Abstract
ABOVE: A protester uses her mobile device as she walks at Gezi Park on Taksim Square in Istanbul 6 June 2013. The government has made clear its disapproval of social media services, which are being used more and more as newspapers and television come increasingly under the sway of the state
Credit: Stoyan Nenov/Reuters
In Turkey the government has brought together a massive team of social media specialists for the upcoming elections in 2014. But there are already signs of foul-play argues
One day in June last year, a Turkish journalist working at the BBC World Service was surprised to find her name on the top of “trending topics”, a list generated by the users of the social media website Twitter. In order to make their conversations more focused, Twitter users mark their tweets using hashtags; the hashtag that brought the Turkish journalist to the top of the trending topic list was written in an extremely accusatory tone. It read: #ingiltereadinaajanlikyapmaselingirit, which roughly means “Don’t spy on behalf of England, Selin Girit.”
Selin Girit, based in London since 2007, was a familiar face for Turkish viewers who watched her BBC reports every afternoon on national television until a few weeks after this event (when the Turkish network NTV refused to broadcast a BBC report critical of Turkish media’s coverage of protests and the BBC cancelled its contract). On the day she became a trending topic, Girit was in Turkey to report on the debates inspired by Occupy Wall Street that were taking place in numerous public parks in Istanbul. The violent state response to the environmental protests in Istanbul’s Gezi Park had abated but not ended. The Turkish government was doing its best to control the protests on two fronts: on the street and, perhaps more crucially, on social media, where protesters decided on meeting points and discussed new strategies. While listening to a public debate, Girit tweeted what she heard: “Here is a suggestion from the park: let’s stop the economy. Let’s stop consuming for six months. Then they will have to listen to us.”
Melih Gökçek, the mayor of Turkey’s capital Ankara, who has more than a million followers on Twitter, was not pleased to see this advice being circulated. Interpreting Girit’s tweet as proof of a conspiracy planned in London – hence the accusation of spying for the UK – he started the now infamous hashtag which was used in thousands of tweets. In response to this campaign Twitter users started the hashtag #selingiritgazetecidir (“Selin Girit is a journalist”) and defended the reporter.
Gökçek’s campaign foreshadowed the increasing use of Twitter in political circles in the months that followed. In September there were reports in the media about the governing Justice and Development (AK) Party’s 6,000-strong “Twitter Army”. Public relations specialists at the party headquarters chose and trained those users, showing them ways to change the conversation on the social media. With the Turkish local elections scheduled for 30 March 2014, the opening shots have been fired in an ideological war in which the social media have the potential to become the main battlefield.
According to a study by the independent market research company eMarketer, Turkey has more than 36 million internet users and 31 per cent use Twitter. This means Turkey has the highest Twitter penetration in the world (followed by Japan, Netherlands and Venezuela). For politicians from all camps, these numbers turn Twitter into an immensely attractive platform for organising election campaigns.
Mustafa Sarıgül, the mayoral candidate for Istanbul and a member of the country’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), is among those who have been pouring significant funds into his Twitter campaign. While the Sarıgül Twitter team struggles against AK Party’s “Twitter Army” Sarıgül reportedly paid $13,000 dollars per day to Twitter to make his campaign a trending topic every day until the elections. Although these appear as “promoted” or “sponsored” tweets they play an important role in defining the political conversation in the country.
The increased significance of Turkey’s social media poses specific challenges in the fields of ethics and freedom of expression. If political parties employ professional Twitter users to inflict the greatest damage to members of the opposing camp, where does that leave us in terms of ethics? Doesn’t it take away the free-spirited, individualistic quality of the media and replace it with a digital Machiavellianism where political ends justify digital means? In the polluted atmosphere of Turkish politics this is undoubtedly the case.
