In my understanding of the article it says they did get a court order: "Elon Musk didn’t say anything about the situation and X didn’t defend freedom of speech. They only said there was a court order and they couldn’t do anything. But many people believe they should have defended free speech."

My reading of the article is that they had a court order telling them to close down the original account, but they seem to be shadow-banning the new account without one.

On a second reading, your interpretation might be the right one, it's not super-clear.

Mine too. But that sounds to me like they're protecting the new account by limiting its reach, not being helpful to the Turkish government. People who seek it out will still see it, but it may pass unseen for a little while from Erdogan who could get a new court order to shut it down with a 30-second phone call.

Somebody may have been trying to help (and I'm sure escalated internally before daring to shadow-ban rather than ban outright for "ban-evasion"), and is getting sabotaged by people who want to score dumb points against Musk, who I'm sure doesn't care either way.