Governing the information ecosystem under authoritarian power: epistemic conditions of public reasoning in Türkiye

1 Introduction

Contemporary authoritarian regimes differ in important respects from the dictatorships and openly repressive authoritarian structures of the 20th century. Today, in many regimes with authoritarian tendencies, the appearance of democracy is preserved, elections are held routinely, opposition actors continue to exist, the judicial system continues to function at a formal level, and the media are not directly or entirely silenced. In these regimes, the discourse of democracy is also carefully maintained. However, while the structural components of democracy are formally preserved, their functionality is increasingly being weakened. Democratic institutions acquire substantive meaning only when political competition remains genuinely open, pluralistic sources of information are accessible, and citizens can form and express political judgments under conditions of meaningful contestation (Dahl, 1971). Political competition becomes increasingly asymmetric, the space for opposition is constricted, oppositional actors are made more vulnerable, and public debate is restricted through subtle mechanisms. The paradox is striking: while authoritarianism becomes less visible, power structures the social sphere more deeply.

In contemporary authoritarian regimes, power neutralizes the opposition not by eliminating it directly, but by portraying it as weak, ineffective, and illegitimate (Guriev and Treisman, 2019; Levitsky and Way, 2002). Media platforms are not necessarily shut down or visibly run by the state. Instead, the information ecosystem in which they operate is reshaped (Deibert, 2020; Gillespie, 2010; Roberts, 2018). Critical news may not be formally banned, yet it can be algorithmically marginalized, neutralized through counter-narratives, overshadowed by sensational and/or polarizing content (Bradshaw and Howard, 2018; Gillespie, 2018; King et al., 2017), or, as in the case of Türkiye, removed on grounds such as personal rights, public order, or information security (Akdeniz and Güven, 2024; Freedom House, 2024). Repression and restriction are still present, but they are often embedded in a broader climate of uncertainty that normalizes selective control, calibrated intervention, and self-censorship (Guriev and Treisman, 2019; King et al., 2013). Therefore, the issue is not only the suppression of political competition, but also the systematic reorganization of the information ecosystem in which that competition takes place.

The literature has addressed these distinctive features of contemporary authoritarian formations largely through analyses of institutional erosion and manifestations of digital authoritarianism that emphasize surveillance technologies, online censorship, and propaganda infrastructures (Deibert, 2020). Conceptualizations such as democratic backsliding or stagnation, competitive authoritarianism, electoral autocracy, digital authoritarianism, networked authoritarianism, and hybrid regime are highly valuable in this respect and offer important guidance for understanding the distinctive features of contemporary authoritarianism (Bermeo, 2016; King et al., 2013; Levitsky and Way, 2010; Roberts, 2018; Schedler, 2013). These studies tend to focus on institutional change or on forms of social control made possible by technological developments. However, a closer look reveals a deeper transformation in structures of power: the restructuring of the epistemic conditions under which political meaning, legitimacy, and truth claims are produced, circulated, made visible, and contested.

In this context, contemporary authoritarian power operates through a combination of repression, legal restrictions, and the regulation of visibility, credibility, and the limits of public reasoning. It shapes what is amplified or normalized, what is marginalized, what is classified as credible, harmful, or dangerous, what is framed as common sense or reasonable public discourse, and what is rendered unsayable (Foucault, 1980; Schneiders and Stark, 2025; Williams, 2025). The boundaries of the public sphere are shaped by information architectures that organize attention, credibility, and agenda-setting authority, alongside coercion. From the perspective of Gramsci's approach to hegemony, this process enables specific worlds of meaning to become sedimented as “common sense,” while alternative interpretations gradually become unthinkable (Gramsci, 1986). Coercion does not disappear. Instead, coercion and consent work together on a ground where the information ecosystem is continuously reorganized.

This article argues that contemporary authoritarian formations should be understood through the epistemic structuring of power. Such regimes often do not present themselves as overtly authoritarian because power increasingly operates by reshaping epistemic conditions rather than by escalating overt repression. This process should be analyzed not only through institutional decline or technological control, but also in terms of how the governance of the information ecosystem reorganizes the conditions under which coercion and consent operate.

This article asks how the governance of the information ecosystem restructures the epistemic conditions of authoritarian power, and how this restructuring helps explain the less visible operation of contemporary authoritarianism under a formal democratic appearance. Its main contribution is to shift the analysis of contemporary authoritarianism from institutional erosion and digital repression to the epistemic conditions under which public reasoning, political judgment, and legitimacy are structured. The article does not treat the information ecosystem merely as a site where censorship, propaganda, or platform regulation take place. Rather, it conceptualizes the information ecosystem as the material, institutional, and communicative environment through which information circulates, whereas the epistemic field refers to the structured conditions of visibility, credibility, legitimacy, and reasonableness produced within that environment.

