Twitter is the engine of protest

Mass protests against the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan have continued in Turkey for the fifth day. The Prime Minister himself is on a visit to Morocco. He believes that this is a marginal protest, inflated by social networks.

On Tuesday, the Confederation of Civil Servants Trade Unions (KESK), which has about 250 thousand members, joined the demonstrators. The day before, the Confederation announced the start of a two-day strike. The protests have long become widespread - actions are taking place in 67 cities, and tens of thousands of people are participating in them. The demonstrations began on May 31, when a group of environmentalists and activists joined them to defend Gezi Park near the central square of Istanbul. The peaceful protest turned into clashes with the police using gas and water cannons. Photos and videos from the rallies instantly spread across social networks - the police were accused of brutality and unjustified use of force. The Turkish Doctors Association confirmed the death of two demonstrators, and about a thousand were injured.

The government blames social networks for the escalation of the conflict and considers the demonstrators hostages of political games. “The main opposition Republican People's Party is provoking my innocent citizens,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said of the protests. “Those who spread the news and call these events the “Turkish Spring” (by analogy with the “Arab Spring” - a series of revolutions in Arab countries - editor's note), they don't know Turkey." According to Erdogan , Twitter is “the worst threat to society”: “Now there is such a threat - it’s called Twitter. There you can find exemplary examples of lies. As for me, social media is the worst threat to society.” Already in Morocco, where Erdogan arrived on an official visit on Tuesday, hesaid that the situation was “calming down”: “By the time I return from the visit, the problem will already be resolved.”

During the protests, Twitter and other social networks were inaccessible to protesters from Taksim Square, which led to rumors spreading that the signal was being deliberately blocked by operators at the request of the government. Turkey's largest mobile operator, Turkcell, has officially denied the allegations: "Turkcell has not received any requests to block mobile communications in any part of Turkey, and our technical teams are still working to provide uninterrupted communications."

The role of Twitter in Turkish protests was studied in the Social Media and Political Engagement Laboratory at New York University . Scientists who systematically monitor activity on social networks during protests, for example during Occupy Wall Street (protests against the actions of the financial elite in the United States) or the Arab revolutions in the spring of 2011, analyzed messages from the Turkish Twitter segment during the first day of the protest - about 2 million tweets. “The uniqueness of this particular case is that information is disseminated directly by participants in the events. Unlike recent protests, about 90% of tweets about Turkey come from Turkey itself, 50% of them from Istanbul,” the study says. “For comparison, in During the revolution in Egypt, there were only 30% of such tweets. In addition, about 88% of tweets are in Turkish, that is, they are aimed at a domestic audience and not at the international community.” Even after midnight, there were about 3 thousand tweets per minute on Twitter every minute.

Number of tweets per minute by hashtags

Source: themonkeycage.org

Currently, all the hashtags in Turkish Twitter trends are related to the protest in one way or another. The main topics are police brutality, the death of Abdul Kömert (an activist shot dead on the border with Syria) and the demand for Erdogan’s resignation. And the most popular hashtag #Bu Millet Bu Oyuna Gelmez (“You will not fool us” - from the demonstrators in Taksim Square) entered the top three global trends on Twitter. Of the photographs, scenes of police violence most often end up on the Internet.

Researchers attribute the popularity of Twitter to insufficient coverage of protests on television. Dissatisfaction with the work of state media, which is accused on social networks of censoring unrest and hushing up police brutality, has resulted in calls for a boycott of television channels and mass protests near editorial offices. “It’s a shame that TV channels showed Erdogan’s speeches from start to finish. Thousands gathered in front of NTV, Turkey’s main news channel, to protest the silencing of the demonstrations,” wrote Turkish journalist Tulin Daloglu .

Protests near the NTV building. Photo: SEkincioglu /Twitter

Social networks are used not only to quickly disseminate information from the scene, but also to coordinate hacker attacks by activists and sympathizers around the world (primarily from Syria and Tunisia). Thus, only a Syrian hacker under the pseudonym Security Dr@Gon organized attacks on four government websites, including the website of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, and about 30 other Turkish resources. The global hacker network Anonymous announced its support for the demonstrators in a video message . Hackers use the hashtag #OpTurkey.