Best VPNs for Turkey

No, only certain VPNs have definitely been banned in Turkey.

In November 2016, Turkey’s Information and Communication Technologies Authority ordered Turkish ISPs to block access to Tor and several VPNs services including Hotspot Shield, Psiphon, Zenmate, TunnelBear, VyprVPN and ExpressVPN.

As a general rule, though, VPNs are legal in Turkey.

The government uses deep packet inspection (sometimes simply called DPI) to inspect traffic and identify if it is being encrypted by one of these VPN services. It can use this to block VPN traffic when it identifies it, but it is nowhere near as effective as China’s Great Firewall.

VPNs with obfuscation technology behind them tend to work in Turkey despite the bans, including both ExpressVPN and VyprVPN.

Some VPNs have the capacity to overcome Turkey’s censorship technologies, but these popular providers do not work in Turkey:

• Hotspot Shield
• TunnelBear
• Zenmate
• IPVanish
• Private Internet Access

If your VPN isn’t working in Turkey, one possible workaround is called port forwarding. OpenVPN connections generally use UDP port 1194, and this can be used to identify it as a VPN connection.

HTTPS traffic, though, generally passes through TCP port 443. If you can get your OpenVPN traffic to pass through this port it is effectively disguised as normal traffic.
You will need a VPN provider whose client includes port forwarding to do this. Private Internet Access supports it, for instance.

Strictly speaking, yes.

Banned websites are blocked, but people are not held legally responsible for attempting to access them.

Something to keep in mind, though, is that whatever you do while using a VPN in Turkey is still subject to Turkish law.

This includes Article 301, which legislates prison sentences of up to two years for anyone who “publicly denigrates the Turkish nation, the State of the Turkish republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey… the judicial institutions of the state… the military and police organizations of the State.”

In practice, the law has been used to actively punish criticism of the Turkish government, its leaders and its actions.

Beyond this, there have been large numbers of arrests in recent years over Twitter comments critical of the government.

If you log onto a Twitter account associated with your real-life name or identity and then start criticising Erdoğan, or even the late Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, you could encounter harsh consequences, whether or not you are using a VPN.

There are a few ways to get access to blocked websites in Turkey. The first of which is to connect to a VPN.

It won’t be surprising that we think a VPN is the best way for you to get around Turkish censorship, but that’s because it’s true. The best VPN services will be able to tunnel your internet activity outside of Turkey without letting your ISP or the government know this is what you are doing.

This allows you to reach the free internet, without risking your security or privacy.

Alternatively you can connect to the Tor network, a global network of community owned servers (or “nodes”) which anonymise your activity and relocate it to another country. Tor has been banned, so this isn’t quite as easy as it once was, but is still possible.

Tor comes with its own risks, though. Unless you know what you’re doing, we always recommend using a trustworthy VPN.

Scroll down the page to see how you can connect to Tor in Turkey.

A third option is to use a proxy. A proxy is more rudimentary than a VPN, and won’t protect your activity from surveillance by your ISP using methods like deep packet inspection (DPI). Getting a proxy working can be a quick way to access information about staying anonymous online from outside Turkey.

If you are currently using a proxy to access blocked content from Turkey we strongly recommend you move onto a more secure and private tool as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, under Erdoğan’s leadership an increasingly large number of websites have been blocked.

Bans have been harsh and unexpected, none more so than Wikipedia, which was banned in April 2017.

The image hosting site Imgur has also been banned in Turkey, following an incident where two men took a district attorney hostage, and posted an image of him at gunpoint on the website.

The online forum Reddit has been banned too, but this decision was almost immediately undone.

Imgur on the other hand remains blocked. There is very little transparency from the Turkish government, so it is hard to tell when a website might go down and whether or not it will come back online.

In July 2019 the Turkish language news site bianet.org was also banned. This was particularly alarming, as Bianet is one of very few independent news sources operating in Turkey.

It later emerged that the ban was made by accident, and only specific articles were supposed to be blocked. That such serious action could be taken so casually demonstrates the need to run a VPN in Turkey, where online resources can be closed off without warning or justification.

The other 135 independent news sites were not as lucky as Bianet, and remain offline.

Media sites are required to apply for a special licence to broadcast to Turkey. Netflix has applied for this licence and claims it won’t be censoring any content. We won’t be surprised if shows depicting non-heterosexual relationships get re-edited or simply come off the Turkish version of the site, though.