2 Methodology

This article adopts a theory-guided qualitative case analysis to examine how the epistemic field is structured through legal, institutional, and infrastructural interventions in digital communication. Türkiye is examined as an analytically revealing case in which multiple mechanisms of epistemic structuring can be observed under conditions of formal democratic continuity. The analysis draws on multiple forms of publicly available evidence, including legal and regulatory changes since 2014, institutional transformations in media and digital governance, and longitudinal indicators from V-Dem Dataset v15 (Varieties of Democracy [V-Dem], 2025), Google Transparency Report, and EngelliWeb. These sources capture different dimensions of the same process: regulatory capacity, the exercise of digital intervention, platform-level content removal, and restrictions on access to alternative information. Read together, they provide analytical triangulation across legal frameworks, institutional capacity, and observable practices.

Generative AI (ChatGPT, OpenAI) was used solely for language editing, stylistic refinement and manuscript formatting.

3 Beyond institutional erosion: power, knowledge and the epistemic environment

The near disappearance of abrupt transitions to classical authoritarianism, together with the growing prevalence of slower, more gradual regime changes unfolding under a democratic appearance, has enriched the literature seeking to explain this transformation. While studies on democratic backsliding (Bermeo, 2016), democratic stagnation (Diamond, 2015; 2022), and the third wave of authoritarianism (Lührmann and Lindberg, 2019) draw attention to democratic decline at the global level, the literature on competitive authoritarianism (Levitsky and Way, 2010) and electoral authoritarianism (Schedler, 2013) focuses on processes of institutional erosion in which political competition becomes increasingly asymmetric. This literature makes an important contribution to our understanding of how contemporary authoritarianism transforms democratic institutions without eliminating them altogether.

More recent studies draw attention to the ways in which technological developments enable authoritarian control. Studies on digital authoritarianism (Deibert, 2020; Khalil, 2020; Roberts, 2018; Roberts and Oosterom, 2025) and networked authoritarianism (MacKinnon, 2011) analyze mechanisms such as surveillance, online censorship, data extraction, algorithmic governance, and disinformation. Recent scholarship has also questioned the conceptual boundaries of digital authoritarianism and emphasized the need for greater precision in distinguishing it from related forms of digital repression and control (Pearson, 2024; Roberts and Oosterom, 2025). These studies show how digital technologies have expanded the state's capacity to monitor opposition actors, regulate online discourse, fragment opposition networks, and manipulate the political sphere (Feldstein, 2020; MacKinnon, 2011).

Viewed as a whole, these studies have significantly deepened our understanding of how contemporary authoritarian regimes advance slowly and incrementally without radically transforming the constitutional order or abolishing democratic institutions. Despite their analytical value, however, they tend to prioritize erosion in institutional arrangements, strategic manipulation, and the effectiveness of technological instruments in this process. Yet a deeper transformation is at work: the restructuring of the epistemic conditions under which political meaning, legitimacy, and truth claims are produced and brought into circulation.

The epistemic field refers to the structured conditions under which knowledge and “truth” claims are considered credible, legitimized, and made visible through circulation. As Foucault argues, every society produces a specific “regime of truth” through mechanisms of power that determine which discourses are accepted as true, who is authorized to speak the truth, and through which institutional channels truth is circulated (Foucault, 1980). In this sense, the epistemic field refers to the institutional and discursive conditions under which political meaning and truth are produced, thereby making public reasoning possible. Public reasoning is understood here as the process through which political claims are encountered, assessed, contested, and rendered meaningful within the public sphere.

To analyze this constitutive role of the epistemic field, this article brings together the theoretical approaches of Foucault, Gramsci, and Althusser. Foucault's analysis of power/knowledge explains how regimes of truth are established and which discourses come to be recognized as legitimate. Gramsci's approach to hegemony (Gramsci, 1986) shows how this epistemic order becomes stabilized and socialized as “common sense.” Althusser's theory of ideology and state apparatuses (Althusser, 2000), in turn, demonstrates how these processes are organized not only at the discursive level but also materially within institutional apparatuses and everyday practices. Taken together, these three perspectives make it possible to see more clearly how power operates by structuring the epistemic conditions where political meaning, truth, and processes of subject formation are produced.

In Foucault's perspective, there is a mutually constitutive relationship between knowledge and power (Foucault, 1980; Rouse, 2005). Power does not function primarily through repression, prohibition, or coercion; instead, it operates by determining what is accepted as true and the conditions under which truth is produced. According to Foucault, “truth” is not the result of a free and equal discussion, but a product created and circulated within specific institutional and technical frameworks (Foucault, 1980). Therefore, the epistemic field functions as a regulatory architecture that determines how knowledge is produced, which knowledge gains the status of truth, which is marginalized, and which actors are capable of speaking the truth. Furthermore, knowledge is a process in circulation that allows power to spread across different points of the social field (Rouse, 2005). Discourse serves as the constitutive mechanism of this circulation. Truth claims are made visible, legitimized, and normalized through discursive practices (Foucault, 2021; Hall, 2001).

