November elections, Turkey. Demotix/Avni Kantan. All rights reserved.On
1 November 2015, Turkey reached the end of an early election period that saw
bombings, mob violence, the burning of party offices, political arrests, a nationwide
media clampdown and military curfew in the Kurdish region of the country.
After
failing to establish a majority government in the 7 June elections, the ruling
Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a landslide victory with 49 percent of
the popular vote. Ranging from announcements of a “Ballot Box Revolution” to
“Fear’s Triumph,” media responses differed drastically.
TV
coverage of joyful celebrations by AKP supporters on the streets were matched
with a sense of shock and incredulity circulating through social media among
the supporters of opposition parties. They have been sharply awakened from the
dream of ending the AKP’s monopoly over state power and preventing the
implementation of a ‘Turkish-style’ super presidency.
In
the wake of these general elections, what is it about Turkey’s media culture that
it undergirds the formation of a society so divided, that people seem to
inhabit parallel realities?
Take
the media reporting on the recent Ankara bombings, when two explosions near the
Ankara Central railway station left 102 dead and more than 400 injured. The
victims were about to participate in the “Labour, Peace and Democracy Rally”
that was organized by dissident trade unions and civil society organizations to
call for an end to the fighting between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK), reignited after the June 7 elections. Casualties included
many activists, unionists and pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP)
members.
The aftermath of the Ankara bombings has seen not less but more ambiguity around who ought to be identified as a “terrorist.”
We
soon noticed that different stories about the bombings emerged in domestic and
international media. On 12 October, we compared top search results for the international
domain of google.com to the Turkish
domain google.com.tr, using a ‘research
browser’ (which cancels Google’s personalization of results). In the former
domain, top-ranked international news sources cited Turkish security sources to
report that ISIL was the chief suspect behind the attacks. The Turkish domain
results, however, were dominated by national pro-AKP media that implicated the
PKK alongside ISIL, echoing prime minister Ahmet
Davutoğlu’s speech on national television.
Moreover,
querying the international Google domain for “PKK” resulted in international
news items highlighting what was absent from the top results in the Turkish
google domain: the military attacks by the Turkish state on the PKK in the wake
of the Ankara bombings.
The aftermath of the Ankara bombings has seen not less but more ambiguity
around who ought to be identified as a “terrorist.” President Erdoğan made the
puzzling claim that parties fighting each other in Syria – ISIL, the PKK,
Syrian intelligence, and the Syrian
Kurdish organization PYD – committed “a collective act of terror” in order to
manipulate the 1 November elections. A few days later, he had narrowed
down his list to the PKK and ISIL. Even after the Ankara chief public
prosecutor’s office informed the public that the attack had been carried out by
ISIL alone,
an unfazed Erdoğan continued
to implicate the PKK in the attack.
A
nationwide poll on 17-18 October found that 42
percent of AKP supporters believed that the PKK was responsible for the
attack.
Relatives of the Ankara victims. Demotix/Recep Yılmaz. All rights reserved.These
differentiated explanations surrounding the Ankara bombing, for domestic and
international audiences, indicate the existence of separate spheres of
communication and information. Similarly, Turkey’s national media is split to
such an extent that ‘neutrality’ carries neither much validity nor relevance
nowadays.
For
instance, Turkish public television is considered ‘partisan media’ by the
opposition. Figures shared by the latter show
that in the run-up to the recent elections, the AKP was allocated 30 hours of
screen time, Erdoğan was given 29 hours, the main opposition party CHP had five
hours, the far-right MHP was allotted one hour, and the pro-Kurdish HDP only
enjoyed 18 minutes.
For
many within Turkey, privately owned broadcast media had already lost their
credibility during the Gezi protests of 2013. “Penguin media” has emerged as a descriptor
for CNN Türk, and other channels deemed alike, which aired a penguin
documentary instead of covering the mass uprising.
Under
AKP rule, between 2002 and 2014, Turkey’s place on the World Press Freedom
Index by Reporters Without Borders slid from 99 out of 134 to 149 out of 180
countries. Only last week, two newspapers and two TV channels affiliated with
the AKP supporter-turned-nemesis Gülen movement were seized and placed in the
hands of a trustee.
