Manipulation in Turkey via Twitter
The importance and usage of Twitter have been soaring, the cascading growth of Twitter contains some pros and cons for both in the aspects of Turkish politicians and the public.Within the framework of the latest precautions taken by Twitter, the Turkish government’s surveillance and pressure have been broken (!).
Twitter, because of its nature, always need to adapt itself to changes since it has become one number tool of politicians as well as activist, campaigners, and so forth. In recent days, the team of Twitter and Jack Dorsey, CEO of the company, have taken action against the twitter accounts which were managing from political parties. These party-centric Twitter accounts have been labeled as suspicious by considering all data from 2009 to today. At the final, they have been banned after deep examinations. We will be inquiring how things come up here, how politics has taken into their advantage it, and what do all these precautions mean?
However, before all that let’s take a quick view of Twitter’s story to understand how things come up here. In the first period of twitter established in 2006, it was aiming to be a place where people can share their experiences, in another say, fulfilling being an online diary for people. At that time, the tagline of twitter was the question of “What you are doing?”, however, in 2009 it was changed to “What’s happening?”. This change might have seen to you as a small nuance but it’ll change the whole context and thus content of Twitter right after and providing to become present. Jack Dorsey has been describing this new feature of twitter as “Massively shared experiences”, that is to say, now people can inform each other on specific events that they have been witnessing in that time. (Reference) Well, this led Twitter to give a meaning like a new public sphere where people may share ideologies and mobilize through it, to be honest, it did well on being a platform for mobilizing. Still, I can’t forget how people were communicating and thus resisting against the police at Gezi Park in 2013.
“The whole bird thing: bird chirps sound meaningless to us, but meaning is applied by other birds. The same is true of Twitter: a lot of messages can be seen as completely useless and meaningless, but it’s entirely dependent on the recipient.” (Sarno, 2009). -Jack Dorsey
Everything seems great at first glance; however, Twitter is dominated by extremist political ideas when it comes to asserting who is more active in there. That is because governments and parties had realized the power of Twitter and its benefits for their political assessment, hereby, they have focused on managing/ manipulating users. Moreover, new media, which includes Twitter, of course, gives a big opportunity to build “networking, collaboration, and community building as well as active engagement” (Owen, 2017). Another debate on that is extremist ideas are more common due to the nature of the medium, that is, negative and sharpen ideas are evaluated to be more discussable and powerful rather than practical and objective ideas in the mind of humans. Briefly, power holders have had to dominate social media where campaigns are more negative and volatile political environment (Owen, 2017).
In the aspects of Turkish government intervention on Twitter, 7.340 malicious accounts have been identified and banned permanently. Although there was a rumor about Ak Party had employed 6.000 accounts right after the Gezi Park resistance, up until today, no one had done anything on that issue. They might have been pondering on the definition of ‘how to define troll account and what is the thin line between being a troll and fake’ or ‘does a troll account beneficial for manipulation’ as far as I understand while reading Stanford’s report regarding these issues.
What things are prohibited?
Twitter, also, researchers specified some rules while defining which accounts are prohibited and may likely to be considered as spurious account. The first one is the malicious use of automation, in doing so, getting a subject to trend. Second, creating overlapping accounts and promoting these accounts (an example from the Turkish case on Figure.1). The third is generating fake engagements, whereas, as pointed out in Stanford’s report most of the wicked accounts haven’t had much engagement, merely 60 of these accounts had over 100,000 followers, meanwhile, 4,534 of them had fewer follower than 500. At last, either aggressive tweeting or behaving in a spammy way, for example, adding irrelevant hashtag underneath of a tweet is also prohibited.
Pro-AKP Retweet rings!
In light of these rules, Twitter had been tracking the suspicious accounts by the collected dataset from 2009. Including dozens of scanned data, they have focused on several issues and reached outnumbered takeaways.
One of the main issues was those spurious accounts had fabricated personalities that most of them share familiarities, also, they had connections with pro-AKP retweet rings. With the help of these retweet rings, they can manipulate the trends as well as they can spin over subjects easily by exaggerating nationalist feelings. In doing so, they seized to suppress the existence of opposition parties on social media platforms. Unlike using this domestic suppression against opposition parties, another purpose of these retweet rings is eliminating the problem of legitimacy of the present government after all failures and misstatements. On the other hand, their domains are not limited from the borders of Turkey, it means, they have been working to shape an image on international terms when there is a huge crisis like war and the military coup. According to Stanford’s report, they’ve determined three massive manipulation attempt, there was also enormous data traffic observed; the day of the Istanbul suicide bombing (January 6, 2015, when President Erdoğan announced he will extend the state of emergency for three months (September 29, 2016) and 2017 constitutional referendum when Mr. Erdoğan compiled all the power on himself. (Figure.2)
By the way, to prevent misunderstanding, you should be aware of not all ‘trolls’ are centric-managed. According to a research which is conducted by Erkan Saka to reveal ‘trolling and behaviors of trolls in political landscape’ says most of the trolls have no connection between any party figure, even, the participants had argued they were doing it voluntarily (Saka, 2018).
Precisely, social media in Turkey have been controlling from the government, which is nothing new, since 2014. As we know, all medium possesses a unique way of context, which molds its content and value as well. By considering its nature and present issues we’ve talked above (retweet rings, spurious interactions and at the final manipulation attempts of government) we can say manufacturing of ideas had become alive more than ever, agenda-setting had evolved to a constant 24/7 manipulation tool, polarization can be seen every area of the public sphere, etc. (in the basis of Turkish political area). For the sake of clarity, we can assume the public sphere of Twitter is a theatre; politicians, writers; trends, scripts; centric accounts, actors, and at last public is the audience that waits for to be impressed commodity.
If we need to evaluate Twitter’s pros and cons, I would we cannot do political philosophy on Twitter due to content is finite by limited words, and context is based upon being a place where we can entertain. Although Twitter uses some regulations to prevent any abuse, it’s impossible to prevent manipulation, as they know, due to its political context. However, my aim is not to disdain either Twitter or the new media environment. I’m just skeptical about what if the social environment made our yokes more powerful than ever happened before as in Orwell’s 1984 novel. In against to ‘my claims’, we are able to distinguish propagandistic tweets most of the time, whereas sometimes not, exactly like Bertrand Russell’s “immunity to eloquence” meaning that “we are able to distinguish between pleasure or charm, or ingratiating tone of the words and the logic of the argument”. (Postman, 1985)
Regardless of all negativity, we have talked so far, Twitter has been fighting against all these manipulations and fake news campaigns as well. Their first preauction had taken against the political advertisement to keep clean and not to being part of a propaganda machine, they banned all political advertisements, which may also be evaluated as a preparation towards the 2020 U.S presidential elections. Recently, they have begun to add marks on manipulative tweets of President Trump since his tweets have severe impacts on various areas ranging from economical to diplomatic relations of the world. (See. Image 1) And a few days ago, Twitter has banned malicious accounts from the platform, in doing so, they showed their audacity towards politics.
References
Saka, E. (2018) Social Media in Turkey as a Space for Political Battles: AKTrolls and other Politically motivated trolling, Middle East Critique, 27:2, 161–177, DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2018.1439271
Sarno, D. (2009). Twitter creator Jack Dorsey illuminates the site’s founding docu- ment. Part I. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technol-ogy/2009/02/twitter-creator.html
Stanford Internet Observatory. (2020). Political Retweet Rings and Compromised Accounts: A Twitter Influence Operation Linked to the Youth Wing of Turkey’s Ruling Party. California: Stanford.
Postman, N. (1986). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. New York: Penguin Books.