Gramsci's concept of hegemony offers a perspective that complements and deepens this relationship between power and knowledge. Like Foucault, Gramsci argues that power cannot operate through coercion alone and can be sustained only by securing consent as well (Carnoy, 2015; Gramsci, 1986). In this context, hegemony refers to the process through which specific worldviews come to be accepted at the societal level as “common sense,” thereby becoming naturalized and legitimized (Carnoy, 2015; Gramsci, 1986). What is described in Foucauldian terms as a “regime of truth” corresponds in Gramsci to the process by which these dominant ideological frameworks are elevated to the status of undeniable reality, while alternative narratives are classified as unthinkable, false, marginal, or radical. This dynamic lies at the very core of the hegemonic struggle. Hence, hegemony is closely tied to the construction of epistemic boundaries that determine which forms of knowledge, and which truth claims are regarded as reasonable.

As Gramsci emphasizes, common sense is not a singular or coherent whole. It is a historically formed, fragmented, and contradictory structure (Gramsci, 1986). Yet it is precisely this fragmented character that creates a continuous field of intervention and reproduction for hegemony. For this reason, public reasoning is not a neutral ground. It is a process through which hegemonic common sense is produced and reproduced. The same emphasis appears in Gramsci's understanding of the state: the state is not reducible to apparatuses of coercion but also includes the production of consent through civil society (state=political society+civil society) (Bensussan and Labica, 2016; Gramsci, 1986). Therefore, coercion and consent are not alternatives to one another. They operate as mutually reinforcing processes. The same pattern can be observed in contemporary authoritarian regimes. Coercion does not disappear but increasingly becomes effective by being embedded in the epistemic and discursive architecture through which consent is produced.

Althusser's theory of ideology shows that the epistemic field is deeply embedded within material apparatuses and everyday practices. According to Althusser, ideology is a material practice that structures the processes through which individuals perceive the social world, recognize themselves within certain positions, and act according to those positions (Althusser, 2000; Hall, 1985). In this context, ideology corresponds to the “imaginary representation” of individuals’ relations to their real conditions of existence. However, rather than being a mere illusion, it serves as an active constitutive mechanism of subject formation (Althusser, 2000; Hall, 1985). Therefore, ideology functions as a process that “interpellates” individuals as subjects, placing them into specific identities, roles, and relationships (Althusser, 2000; Althusser, 2014).

This approach becomes more concrete in Althusser's theory of state apparatuses. For Althusser, repressive state apparatuses and ideological state apparatuses are not entirely separate from one another. Both operate through repression and ideology. The difference lies in which element is primary. In repressive apparatuses, coercion is dominant, whereas in ideological apparatuses, ideology occupies the leading position (Althusser, 2000). Even so, ideological apparatuses assume the decisive role in the reproduction of the social order and of the relations of production. Institutions such as education, religion, family, media, and culture are material mechanisms that enable individuals to accept specific worldviews and truth claims as natural and legitimate. Consequently, the epistemic field should be understood not only as a ground where truth claims circulate, but also as a material infrastructure where ideological apparatuses reproduce what is “normal” and “reasonable” within everyday practices (Althusser, 2000; Hall, 1985). Thus, Foucault explains the formation of the epistemic order, Gramsci its hegemonic stabilization, and Althusser how subjects are constituted within that order.

On this basis, contemporary authoritarian transformations can be understood as operating not only through legal or institutional change, but also through the restructuring of the conditions under which subjects encounter, interpret, and evaluate political meaning. In this framework, the epistemic field corresponds to a material and discursive architecture where truth, legitimacy, and political reality are produced, circulated, and socially internalized. Therefore, the distinctive quality of contemporary authoritarianism is the simultaneous reorganization of the conditions for truth, consent, and subject formation, alongside the diversification of repressive tools and methods.

4 Epistemic structuring of power: mechanisms and apparatuses

In the digital age, power sustains itself by governing the infrastructures that shape the conditions under which information, truth, and discourse circulate. Platform architectures, ranking and recommendation systems, data extraction and governance mechanisms, and content moderation procedures have become the material apparatuses that shape the material conditions of public reasoning. Therefore, digital communication channels function as political infrastructures that determine the conditions of public visibility, credibility, and managed publicness (Schneiders and Stark, 2025; Williams, 2025). These underlying architectures shape the patterns and boundaries of everyday practices. They are invisible, and it is precisely to the extent that they remain invisible that they are political (Deibert and Rohozinski, 2010; Gillespie, 2010). For this reason, the epistemic field should be understood not simply as a site of ideological conflict structured around oppositions such as ‘true/false’, ‘legitimate/illegitimate’, or ‘reasonable/marginal’, but as a dynamic architecture that draws and manages the boundaries of which claims become visible, which sources are treated as credible, and which discourses are regarded as reasonable.