According to Ceren Kenar, a columnist in Türkiye newspaper, there is nothing wrong with using Twitter for political means. “Twitter is a venue with its own internal rules,” she says. “That a political group wants to be active in this venue is of course legitimate. But the rules that apply to the street do not apply to the digital world: electoral fraud is a crime in the real world whereas a politician can exaggerate his popularity through fake Twitter accounts and get away with it.” She points to the lack of a legal framework or code of conduct for such problems. “Twitter was initially a space for self-expression but it suddenly turned into this great apparatus for manipulation or propaganda,” she says. According to Kenar, the Turkish Twittersphere echoes and continues some of the unethical practices that have hitherto dominated newspapers and websites, such as serving the interests of political parties by way of inflicting damage on their adversaries without taking journalistic standards into account, and preferring partisanship over proper journalism. This is why the responsibility of producing credible content on Twitter partly falls on the shoulders of journalists who must protect their objectivity even when faced with intimidation. “The only asset a journalist has is reputation,” she says. “During the Gezi events some journalists tweeted false information, such as a helicopter throwing bombs at protestors, and there were also conspiracy theorists that connected everything to the Gezi protestors. The media should take a careful look at those journalists who contributed to disinformation.”
Twitter also poses challenges in the field of freedom of expression since the volume of digital information its users produce makes the platform very difficult to moderate by Turkish prosecutors. Before Twitter, it was relatively easy for prosecutors to go after websites and successfully shut them down for ideological reasons: YouTube was shut down in its entirety between 2008 and 2010 in Turkey because of a video that allegedly insulted the Turkish political leader Mustafa Kemal. It was only last November that the French video-sharing website Dailymotion was closed for a few weeks. During the Gezi events there were reports of a possible closure of Twitter after the prime minister talked on national television about the social media being “the worst menace to society”.
The irony of the Prime Minister’s position was that when he expressed it in front of the cameras his advisers were busy formulating those same arguments in 140 character-long tweets. So Turkey’s politicians by no means downplay the importance of Twitter. Perhaps the problem is that they take it too seriously.
Just consider the case of Gökçek, the Ankara mayor, who had drawn a parallel between debates on Twitter and battles fought in ancient wars. “As long as we tweet with an intensity similar to that of our love for worship, our enemies do give up,” he said in July last year. “By learning how to use Twitter better we will take the ammunition away from them. Foreign power centres start revolutions and coups through the social media… If our grandmothers, grandfathers and hadjis learn how to use this thing, then we will triumph.”
Gökçek’s call for mobilisation on Twitter had its parallel in the anti-government camp, where the influential hacktivist group RedHack had for long been collaborating with a group of devoted protestors to disseminate information on public servants and leading government figures. In February and March last year, the group started a full-fledged war against the Ankara municipality and hacked its website. In June they used Twitter to publish mobile numbers of parliamentarians whom they accused of being insensitive about the events in Gezi Park. They also made public the contact information of high-ranking police chiefs whom they denounced for being responsible for the heavy-handed response to protestors. In October 2012, the cyber-crimes branch of Turkish police force had detained 10 RedHack activists whom the public prosecutor accused of providing digital aid to terrorist groups. The group’s support for Gezi events made them more suspect in the eyes of the security community. If convicted, they could face up to 24 years in prison.
Those developments were but the opening shots in an ideological war where the social media has the potential to become the main battlefield
In this very politicised atmosphere Twitter seems to have been taken up with enthusiasm among Turkish politicians and journalists. It has become the de facto platform for politicians to express their positions, a space where they make politics around the clock and get instant reaction. This also leads to occasional Twitter feuds between Turkish politicians and journalists. After the liberal Taraf newspaper published documents about the government’s data-collecting activities in November, a parliamentarian from the governing party called the journalist who broke the story “a dog”. When such heated exchanges take place on Twitter, journalists and politicians sometimes retreat and apologise, but the damage is done for the moment and then the apologies, when they are made, rarely attract the same amount of interest from the public.
Until the elections are over in April we will probably see more examples of intense 140-character-long exchanges and it is a good thing that we can read them without the interference of censorship. Politicians may have called it “the worst menace to society” but none of them dared to censor Twitter or close it down — with so many voters actively using the website it would amount to nothing less than political suicide.
