Regulating Public Morality: Censorships and Authoritarian States

• In Event: Religion and the Political Incorporation of Minority Groups

Abstract

This analysis delves into the processes and mechanisms that are deployed to curtail the freedom of expression and define morality in authoritarian regimes. It offers one of the first systematic analyses of decisions made by Turkey's Radio and Television Council (RTUK) —often neglected and one of the pivotal state institutions controlled by the country's pro-Islamic government that monitors all media contents, fines, and prisons individuals and agents when their expressions are determined to be damaging "public morality." Although it was once described as a model Muslim democracy, the country's democracy has declined drastically over the last few years, offering a critical case to understand how democratic backsliding occurs and affects minorities. Turkey has been ruled by a populist, authoritarian, pro-Islamic party that enables us to question how religious parties use their political dominance through ostensibly innocuous mechanisms and institutions. Drawing on a data set developed I developed that organized RTUK'a's decision between 1998-2023 and interviews with RTUK members; the findings show that despite the common depiction of state censorship as a top-down process, populist authoritarian regimes share their monitoring capacity by various mechanisms. Placing RTUK in a broader context of authoritarian regimes, the paper discusses how censorship and different strategies are adopted to mitigate the objections to politically strategic censorship, which targets the opposition media and LGBTQ+ communities.

Author

• Sultan Tepe, University of Illinois at Chicago