This transformation in the relationship between power and the epistemic field helps explain why contemporary authoritarian regimes often appear “less authoritarian,” or why they are placed in the “grey zone” as hybrid formations. Unlike classical authoritarian regimes, these systems do not seek to discipline the public sphere primarily through overt coercion. Instead, they produce a political terrain in which the information field that sustains public thought remains formally open; oppositional actors and critical perspectives continue to exist, yet their impact is systematically constrained. Guriev and Treisman's framework of the “informational autocrat” makes this logic especially clear: While repression does not disappear, the center of gravity shifts toward informational strategies that regulate what individuals know and what they regard as reasonable (Guriev and Treisman, 2019). Beyond simply producing false information, power raises the costs of public reasoning through uncertainty, selectivity, and constant reframing. Hence, the central issue is under what structural conditions public reasoning is made possible and through which mechanisms those conditions are regulated.

The restructuring of the epistemic field operates through four mechanisms. First, infrastructural control refers to the reorganization of the legal, institutional, and technical architecture of information flows. Digital surveillance infrastructures, platform regulations, access restrictions, and content removal practices shape the structural framework of information circulation (Deibert, 2020; Feldstein, 2020; Roberts, 2018). Second, visibility regimes regulate which forms of information and truth claims enter the field of public attention through processes of selective suppression, marginalization, and amplification. As a result, some issues are made visible while others are systematically pushed into the background (Gillespie, 2018; King et al., 2013; Tufekci, 2017). Third, epistemic authority is attributed to particular actors, and the distribution of credibility is controlled by the classification of who counts as a source of reliable, true, and legitimate knowledge. This process involves the institutional reinforcement of sources and actors regarded as credible and legitimate, while discrediting their alternatives (Bennett and Livingston, 2018; Guriev and Treisman, 2019; Marwick and Lewis, 2017). Finally, strategic uncertainty refers to the deliberate production of ambiguity, informational overload, and competing narratives that make political interpretation and judgment more difficult. Narrative saturation operates as one of its principal mechanisms by dispersing attention, multiplying counter-narratives, and inflating the public agenda. In this way, the consolidation of alternative political narratives and positions is made more difficult, thereby contributing to the maintenance of hegemonic order (Bradshaw and Howard, 2018; Starbird et al., 2019).

The first mechanism, infrastructural control, concerns the governance of the legal, institutional, and technical conditions under which information circulates. Digitalization has made the infrastructural conditions of epistemic restructuring more governable. Decisions regarding how platforms operate, which content is removed and through which procedures, what data is collected and for what purposes, as well as which forms of information and truth claims circulate and with what priority, are shaped by technical and legal choices embedded in infrastructural design. Therefore, information and communication channels function as infrastructures that regulate the material conditions of public reasoning (Gillespie, 2010). This transformation becomes clearer when read alongside Lawrence Lessig's ‘Code is Law’ approach. For Lessig, software, algorithmic architecture, and platform design perform a regulatory function in digital environments by constraining and directing user behavior (Lessig, 1999). These infrastructures are not necessarily designed or owned by states. In many cases, they are operated by transnational platform companies, which makes the relationship between authoritarian governance and private digital infrastructures analytically important (Conduit, 2025). State power can nevertheless shape their political effects through regulation, content-removal obligations, data requirements, sanctions, and other forms of regulatory leverage over platform governance. Hence, content filtering, ranking algorithms, and rules of visibility should be understood as politically consequential mechanisms that help define the boundaries of the epistemic field. In contemporary authoritarian regimes, this form of infrastructural regulation also makes it possible for repression and consent to be produced within the same architecture. Digital infrastructures expand the capacity of power to produce consent by facilitating the normalization of specific narratives, the designation of legitimate sources of knowledge and truth, and the monopolization of agenda-setting capacity. Moreover, they enable repression by instruments such as content removal, account suspension, access blocking, the threat of legal sanctions, and selective prosecution. Indeed, comparative studies show that digital technologies have expanded the repertoire of repression and social control available to power, that the global decline in internet freedom continues, and that online information environments are systematically manipulated by states and political actors (Bradshaw et al., 2021; European Parliament, 2021a, b; Freedom House, 2024; V-Dem Institute, 2025).

The second mechanism, visibility regimes, operates through the management of flows of attention. Empirically, this mechanism is reflected in patterns of selective suppression, amplification, and differential visibility across content, topics, and political actors, rather than merely in the capacity to intervene. Research on selective censorship shows that censorship may operate less by suppressing all criticism than by limiting communication with the potential to facilitate collective action and mobilization (King et al., 2013). It can therefore operate through the selective suppression, algorithmic downgrading, or marginalization of content that may enhance the capacity for collective action, as well as through the amplification of content that aligns with the regime and/or functions as a distraction (Williams, 2025). As Zuboff also emphasizes, digital infrastructures produce not only economic outcomes but political ones as well, through their capacity to extract and steer behavioral data (Zuboff, 2019). This means that decisions about which forms of information and truth claims enter circulation in the public sphere, become visible, and acquire epistemic weight are increasingly regulated infrastructurally.

