X(Twitter) Secretly Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate

The X account of a Turkish opposition leader with 9.7M followers is restricted in Turkey. Although his new account is not restricted, many users say they don't see his posts on their homepages.

Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu’s university diploma was annulled on March 18, 2025, and he was jailed for corruption on March 23, 2025. Many people believe he did nothing wrong and that the current Turkish president wants to remove his strongest rival.

What happened afterward supports this view. His photo was banned from billboards in Istanbul, and his X (formerly Twitter) account with 9.7 million followers was restricted in Turkey.

Elon Musk didn’t say anything about the situation and X didn’t defend freedom of speech. They only said there was a court order and they couldn’t do anything. But many people believe they should have defended free speech.

What happened next made people wonder about Elon Musk’s position on the issue. Ekrem İmamoğlu opened a new X account called “Cumhurbaşkanlığı Aday Ofisi” (Office of the Presidential Candidate).

The account was promoted by the opposition party leader (3.7M followers) and the mayor of Ankara (7.8M followers). In a short time, it reached 200K followers. But after that, the growth slowed down sharply. A week later, it was around 210K, and the following week, 230K. Considering his original account had 9.7M followers, these numbers seemed unusually low.

Then, people started noticing they weren’t seeing İmamoğlu’s posts on their timelines. Even though he posted regularly, the algorithm didn’t promote his content. I noticed the same. I had 200 mutual friends with him, I followed his new account, visited his profile, and liked all his posts. But still didn’t see any of his tweets in the following days. Now, he has only 318K followers while his wife Dilek İmamoğlu has 600K.

For the last two weeks, I was busy with personal matters but still checked my X timeline daily. Yesterday, I realized I hadn’t seen any posts from İmamoğlu in a long time. I wondered why he wasn’t posting. When I visited his profile, I saw that he was actually tweeting regularly, but X wasn’t showing his posts to me.

This started a discussion in the Turkish community. Many people said they follow İmamoğlu but don’t see his tweets on their homepages. I created a poll and 715 people voted:

• 56% said they never see his posts

• 34% said they see them rarely

• 6% said they see an average amount

• 3% said they see them constantly

We don’t have solid proof, but it strongly suggests that X is secretly shadow banning İmamoğlu. I don’t think Elon Musk will change this, but I’m writing this article to show the political power he holds.