The
internet, while often associated with connectedness and information flow, is
split, too. One factor is the set of information management techniques that
construct a ‘clean’ and ‘safe’ internet. Filters that are voluntary in private
use and mandatory in places such as schools and libraries work with blacklists
of banned websites and whitelists of permitted ones. Amendments in 2014 and
2015 to the law regulating access to information on the internet enabled the swift
temporary banning of websites by the prime minister and other ministers.
The internet, while often associated with connectedness and information flow, is split, too.
The
introduction of a new government-controlled Internet Service Provider Union
(ISPU) with obligatory membership further enabled the quick enforcement of
take-down decisions. ISPU members are asked to obtain control utilities such as
Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), which enable the extensive surveillance of
personal and encrypted communication. These utilities further support DNS
hijacking, namely the redirection of internet traffic for surveillance or
access restriction purposes.
And
in recent years, Twitter has been blocked at crucial moments, such as during
the local elections in 2014. The Removal Request Report by Twitter on Turkey,
covering July to December 2014, shows
that requests from Turkey were higher than all other countries combined.
While
the actual number remains unknown, the independent initiative Engelli Web crowdsources information on blocked
websites. It listed 80,000 of them in May 2015. While the majority of banned
websites concerned porn, they also
involved dissident and pro-Kurdish websites. During the run-up to the
recent elections, just between 20 and 24 October, 12 dissident news websites were blocked.
Protests over internet restrictions, Turkey, 2014. Demotix/Deniz Uzunoglu. All rights reserved.Yet
where there is a filter, there necessarily is an ‘outside’, too: a ‘dirty’ or
‘unsafe’ internet that seems lawless, immoral, and threatening. The technique
of filtering comes with the idea of an outside enemy, or Other – although the
AKP’s media policy also addresses cleansing and controlling the Other within
oneself when facing the seductions of pornography or terrorist propaganda.
After the Gezi uprising, Erdoğan declared Twitter a “menace” to society that he
vowed to “eradicate completely.”
According
to a recent survey, a large number of AKP supporters favoured an internet free
of intervention, but nonetheless deemed regulatory measures necessary. Of all respondents, regardless of their
political orientation, 41 percent believed
that the internet is “used wrongly to spread false rumors and lies about public
figures.” Indeed, before its turn to DPI tools, the government relied on
voluntary peer-surveillance by citizens, convinced of the need to clean up the
internet.
In
contrast, for opponents and dissidents, what lies beyond the filter is often a
realm where truth is spoken, people voice their opinions and disclose
information through citizen-journalism and ‘sousveillance’ (bottom-up
surveillance) tactics.
During
the elections, the independent civil initiative “Vote and Beyond” (“Oy ve Ötesi”), which provides training for observers at polling stations in
order to curb election fraud, used an online system to collect digital photos
of ballot box results for comparison with the official reports.
For opponents and dissidents, what lies beyond the filter is often a realm where truth is spoken.
Lacking
proper screen time, leaders of the opposition parties used internet platforms
to communicate with voters: the leader of CHP chose the popular urban
dictionary “Ekşi Sözlük” to answer
voter questions under the entry, “I’m Kılıçdaroğlu and I’m with you.”
Selahattin Demirtaş, the leader of HDP, used Twitter’s Periscope and Facebook’s
Livestream apps to answer direct questions from voters, a solution to overcome
exclusion from broadcast media that is commonly used by journalists laid off for
their opposing views.
While
both associated with transparency and
dark forces, the blocked internet has not been eradicated. On more than one occasion, when Twitter was been blocked
in Turkey, the hashtag #TwitterisBlockedinTurkey began trending. Likewise, in
the hours following the Twitter ban during the March 2014 local elections,
there was a 138 percent increase in the volume of tweets
from Turkey: around 17,000 tweets every minute.
Since December 2014, voice recordings suggesting corruption at
the highest levels of the government have been leaked by the @Haramzadeler333 Twitter
account. After its closure, the still active @fuatavni_f (Fuat Avni)
account, which has 2.2 million followers, has continued with similar releases, recently
including the names of citizens and judges claimed to be involved in election
fraud in support of the AKP.
The
censored and filtered web comes together with a culture of conspiracy theories
that reduce oppositional forces to ‘dark’ forces, sprouting from the supposedly
shady side of the internet. If Fuat Avni remains a mysterious account inducing
all kinds of speculation regarding its origins, “Vote and Beyond” maintains a
public profile and is transparent about its own workings. Yet pro-government
newspaper Sabah claimed that it was
working to undermine the AKP’s electoral success with support from abroad and
the ‘terrorist’ Gülen movement’s media.