The literature on the platform society and the attention economy shows that political power in digital environments depends on the capacity to produce and curate content (Gillespie, 2014; Tufekci, 2017; van Dijck et al., 2018). Under conditions of dense information flow, attention becomes the scarce resource. Thus, ranking, recommendation, and trending mechanisms determine how the public agenda is shaped (Davenport and Beck, 2001; Simon, 1971; Webster, 2014). Hence, regimes with authoritarian tendencies can exclude alternative frames from the agenda not by fully closing the public sphere, but by directing the flow of attention. Indeed, King, Pan, and Roberts’ quantitative analysis of China shows that pro-government social media activity functions less by directly polemicizing against oppositional discussion than by inflating the agenda and dispersing attention (King et al., 2017). Similarly, data from V-Dem's Digital Society Project show that state actors in many countries conduct coordinated campaigns aimed at manipulating the online information environment (V-Dem Institute, 2025). Therefore, visibility regimes do not fully replace overt repression. Rather, they function as a mechanism that reduces its visibility while sustaining its effects. Contemporary authoritarianism, in this sense, limits the capacity for public reasoning less by directly closing the public sphere than by redesigning the distribution of visibility (Schneiders and Stark, 2025; Williams, 2025).

The third mechanism, the redistribution of epistemic authority, concerns the conditions under which particular actors, institutions, and sources become recognized as credible and authorized producers of knowledge. This mechanism can be observed in shifts in which actors, institutions, and information sources gain or lose public credibility and authority within the information environment. This process is also central to understanding how authority is constructed and contested within disinformation ecosystems. In this context, epistemic authority is no longer confined to a structure centered on institutional media, academic knowledge, and expert domains in the classical sense. Instead, it acquires a networked, fragmented, and competitive character in the digital sphere. In this environment, epistemic struggle is centered less on the truth of content than on who has the authority to define what counts as true (Schneiders and Stark, 2025). Bennett and Livingston's conceptualization of the “disinformation order” shows that disinformation does not consist merely in the production of false information; it also systematically erodes the authority of legitimate knowledge institutions and generates alternative epistemic authorities (Bennett and Livingston, 2018). Similarly, Marwick and Lewis emphasize that online manipulation targets mainstream media and expert institutions, blurs the criteria of credibility, and produces “alternative truth communities” (Marwick and Lewis, 2017). Empirical studies also show that this shift in authority produces measurable effects. Findings from the Reuters Institute in 2025 indicate that news use is increasingly shifting toward fragmented online networks, while traditional news media face low trust and weakening bonds with audiences (Newman et al., 2025). Indicators from V-Dem's Digital Society Project likewise document that state actors increase the level of political control over the media by manipulating the online information environment (V-Dem Institute, 2025). This means that epistemic authority is now dispersed across networks that can themselves be politically steered. Hence, the issue is under what conditions accurate information acquires status and within which networks it circulates.

The fourth mechanism, strategic uncertainty, operates through the deliberate multiplication of competing narratives, informational noise, and ambiguity in ways that increase the cognitive and interpretive costs of public reasoning. This mechanism can be observed where ambiguous legal categories, competing narratives, and informational noise make the boundaries of permissible expression and reliable political interpretation more difficult to anticipate. Narrative saturation is one of the principal forms through which this uncertainty is produced. In digital environments, the virtually unlimited capacity to produce content gives political actors the ability to manage the circulation of information and truth claims. At the same time, it also enables them to occupy the public sphere with low-intensity but continuous noise. The aim is to occupy the public sphere with multiple simultaneous narratives, thereby dispersing attention and raising the costs of reasoning on the one hand, while eroding epistemic clarity on the other. Tufekci's work shows that one of the new forms of censorship in the digital age operates less through direct prohibition than through managing the information environment by shifting attention and inflating content. Under such conditions, censorship becomes less visible and works increasingly through distraction (Tufekci, 2017). Moreover, the production of strategic uncertainty also involves the erosion of trust in democratic institutions. The European Parliament (2021b) shows that organized disinformation campaigns go beyond spreading false information to generalize doubt and erode institutional trust. Similarly, RAND's analyses of “truth decay” demonstrate that the blurring of the distinction between facts and opinions has structural effects on political polarization and decision-making processes (Kavanagh and Rich, 2018).

Taken together, these four mechanisms reveal the epistemic field as a structural architecture through which power reproduces itself by establishing the conditions for circulation, visibility, and legitimacy. Thus, contemporary authoritarianism should be understood not merely by an expanding repressive repertoire or institutional erosion, but also by the systematic redesign of the conditions under which political meaning is encountered and evaluated.

