s regime has constructed a digital iron curtain through legal and extralegal means. A new social media law in 2022 gave authorities “vast and vague power” to suppress online content. Officials routinely threaten to block platforms entirely during political crises – a credible threat that puts companies like X in a bind.
Musk himself defended Twitter’s compliance in Turkey, saying “the choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets”. In practice, that meant bowing to hundreds of takedown requests from Ankara’s censors. During the first half of 2023, Twitter under Musk approved an astounding 83% of government censorship requests, up from roughly 50% a year prior. Turkey was by far one of the most active requesters. By late 2024, X was heeding 86% of takedown demands from Turkish authorities – a striking success rate for Erdoğan’s censors.
Beyond outright removals and throttling, Erdoğan’s government also wields armies of online trolls to police the narrative. When dissidents aren’t silenced by bans, they are often shouted down or harassed into silence. Research has exposed a coordinated network of pro-Erdoğan Twitter accounts – known colloquially as the “AK Trolls” (after Erdoğan’s AK Party) – that pump out propaganda and attack opposition voices.
In 2020, Twitter itself identified and suspended 6,252 accounts linked to the Turkish government for “coordinated inauthentic activity” targeting domestic audiences. Those accounts had masqueraded as ordinary citizens (even as supporters of opposition parties) to shape public opinion through fake grassroots campaigns. Today, new troll accounts keep appearing, often spewing nationalist slogans or disinformation, while dogpiling anyone who criticizes the president.
“They swarm you,” says one Turkish activist who regularly faces online abuse, describing a flood of replies from accounts with suspiciously similar profiles and talking points. During the 2023 election, hashtags praising Erdoğan’s achievements mysteriously trended at key moments – likely boosted by these networks to drown out critical hashtags. Such trolling campaigns create an illusion of overwhelming public support for the government, intimidating genuine users who might dare dissent.
The cumulative effect in Turkey is a twisted version of the digital town square: one where the ruling party’s voice booms from loudspeakers, opposition shouts are muffled, and regime-friendly cheerleaders patrol the crowd. Mainstream media in Turkey is largely state-controlled, so platforms like X had been one of the last refuges for independent journalism and opposition speech.
Now that refuge is under siege. “Social media remains one of the only outlets for those opposing Erdoğan,” analyst Fazıl Akiş notes, but the AKP is determined to “control the narratives” there as well. From the Gezi Park protests in 2013 to today, Erdoğan’s administration refined its playbook: if you can’t fully censor a platform, then flood it with your own content and scare off your critics.
Block, divide and control
Authoritarian-leaning governments have also learned that controlling access to Twitter can be just as important as controlling content. By selectively blocking and unblocking the platform, they wield it as both stick and carrot in times of crisis. Turkey’s brief Twitter shutdown during the 2023 earthquake response is one example of this tactic – silencing public outrage, then reopening the channel once the state could push its narrative of competent rescue efforts.
A dramatic illustration comes from Pakistan. In early 2024, following mass protests and political turmoil, Pakistani authorities imposed a sweeping 15-month ban on Twitter, cutting off millions from the service. But in May 2025, as a fresh military confrontation flared up with India, Islamabad suddenly lifted the ban. Access to X was “partially restored” for many Pakistanis just as tensions with India escalated.
The timing was no coincidence. Officials quietly acknowledged they needed the platform to counter New Delhi’s “digital narrative” amid the conflict. State media and the army’s public relations wing sprang into action on X, flooding feeds with Pakistan’s version of events in real-time. By toggling the platform off during domestic unrest and on during a foreign crisis, Pakistan revealed its view of Twitter as a strategic instrument – one to be denied to opposition voices at home, yet deployed when the government needs to rally national sentiment or manage information warfare with a rival.
India, too, has exhibited this on-off approach, albeit in a different way. The Indian government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi hasn’t outright banned Twitter nationwide, but it has repeatedly threatened to and has selectively blocked content during sensitive moments. In 2021, when farmers staged huge protests, Twitter was pressured to remove protest-related accounts, and officials warned local staff could be jailed for non-compliance.
By 2023, Musk’s Twitter proved more compliant with New Delhi’s directives. When a BBC documentary critical of Modi aired in January, India invoked emergency laws to block clips and links to it on social media. Twitter obliged by removing posts with images or links to the film, even those by journalists and a sitting member of parliament.
Musk shrugged off criticism, saying India’s rules on social media are “quite strict” and that “if we have a choice of either our people going to prison or us complying with the laws, we will comply”. The documentary vanished from X in India, demonstrating how a government can reach into a global platform and black out content at will.
What happens in Pakistan, India and Turkey underscores a broader trend: authoritarian regimes treat connectivity as leverage. During contentious events – elections, protests, even border clashes – they will slow or shut off access to platforms like X to choke the flow of unfavorable information. Then, when it suits them, they restore access but often under new constraints (such as agreements to censor certain topics).
