If a social media account is invisible in Turkey but remains accessible in Berlin, Paris or London, does that account really cease to exist?This is the question we should be asking in the face of the successive restrictions imposed on social media accounts in Turkey in recent months. What we are confronting is no longer simply a question of what is prohibited, but of who is able to see what.In September, the scope of these restrictions widened considerably. A list issued by the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office covered 419 social media accounts, leading to restrictions on accounts belonging to journalists, media organisations, academics, women’s organisations and human rights groups.Among those affected were journalists Şirin Payzın, İrfan Değirmenci, Özlem Akarsu Çelik and Fırat Fıstık, as well as the news outlets Evrensel, soL Haber and Kısa Dalga; Academics for Peace; Amnesty International Turkey; the Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA); the Federation of Turkish Women’s Associations; and the Women’s Coalition. Similar decisions subsequently targeted the accounts of Veysel Ulusoy, Naz Yavuzarslan and Dinçer Gökçe.On September 24, the X account of Yaman Akdeniz, one of the founders of the Freedom of Expression Association and a scholar who has documented internet censorship in Turkey for years, was restricted under Article 8/A of Law No. 5651 on the grounds of “protecting national security and public order.” X subsequently withheld the account in Turkey.The crucial words here are “in Turkey.”The account has not disappeared from the internet. Viewed from another country, it is still there. Posts continue to appear; people can read them, share them and discuss them. Viewed from within Turkey, however, the same account is not visible. In other words, the account simultaneously exists and does not exist, depending on where the user happens to be.From censorship to information asymmetryResearch on internet censorship has long documented which forms of content are blocked, the legal decisions through which access is restricted and the consequences of such measures for freedom of expression and collective memory. The work of Yaman Akdeniz and the Freedom of Expression Association has for years documented the scale of this phenomenon in Turkey.What I want to draw attention to here is a different consequence. Removing a piece of content from the internet altogether is not the same as making it invisible only within a particular geographical territory.In the latter case, what emerges is not simply censorship. It is also information asymmetry. Someone living in Berlin can see the posts of a journalist, academic or civil society organisation that a user in Istanbul cannot.Those who use a VPN can gain access; those who do not cannot. Those with sufficient technical knowledge can trace the missing content, while others may never even become aware that it exists. Existing economic, cultural and educational inequalities in access to information are therefore compounded by another form of inequality: geographical inequality.Yet there is another, perhaps even more striking, dimension to this: censorship itself becomes invisible.In the era of print, when a newspaper was confiscated, a book banned or a television broadcast taken off air, the act of censorship was itself visible. We knew that something had been removed.The digital environment works differently. If an account does not appear when you search for it, you may not know why. Has the account been closed? Did the user delete it? Did the platform remove it? Or has it been made invisible as the result of a court order? More importantly, if you never search for that particular account or piece of content, you may never discover that it has been withheld in the first place.Digital censorship, therefore, does more than prevent us from seeing something. It can also deprive us of the possibility of knowing what we are not seeing.This is one of the less discussed consequences of geographically targeted restrictions. The most effective form of censorship may not be an empty screen announcing that content has been removed. It may instead be an information environment that appears complete to the user while, in fact, some of its constituent parts have quietly been taken away.The other side of access restrictions: the right to knowThis also requires us to reconsider the conventional way in which we understand restrictions on access. When the account of a journalist or academic is made invisible in Turkey, the first and most obvious debate concerns that person’s freedom of expression. This is, of course, fundamental. But there is another side to the equation: the millions of people who are no longer able to see that account.The account holder continues to speak. Users in other countries continue to read what they say. Their posts may continue to circulate through other channels. The user in Turkey, however, is excluded from that circulation.The person whose speech is restricted, then, is not the only party affected by an access restriction. The citizen whose ability to listen, read, compare and obtain information has been curtailed is also directly implicated.For this reason, perhaps we need to discuss digital censorship not only in terms of freedom of expression, but also, and more explicitly, in terms of the citizen’s right to know.The invisible borders of shared realityIn the early years of the internet, there was considerable optimism that it would transcend physical borders. Geography, we were told, would lose its significance and information would circulate freely across national boundaries.Today, borders are being drawn again within the very same platforms. The difference is that we cannot see the map on which these borders are marked.A person opening X on their phone in Istanbul and another doing the same in Berlin may believe they are entering the same platform. The logo is the same, the search box is the same, the interface is the same. Yet the public sphere available to each of them is not.This is why it is insufficient to understand recent access restrictions simply as yet another account being blocked. The more important question is whether the body of information that is invisible from Turkey but accessible elsewhere in the world is steadily expanding.As that space grows, censorship does more than narrow the boundaries of expression. It also deepens informational inequality among citizens. Perhaps, then, when confronting digital censorship, we should no longer ask only: What has been banned?We should also ask: Who can see what? And the more difficult question is this: Who is aware of what they cannot see?Shared reality does not mean that everyone believes the same thing. It means that even when we disagree, we can look at the same documents, scrutinise the same claims and access the sources to which others refer.If those sources now differ according to where we happen to be located, then what we face is not simply a problem of censorship. It is a problem of the fragmentation of shared reality.Yasemin Giritli İnceoğlu is a communication scholar.