5 Türkiye as an epistemic case

Over the past decade, Türkiye has been classified in international democracy and freedom indices as an unfree regime, while also being described as a hybrid regime or electoral autocracy and identified among the countries experiencing the most dramatic decline. In its 2017 Democracy Report, the V-Dem Institute ranked Türkiye among the five most pronounced cases of democratic backsliding over the preceding five years (V-Dem Institute, 2017). In Freedom House reports, it has been classified as “Not Free” since 2018 (Freedom House, 2018, 2025). In the Democracy Index reports published by the Economist Intelligence Unit, it is placed in the lower ranks of the hybrid regime category (The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2025). At the same time, elections continue to be held, opposition parties remain active, and the media formally persist. However, behind this formal continuity a systematic process of restructuring is at work within the institutional and digital layers of the epistemic field that shape the material and technical conditions of public reasoning. This makes it possible to treat Türkiye as an epistemic case in which infrastructural control, visibility regimes, the redistribution of epistemic authority, and strategic uncertainty operate simultaneously under conditions of formal democratic continuity.

The restructuring of the epistemic field proceeds through cumulative and mutually reinforcing legal, institutional, and technical interventions. In Türkiye, this process is particularly visible in the successive reorganization of the regulatory framework governing digital communication. In particular, the amendments made to Law No. 5651 in 2014, 2020, and 2022 significantly strengthened state capacity to regulate the circulation of information and online visibility by expanding the legal framework of the digital communication infrastructure. The 2014 amendment expanded administrative powers regarding content blocking and access restriction, thereby establishing a legal basis for the more centralized regulation of the digital communication sphere through the telecommunications and internet regulatory authorities of the period (BİA News Center, 2014; Law No. 5651, 2007; Law No. 6518, 2014). Law No. 7253 of 2020 imposed new obligations on foreign-based social network providers with more than one million daily users in Türkiye, including the appointment of a local representative, notification to the BTK, responding to certain applications within 48 h, and reporting requirements (Law No. 7253, 2020, Art. 6, amending Law No. 5651, Additional Art. 4; Oymak, 2020). Law No. 7418, adopted in 2022, introduced Article 217/A into the Turkish Penal Code No. 5237, thereby criminalizing certain forms of the public dissemination of misleading information and prescribing a prison sentence of one to three years for this offense (Law No. 7418, 2022, Art. 29; amending Law No. 5237, Art. 217/A; Constitutional Court of Türkiye, 2023; Oymak, 2022). By extending criminal liability to the dissemination of misleading information, this framework also contributes to uncertainty surrounding the boundaries of permissible online expression. This provides a concrete instance of strategic uncertainty, as the ambiguity surrounding what counts as “misleading information” makes the limits of permissible digital expression more difficult to anticipate. The BTK's 2023 decision on “Procedures and Principles Regarding Social Network Providers” further specified the obligations of social network providers and made the framework governing reporting procedures, data hosting, advertising bans, bandwidth reduction, and the implementation of content removal/access blocking decisions more detailed and operational (Information and Communication Technologies Authority [BTK], 2023, Decision No. 2023/DK-İD/119).

In addition to these legal transformations, the transition to the Presidential Government System in 2018 marked another major turning point in the governance of digital communication and media. This transformation produced a new institutional architecture in which executive powers were centralized, and institutions regulating media and digital communication were repositioned within a strongly executive-centered framework of governance (Constitution of the Republic of Türkiye, 1982, Art. 104; Law No. 6771, 2017; Presidential Decree No. 1, 2018; Karahanoğulları and Türk, 2018). This institutional restructuring contributed to transforming the field of digital communication from a merely technical infrastructure into a domain in which the circulation of information and public visibility can be managed. This institutional concentration also affects the distribution of epistemic authority by strengthening the regulatory capacity of state institutions over the conditions under which information sources gain visibility and legitimacy.

These regulations demonstrate that digital infrastructure has evolved into a governance domain that shapes information circulation, the distribution of visibility, and epistemic authority. Table 1 summarizes the key legal and institutional thresholds of this transformation since 2014 and their impact on the epistemic field.

Table 1. Legal–institutional infrastructure of epistemic control in Türkiye.

Source: Author's compilation based on Law No. 5651 and its amendments (2014, 2020, 2022), Law No. 6771, Presidential Decree No. 1, and BTK's 2023 Regulation on Social Network Providers.

Legal and institutional regulations aimed at restructuring the epistemic field have made it possible to govern the circulation of information, the distribution of visibility, and the conditions of public debate in the digital communication environment in a more centralized manner. This transformation can also be traced through empirical indicators demonstrating how information flows and online visibility are regulated in practice. International datasets and reports published by independent research organizations show that, in Türkiye, processes such as the narrowing of alternative information sources, the systematic filtering of digital content, and platforms’ responses to content removal requests have intensified significantly in recent years.

V-Dem datasets facilitate a systematic analysis of governmental capacity to control the digital sphere. Figure 1 illustrates three primary dimensions of state capacity in Türkiye: filtering, internet shutdowns, and content regulation. These indicators reveal significant institutional and technical capacity for digital intervention. The coexistence of these capacities highlights a multi-layered control regime, reflecting the institutionalization of a structural regulatory infrastructure. Taken together, these indicators primarily illustrate infrastructural control by capturing the institutional and technical capacity to intervene in information flows.