Protest against internet censorship, Ankara, 2014. Demotix/emrah özesen. All rights reserved.Social
media has played an important role in protest mobilization since the Gezi
uprising, assisting self-organization beyond formal political parties or
existing organizations. For opponents of the government, the awareness of
censorship constitutes the belief in a more authentic and transparent public ‘beyond’
the filter. Yet conspiratorial reasoning undoes such claims to political
authenticity: nothing is ‘what it seems’ in a conspiracy and the unfiltered
internet will deceive you.
The
discourse of ‘lobbies’ that stir up dissent in Turkey substitutes the claim of
spontaneity with the accusation of manipulation. For instance, Erdoğan has accused
a “robot lobby” of targeting
his party through viral tweets. While it is true that Twitter has taken note of
an extraordinary amount of fake accounts in Turkey operated by bots,
researchers and media activists have found them working on the government’s
side, with some suspecting the organized
operation of what they call “AK trolls."
In
conspiracy thinking, the best evidence for the existence of a dark force is
probably the lack of clear evidence: how could a dark, ungraspable force ever
become completely clear? This type of rhetoric and its affective communication
characterizes the above-mentioned claim that ISIL and PKK plotted the Ankara
bombings together.
Rather
than evidence, the reasoning focused on political effect: the PKK and HDP
expected to raise the pro-Kurdish vote by killing their own supporters. ‘Shady’
social media was made part of the narrative again – after the Ankara bombings,
the pro-government media found two Twitter accounts that had warned against the
possibility of a bombing during the rally the night before. They linked these
accounts to HDP members to claim that the HDP and PKK were responsible for the
attacks. One of the arrested claimed that police tortured him to accept ownership
of the account. Both HDP members were soon released without
charge.
Conspiracy
theories create an atmosphere of fear: anyone can be randomly accused and persecuted
as an affiliate of a ‘dark’ force. Their ambiguity and contradictions also
allow for flexibility in constructions of who the ‘enemy’ is. Dozens of high-ranking
army generals were arrested in 2009 in the “Ergenekon” case on charges of plotting a military coup, yet they were
exonerated as soon as the AKP fell out with the Gülen movement, members of
which had helped build the case in the first place.
Accordingly,
the AKP’s narrative of an army plot against the elected government eventually
gave way to a Gülenist plot against the army, while AKP representatives claimed
to have been ‘tricked’ by Gülenists.
Growing skepticism towards broadcast and social media alike clouds the domain of the visible and knowable.
Recently,
the talk of lobbies has been replaced with references to some kind of invisible
“üst akıl”, or “mastermind,” the ambiguous meaning of which can connote western
powers, a secret global organization with connections to Israel akin to the
Illuminati, as well as a long list of pawns within Turkey.
This
converges with incessant talk about a “parallel state”, referring alternatively
to Gülenists that retain their bureaucratic positions despite recent purges and
to the People’s Assemblies affiliated with the PKK that seek to initiate
self-governance in Kurdish regions, despite the fact that the PKK has long
relinquished its claim to establish a sovereign Kurdish state.
Conspiratorial
reasoning is not the prerogative of the AKP, and it is not just a political
rhetorical device. It is also a cultural response to the particular media
conditions of Turkey, which are, however, sustained and exploited by the
government. Censorship creates its own ‘outside’ and hence, rather than erasing
the impermissible from the public’s mind, it constructs the notion of ‘unsafe’ and ‘dark’ forces.
Growing
skepticism towards broadcast and social media alike clouds the domain of the
visible and knowable, to the extent that all kinds of mysterious forces can be
evoked. The splits within the Turkish media ecology, afforded by censorship and
information management, shape, and are shaped by, an extremely polarized
society that currently lacks the means to negotiate differences or weigh truth
claims. Instead, we are left with a much rawer type of information warfare,
while opposition parties inhabit parallel realities.
Those
who did not get what they wanted in the recent elections will not only have to disrupt
censorship, but also break the spell of conspiracy thinking. They will have to foster
a media for an inclusive politics of hope, one that can counter polarization
and the politics of fear.