The penalties imposed by Turkey’s government-controlled broadcasting watchdog have grown increasingly overblown and bizarre in recent months, reflecting an intensified effort to impose the government’s conservative worldview on the entire nation. Targeting a wide range of media — from video clips of Rihanna and Shakira to Simpsons cartoons and kissing scenes in local soap operas — the policies of the High Board of Radio and Television (RTUK) has become a major tool in the efforts of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to shape Turkish society.

RTUK wields two kinds of leverage: the government — the main source of the board’s power — and the sector of the Turkish viewing audience that backs its policies. The nine board members are elected by the parliament, with the AKP holding a five-seat contingent. Thanks to this composition, conservative members prevail over the decision-making. Viewers from the pious and conservative masses, which make up a majority in Turkey, are empowered to lodge complaints about shows they deem inappropriate. In 2014, some 31,000 people lodged complaints with the board, up from 15,000 in 2013. Most of those complaints pertained to “immoral” programs, and most of the RTUK sanctions penalized “immorality.”

Take, for instance, the video clip of Rihanna and Shakira’s hit “Can’t Remember to Forget You.” RTUK decided that it “featured content of a potentially harmful nature for the moral development of children and young people” because it showed the two singers half-naked in bed. Three TV stations that aired the video were fined. Another was penalized for airing DJ Calvin Harris’ clip “Summer” because it featured a female dancer who “jiggles her hips rhythmically in a way that may arouse sexual urges.” To further illustrate how the board has transformed Turkish television, private stations used to air erotic soap operas and foreign striptease shows when they made their debut in Turkey in the 1990s.

All sorts of programs have taken their share of conservative pressure, including one of Turkey’s most popular game shows, “My Spouse Knows Better,” in which married couples compete. The station airing the show was fined over an episode in which husbands danced with women not their wives, behavior that RTUK deemed contrary to “general morality.”