The indicators in Figure 2 illustrate how state intervention in the digital information environment operates in practice. Analysis reveals that intervention in Türkiye's digital sphere is sustained through diverse instruments. Specifically, the decline in the ‘Government censorship effort–Media’ indicator signifies intensifying censorship over time. Similarly, filtering and shutdown indicators demonstrate regular recourse to access restrictions, while the ‘Alternative source information index’ reveals limited access to pluralistic information. This indicator also speaks directly to the redistribution of epistemic authority: as access to pluralistic and alternative information sources narrows, the relative authority of remaining and institutionally advantaged sources is strengthened. Collectively, V-Dem data suggest that digital regulation in Türkiye relies on a multi-layered control structure that combines filtering, censorship, and regulatory mechanisms, thereby constituting an established intervention repertoire shaping the conditions of information circulation in the digital public sphere.

Data from the Google Transparency Report (Google, 2026) show how state intervention in online content operates at the platform level. Figure 3 presents the change over time in the number of content removal requests submitted to Google by public authorities in Türkiye, as well as the number of items removed. The data show a marked increase in content removal requests, particularly after 2022. While annual requests remained in the range of approximately 7,000 to 8,000 between 2019 and 2021, this number reached its highest level, 28,947, in 2023. A similar general upward trend can also be observed in the number of removed items, although actual removals peaked earlier in 2022. Although not all requests were granted by Google, the overall rise in removed content indicates that the state's capacity to intervene in online content can also be exercised through platforms. This suggests that information circulation in the digital public sphere is governed not only by direct state intervention but also by regulatory relationships established with global digital platforms. Taken together with the access-blocking patterns discussed below, these data primarily illustrate visibility regimes by showing how specific forms of content and information are removed from or restricted within the digital public sphere.

EngelliWeb data provide a more concrete account of the scope of access-blocking practices in Türkiye. As shown in Figure 4, the number of blocked websites reached 311,091 in 2024, up from 38,441 in 2014. This increase shows that access-blocking mechanisms have become an increasingly central instrument in the regulation of the digital sphere. EngelliWeb reports also demonstrate that these practices are not limited to websites in general but extend across different digital platforms. According to the continuously updated access-blocking data published on the website of the Freedom of Expression Association, between December 2024 and September 2025, approximately 270,000 URLs, 17,000 X accounts, 75,000 X posts, 25,500 YouTube videos, 16,700 Facebook items, and 16,000 Instagram items were blocked (Akdeniz and Güven, 2024; Freedom of Expression Association, n.d.). In this context, access blocking has transitioned from an exceptional intervention into an established regulatory practice.

A similar trend can also be observed in access-blocking practices targeting news content. As illustrated in Figure 5, the number of blocked news URLs was only 537 in 2014 but reached a peak of 8,658 in 2023. This increase shows that access-blocking practices have become a form of intervention that directly targets the circulation of news and public visibility. It is also evident that access-blocking decisions are not issued solely by judicial bodies, and that various administrative institutions play an important role in this process as well. According to reports, the BTK issued the majority of access-blocking decisions between 2006 and 2024, while judicial decisions ranked fourth. The fact that, in 2024, institutions issuing access-blocking decisions included not only the BTK but also various administrative bodies such as the Turkish Football Federation, the National Lottery Administration, and the Capital Markets Board shows that access-blocking mechanisms have spread across a broad institutional terrain at the administrative level (Akdeniz and Güven, 2024).

The datasets examined in this section demonstrate that the digital sphere in Türkiye has increasingly evolved into a communication environment defined by intensive regulation and control. It is evident that digital regulation in Türkiye relies on a multi-layered control structure that integrates filtering, content removal, access blocking, and platform-level regulatory interventions. When viewed from the perspective of the structuring of the epistemic field, these practices should be read not only as mechanisms of repression, but also as processes that contribute to the more stable prominence of dominant narratives in the public sphere. As Gramsci's approach to hegemony emphasizes, apparatuses of coercion do not eliminate consent; they also function as an “armor” that secures it. In the Türkiye context, the blocking of hundreds of thousands of URLs, news items, and alternative sources of information in the digital sphere not only reduces the visibility of oppositional discourses but also narrows the epistemic resources on which public reasoning depends, thereby creating the conditions under which dominant narratives appear more legitimate and natural. In this sense, digital censorship practices also function as mechanisms that reinforce the epistemic conditions of hegemonic order by restricting the circulation of alternative truth claims.

Taken together, these findings show that the digital sphere in Türkiye has become an epistemic field in which the circulation of information and public visibility are shaped through governance. The intense regulatory capacity that emerges is most directly visible in infrastructural control and visibility regimes, while the regulation of alternative information sources and the uncertainty surrounding permissible online expression also affect the distribution of epistemic authority and contribute to strategic uncertainty. The case of Türkiye therefore shows that contemporary authoritarian tendencies operate not only through direct instruments of repression, but also through a broader logic of epistemic governance that reorganizes the conditions of circulation, access, and visibility of information.

