‘It’s a war on words’: Turks fear new law to muzzle social media giants

President Recep Tayyip Erdoan's draconian legislation comes into force this week in a bid to censor free speech online

When a team of 20 police officers demanded to search journalist Oktay Candemir's flat earlier this month, he feared the worst: members of the Turkish media who are critical of the government are often arrested on spurious terrorism charges, and he has been in trouble several times before.

Instead, one of the officers pulled out a phone to remind Candemir of a jokey tweet he had sent a few days earlier, mocking a spate of new television shows about Ottoman sultans. I was arrested under article 130, for insulting the memory of a dead person. They told me I was defaming the Ottoman sultans."