LGBT+ content and news have been a persistent target for censorship, offline and online. Istanbul Pride has been repeatedly banned and in September 2019 TikTok banned all depictions of homosexuality from its platform in Turkey.

The gay dating app Grindr was banned in Turkey in 2013, well before the more recent censorship escalations.

Social media blockages are particularly severe when “wartime” restrictions come into effect.

Most recently, a huge number of social media sites were brought down in Southern Turkey while the Turkish Armed Forces and the Free Syrian Army moved to invade Syria against the Kurdish PKK and YPG, dubbed “Operation Peace Spring”.

Banning just part of the country is part of the growing technological capabilities of Turkey’s censorship regime.

Social media services routinely blocked in Turkey include:

• Facebook
• Facebook Messenger
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Instagram
• WhatsApp
• Skype
• Telegram

The Twitter account @TurkeyBlocks provides real-time coverage when these services go down.

If you want to access these sites and services during a government blackout you need to have a VPN or another method of circumnavigating your ISP’s firewall.

It’s extremely easy to get a Turkish IP address using a VPN. In fact, it’s much easier than using a VPN when visiting Turkey itself.

First, ensure you subscribe to a VPN with servers in Turkey or nearby countries. The VPN services in this article do, but you can also check server locations on a VPN provider’s website.

It’s as simple as that. You can check your Turkish IP address by using an IP address testing tool or typing ‘my IP’ into Google.

Because the government blocks VPN providers’ websites, it can be difficult to download a VPN while in Turkey.

If you are planning on travelling to Turkey, we always recommend downloading your VPN before leaving your home country to guarantee you can use it once you are there.

But this is not always an option. Perhaps you didn’t realise you would need a VPN until you reached Turkey, or you are from Turkey and don’t have access to foreign internet.

Fortunately, only major VPN services have actually been blocked, so it is generally possible to use a proxy or other service to access the website of your provider and download their app.

Tor was banned in Turkey back in 2016.

The Turkish government is able to identify traffic which is bound for the Tor network and block it.

It is still possible to use Tor in Turkey, though. You will need to make use of something called a “bridge.”

A bridge allows you to connect to the Tor network without your ISP or government knowing what you are doing, but will only work if your government or ISP does not know the server you are connecting to is a bridge into the Tor network.

Tor is an alternative to a VPN if you need anonymity online. Generally, we recommend using a VPN if your main aim is to circumvent censorship.

Tor comes with risks, and your activity won’t be secure on the Tor network.

We don’t recommend using free VPNs. More often than not they are loaded up with adware or malware, or they don’t encrypt your traffic properly.

You can try your luck with a free VPN, but they’re unlikely to be equipped to avoid detection by an ISP or the Turkish government.

If you absolutely cannot use a paid VPN, you might have some luck with Psiphon.

Psiphon is mainly a proxy service, not a VPN. (It does include a VPN, but not a very good one). This means it doesn’t offer you any additional security, and it also logs far too much user data. It does have a reputation for getting around censorship, though.

Psiphon has been explicitly banned in Turkey, too. So it’s probably only an option if you can download the app before you arrive in Turkey.

There is also no guarantee that it will work consistently once you arrive.

For your safety, security and privacy, we generally only recommend using Psiphon until you can get your hands on a proper VPN.

Your Amazon Fire TV Stick will work just fine in Turkey – and is a great way to watch your favourite international content.

In particular, the Amazon Fire TV Stick is popular for sideloading the Kodi media player (formerly XBMC), which allows you to put all your media together in one place.

To get access to all your content, though, you may also need a VPN.

A VPN will allow you to get around regional blocks, for instance to watch BBC iPlayer or US Netflix.

It will also hide your IP address, which is important for staying safe while using a media platform like Kodi.

As we have already covered, there are frequent arrests for social media posts in Turkey. They have only increased since the Turkish invasion of Syria.

This doesn’t mean you can’t post holiday pictures on Instagram, but if you want to organize politically online anonymity could help keep you safe.

A VPN will keep your activity hidden from your ISP, but this won’t matter if you are posting on a Twitter account under your own name. If you want to be completely anonymous online, you need to use Tor or a good VPN while also avoiding anything that might expose your identity.