6 Discussion and conclusion

Contemporary powers with authoritarian tendencies are increasingly restructuring the epistemic conditions of political life in ways that are less visible yet more deeply consequential. Their distinctive feature lies in the construction of a broader political architecture that determines the conditions under which political meaning is produced, which forms of knowledge are treated as visible and credible, which narratives are recognized as reasonable and legitimate, which actors acquire epistemic authority, and under what material conditions public reasoning becomes possible. For this reason, it is no longer sufficient to interpret contemporary authoritarian tendencies only through the distortion of electoral competition, the politicization of the judiciary, or the expansion of digital surveillance. What is decisive today is the way power intervenes in the conditions under which social reality is perceived, classified, and evaluated by reorganizing the epistemic field. The logic of the “informational autocrat” identified by Guriev and Treisman points to a regime in which overt repression has not disappeared, but in which the center of gravity has shifted toward managing information flows, perceptions of performance, and the formation of public opinion (Guriev and Treisman, 2019). In a similar vein, Roberts's analyses of censorship and Tufekci's discussion of algorithmic visibility show that political effects can be produced without fully blocking access to information, by shaping flows of attention, costs of access, and distributions of visibility (Roberts, 2018; Tufekci, 2017).

Within this framework, the epistemic structuring of power operates through four intertwined mechanisms: infrastructural control, visibility regimes, the redistribution of epistemic authority, and strategic uncertainty. Foucault's concept of regimes of truth makes visible that the political is constituted not only at the level of institutions and decisions, but also through the conditions under which discourses come to be accepted as true. Gramsci explains how this order acquires social stability by becoming “common sense,” while Althusser shows how these processes are materially reproduced through apparatuses and everyday practices. In this way, contemporary authoritarian formations reveal that repression and consent are not mutually exclusive mechanisms, but processes articulated within the same epistemic architecture. The key issue, then, is not only which content is removed, but also which content is amplified; not only who is silenced, but also who is presented as credible; not only which forms of knowledge are prohibited, but also which are coded as “reasonable,” “normal,” and “natural.”

The case of Türkiye clearly shows how this logic becomes institutionalized in practice. When the amendments to Law No. 5651, the new institutional architecture centered on the executive, the obligations imposed on platform providers, Law No. 7418, and the BTK's implementation framework are considered together, the digital sphere emerges as more than a technical communication environment. It becomes an administratively structured epistemic field. Taken together, these indicators of democratic decline, regulatory capacity, and digital intervention reveal not a series of isolated cases of censorship, but a multi-layered and institutionalized repertoire of intervention. This repertoire does not simply suppress oppositional content. It also narrows the circulation of alternative sources of information, limits the visibility of news, and creates the conditions under which particular dominant narratives gain more stable prominence. Türkiye should therefore be read not only as a case of democratic backsliding, but also as a case of epistemic governance in which the conditions of visibility, access, credibility, and legitimacy are redesigned in a state-centered manner.

The analysis also has clear limitations. As a theory-guided single-case study, it does not establish causal effects between particular regulatory interventions and changes in public judgment, nor does it claim that the mechanisms identified in Türkiye operate identically across authoritarian contexts. Rather, the case demonstrates how multiple forms of infrastructural, legal, and institutional intervention can converge within a single epistemic architecture. Comparative research could examine how these mechanisms vary across regime types and platform environments, while audience-level studies could investigate how changes in visibility, credibility, and informational uncertainty are experienced and interpreted by citizens.

In this context, understanding contemporary authoritarianism requires more than asking who is silenced, which institution is weakened, or which election is manipulated. It also requires examining which forms of knowledge are able to circulate, which sources acquire public trust, which narratives remain continuously visible, and which counter-narratives are eroded at the level of access, attention, and legitimacy. This perspective does not displace the literature on democratic backsliding and digital authoritarianism. On the contrary, it makes it possible to read the institutional and technological transformations identified by this literature at a deeper level, namely as the reconstitution of the epistemic order. As Bennett and Livingston's conceptualization of the “disinformation order” suggests, the issue is not merely the circulation of false information. It is also the erosion of legitimate knowledge institutions and the fragility of shared grounds of public truth (Bennett and Livingston, 2018). RAND's discussions of “truth decay” likewise show that the blurring of the boundary between fact and opinion structurally weakens public reasoning and institutional trust (Kavanagh and Rich, 2018). Seen from this perspective, contemporary authoritarianism should be understood not only as a crisis of institutions or rights, but also as a crisis of the epistemic conditions that make democratic judgment possible. When visibility, credibility, and legitimacy are governed infrastructurally, the democratic public sphere may remain formally open while its capacity to sustain meaningful contestation is weakened. Authoritarian power therefore becomes less visible not because it is less extensive, but because it operates increasingly by organizing the conditions under which political reality itself is perceived, evaluated, and contested.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Janneth Trejo-Quintana, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico

Reviewed by: Maryam Tavosi, National Library and Archives of Iran, Iran

Rut Bermejo, Rey Juan Carlos University, Campus of Vicalvaro, Spain