In effect, they negotiate the terms of Twitter’s availability: toe our line, and you stay online. This extortionate dynamic played out in Nigeria as well, when in 2021 the government banned Twitter for seven months after a post by the president was removed. Twitter was unblocked only after it agreed to open a local office and adhere to strict regulations.
As David Kaye, former UN free speech rapporteur, put it, how platforms handle pressure from powerful states like India, Nigeria, or Saudi Arabia is a key indicator of their commitment to free expression. By that measure, the signs for X under Musk are troubling. Countries are learning that a brief blackout can bring even a tech titan to heel, extracting concessions that permanently alter the platform’s freedom.
Here comes AK Trolls!
Authoritarian governments don’t rely on official edicts alone – they also unleash swarms of supporters and bots to do the dirty work of harassing critics and spreading propaganda. These coordinated trolling campaigns function as state-sponsored influence operations, and Twitter has been their preferred arena.
Under Erdoğan, Turkey’s ruling party built a notorious troll army that operates day and night on social media. Posing as ordinary users, they have dominated hashtags, vilified opposition leaders, and even orchestrated smear campaigns at critical junctures like the 2016 coup attempt or the 2019 Istanbul mayoral race. “Astroturfing” on this scale creates the impression that Erdoğan’s hardline views are organically popular.
According to a Washington-based think tank report, the AKP’s troll operation even crafted fake personas as Kurds, nationalists, or secular Kemalists – whatever avatar was needed to infiltrate and sway different segments of society. Their most-retweeted posts were a toxic mix of false information favoring the government and vicious attacks on opponents.
This well-oiled propaganda machine has only grown more important as Turkey’s opposition turned to social media out of necessity. By faking grassroots support and silencing detractors through intimidation, troll armies let autocrats micromanage the narrative while maintaining plausible deniability.
This phenomenon is not unique to Turkey. India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has likewise been accused of marshaling legions of online “bhakts” (devotees) and an official IT Cell to dominate discourse on Twitter. Critics in India – from outspoken journalists to Bollywood actors who question the government – often find themselves barraged by hundreds of abusive replies parroting pro-Modi slogans.
These trolls label critics “anti-national” and have successfully gotten accounts suspended by mass-reporting them as allegedly violating rules. A prominent example was @HindutvaWatch, an account documenting Hindu nationalist violence: it was suddenly suspended in 2021 after a campaign by right-wing volunteers. “The online vigilante machinery stalks accounts critical of the BJP…and lobbies to get them suspended,” a member of that group told Al Jazeera.
In effect, government-aligned trolls act as crowdsourced censors, tricking Twitter’s automated systems into muzzling voices that challenge the ruling party. With Musk’s reduced moderation, these tactics can run rampant. One digital rights activist noted it has become “harder to distinguish between online trolls, the BJP IT cell, and [government] cyber-volunteers” – all appear to work in tandem to police speech online.
Even outside the democratic sphere, authoritarian states manipulate Twitter as a propaganda weapon. Russia famously employed troll farms to meddle in foreign elections, but it also uses them to reinforce support at home and distort the narrative around events like the Ukraine war. Although Twitter was blocked within Russia in 2022, pro-Kremlin troll accounts and bots continue to target global audiences – spreading Kremlin talking points, sowing confusion, and attacking those who oppose Moscow’s line. Moderation lapses under Musk have made this easier.
Twitter once actively downranked or labeled Russian state media and propaganda outlets; in 2023, those labels (e.g. “Russia state-affiliated media”) were quietly removed. The change allowed accounts like RT and Sputnik News to appear more legitimate in feeds. Meanwhile, mass layoffs at X meant fewer staff to combat coordinated disinformation. By late 2023, European Union analysts found that X had the highest ratio of misinformation of any major platform, driven largely by Russian propaganda efforts online.
EU commissioner Věra Jourová warned that Moscow had engaged in a “war of ideas” to “pollute our information space” with falsehoods, and put Musk on notice that X must do more to rein in fake news or face penalties. Thus far, however, the trajectory of X has been the opposite – a loosening of safeguards that authoritarian information warriors are eager to exploit.
Musk’s twisted idea of free speech
When Elon Musk took control of Twitter in October 2022, he promised to restore what he called “free speech” to the platform. For Musk, this meant mostly aligning with the maximum legal limits of speech in each country. “By ‘free speech,’ I simply mean that which matches the law,” he tweeted months before the acquisition.
In other words, Twitter under Musk would avoid censoring anything that governments themselves didn’t outlaw. In theory, this sounds even-handed. In practice, it has translated into unprecedented deference to government demands – including those from repressive regimes. Over Musk’s first six months at the helm, Twitter complied with 808 government censorship requests (fully or partially) out of 971 received.
The surge in requests – almost triple the volume from the previous period – and the sky-high compliance rate signaled to authoritarian leaders that Twitter’s new owner was far more yielding. “Few recent actions have done more to make a social media platform safe for disinformation, extremism, and authoritarian propaganda than the changes to Twitter since its purchase by Elon Musk,” observes analyst Miah Hammond-Errey.
Those changes include disbanding Twitter’s Trust and Safety teams, reinstating formerly banned extremists, and scrapping labels that identified state-controlled media outlets. Musk also ended Twitter’s participation in key global disinformation coalitions and rolled back moderation of hate speech. The result, critics say, is that trolls, bots and authoritarian propagandists now have free rein on X in ways they didn’t before.
Digital rights experts and academics are increasingly alarmed by this turn. Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia policy director at Access Now, notes that pre-Musk Twitter took the Indian government to court over censorship orders – a bold stance Musk shows little interest in continuing. Musk even cited that lawsuit (meant to protect Indian users’ speech) as a business risk in his legal filings, suggesting he might drop the challenge. “It would be a vindication of a very problematic, unconstitutional set of actions by the Indian government,” Chima warned, arguing that backing down sends a signal globally: Silicon Valley won’t fight for users’ rights in tough markets.
Indeed, Musk’s mass layoffs gutted the teams responsible for understanding local contexts and pushing back on excessive requests. Twitter’s entire human rights advisory group was dissolved, and many regional experts were let go. “Remaining staff get the message: don’t rock the boat,” Chima says, meaning don’t resist authorities or ask for more resources.
With Musk as sole owner, Twitter can no longer claim “our shareholders won’t allow us” when a government demands the silencing of a dissident or the handover of user data. Policy head Jason Pielemeier points out that Musk’s X has lost a key bargaining chip – it can’t deflect pressure by citing fiduciary duty or board oversight. Decisions concentrate in one man’s hands, and that man has varied business entanglements that regimes can exploit.
Observers note that Musk’s expansive business empire creates new vulnerabilities for Twitter’s principles. Musk needs governments like India, Turkey, and China on his side for his other ventures (Tesla, SpaceX’s Starlink, etc.). “The government of India is notorious for finding ways to pressure companies,” says tech lawyer Mishi Choudhary, noting that authorities can dangle licenses or threaten taxes to get what they want online. In India, Musk’s SpaceX has been seeking permits for Starlink internet and hoping for lower import duties on Tesla cars. Such pending deals could potentially soften X’s stance against India’s heavy-handed content restrictions.
Meanwhile, a Saudi prince became one of X’s largest investors by rolling over his Twitter shares – a fact not lost on human rights groups. The Saudi government has previously infiltrated Twitter’s staff to spy on dissidents and runs bot networks to sway opinion and report critics en masse. “They want to control Twitter’s trending algorithm in Saudi and force public opinion using bots,” says Wajeeh Lion, a Saudi activist who has been targeted online. He and others worry that Musk, given his financial ties, will be less inclined to purge those bot armies or to stand up to regimes like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s. Abdullah Alaoudh, of Democracy for the Arab World Now, observes how Saudi-linked accounts often coordinate to report a critic’s tweet as “hate” or “insulting the nation,” leading to automatic takedowns. Under Musk, such abuse of the reporting system could go unchecked or even be quietly encouraged if it aligns with local laws.
Concrete data is emerging on X’s post-Musk trajectory – and it’s not flattering. A February 2025 study published in PLOS One found hate speech on X jumped by roughly 50% after Musk’s takeover and stayed high into 2023. The researchers also found no decrease in bot activity – if anything, inauthentic accounts grew more active. In other words, Musk’s promises to defeat “spam bots” have not materialized, but his lax moderation has seemingly emboldened those spewing racial, religious, and political hatred.
Such an environment plays into authoritarian hands: regimes often weaponize hate speech and disinformation to marginalize minority groups or justify crackdowns on “instability.” We’ve seen this before – for instance, Myanmar’s military exploited Facebook’s lax oversight to incite violence against the Rohingya. “Facebook is a dark precedent of what a Twitter in freefall could look like,” warns El País, noting how tolerance of hate for growth’s sake contributed to real-world atrocities. If X becomes an unchecked torrent of hate and lies, authoritarian governments can both capitalize on the chaos (to spread their own narratives) and cite it as a pretext for further censorship (“we must block X to quell hate speech”). It’s a vicious cycle already in motion.
From India’s curtailed tweets to Turkey’s on-demand bans, the story is consistent: Twitter’s evolution into X has coincided with a shift in power over the platform’s use – tilting markedly toward state control and away from grassroots users. Authoritarian leaders have figured out how to turn a social media megaphone into an instrument of state propaganda and repression.
Elon Musk’s stewardship, marked by ideological flexibility and business pragmatism, has arguably accelerated this shift. By stripping away many of the safeguards and accountability mechanisms that once restrained both users and governments, X now offers a more permissive playground for digital authoritarians.
For citizens in places like Turkey, India, and Russia, this raises daunting questions: Will X continue to be a space where they can find truth and speak out, or will it become another mouthpiece of those in power? Digital rights activists worry that if current trends hold, voices of dissent will be drowned in a sea of state-sponsored noise, or snuffed out by a quick stroke of compliance with censorship laws. “Protecting the users of Twitter is critical to the success of the platform,” notes Kian Vesteinsson of Freedom House – if people