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Social media manipulation in

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Bilge Yesil
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36
SOCIAL MEDIA
MANIPULATION IN TURKEY
Actors, tactics, targets

Bilge Yesil

Turkey has recently faced a number of domestic and international developments that range
from an economic downturn to a coup attempt, from cross-border military operations to dip-
lomatic crises. Despite the obvious differences in terms of their political, economic, military,
and social contexts, these events can nonetheless be studied through a common denominator:
the changing sets of tools pro-government actors employ to impose their narratives on social
media as the events unfold. This frame provides a means to integrate the variety of social media
users engaging in this dynamic: paid or unpaid, anonymous or identified, these users undertake
online political messaging in order to suppress critical voices on social media and shore up
support the AKP (Justice and Development Party) government and its leader, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan. Moreover, these users not only serve a domestic political function but also, together
with state actors, undertake information operations in English and other languages to influence
global public opinion. For example, in July  2016, when a small group of insurgent military
officers affiliated with Erdogan’s arch enemy Fethullah Gulen orchestrated a coup to over-
throw the government, social media activity on Turkish Twitter reached unprecedented levels.
While users from all walks of life overwhelmed the site with news, information, and opinion,
government-backed trolls and identifiable pro-AKP accounts carried out a sustained campaign
to praise Erdogan and express support for the ongoing purge against putschists (Yildiz and Smets
2019). Meanwhile, news media outlets, already highly partisan and politicised, helped circulate
the AKP narrative that Western powers might be using Gulen to destabilise Turkey and that
Erdogan and his government could not be accused of human rights violations as they clamped
down on the coup plotters. Last, but not least, a myriad of actors consisting of Turkish diplomats
and representatives around the world, state agencies, and AKP supporters shared infographics
and videos in English to communicate to foreign audiences that Gulen was a terrorist master-
mind and that ordinary Turks fought bravely against his soldiers to safeguard democracy.
I begin with this example since it opens up a space for the discussion of information opera-
tions undertaken by pro-government users, the proliferation of pro-Erdogan and right-wing
nationalist content on social media sites, and the structural conditions of the online sphere in
Turkey. In fact, the coup attempt marked an important period in the socio-political, legal, and
media processes, stretching over the last decade, that has allowed the AKP and its affiliates to
develop tools for the control and manipulation of information online. During the AKP era
(2002–present), the majority of news outlets have become vehicles of government propaganda,

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Social media manipulation in Turkey

and journalistic autonomy and professionalism have sustained unprecedented damage. The
social media environment is increasingly polarised as pro-AKP users, both paid operatives and
average citizens, overwhelm Twitter and Facebook with government narratives and harass dis-
senters. Obviously, these problems are not specific to Turkey, yet the AKP’s digital surveillance
schemes and use of legal provisions to silence its critics make social media sites especially vulner-
able to the effects of troll harassment and dis/misinformation campaigns.
In this chapter, I first provide an overview of the state of news media and the online public
sphere in Turkey. After demonstrating how AKP’s attempts to tame both realms over the past
decade have made them highly vulnerable to polarisation and politicisation, I proceed to discuss
AKP-backed social media operatives as well as other groups. Lastly, I point to some lines of
inquiry that might remedy the gaps in literature concerning dis/misinformation campaigns in
and from Turkey.

Turkey’s news media and online public sphere

Turkey, a country of 80 million, boasts dozens of national newspapers and news channels and
hundreds of local print and broadcast outlets. While these numbers might suggest a pluralistic
ecosystem, one must keep in mind that news media in Turkey operates under conditions of
clientelism, patrimonialism, and the predominance of informal arrangements in the sector.
Although Turkey’s news media have depended on their ties with the ruling elite for financial
survival since at least the neoliberal restructuring of the country in the 1980s, party-press paral-
lelism, marginalisation of critical voices, and the decline in journalistic professionalism reached
unprecedented levels during the AKP era. Under the leadership of Erdogan, the AKP neutral-
ised mainstream and oppositional media via legal and financial attacks, such as the prosecution
of journalists, expropriation of critical outlets, and levying of tax penalties. In the meantime, it
cultivated a number of partisan media conglomerates by distributing privatisation deals, public
tenders, cheap credits, and government advertising to loyal businessmen (Kaya and Cakmur
2010; Akser and Baybars-Hawk 2012; Yesil 2016b, 2018; Somer 2016). The extent to which
the media have become an integrated tool of the AKP government becomes especially clear
during political, economic, and foreign policy crises that challenge the AKP’s hegemony. Parti-
san newspapers use the same headlines and publish similarly worded op-eds, while pro-Erdogan
news channels peddle conspiracy theories about myriad actors (the US, Europe, Israel, George
Soros, IMF, etc.) supposedly preoccupied with destabilising Turkey. For example, during the
nationwide Gezi protests in 2013, one newspaper published a fake interview with Christiane
Amanpour in which she allegedly confessed that she and CNN were paid to overreport the
Gezi protests in order to weaken Turkey (Fung 2013). Another pro-government newspaper
fabricated (using Google Translate) parts of an interview with Noam Chomsky that seemingly
defended Erdogan’s policies during the Arab Spring (Peker 2013). After the failed coup in
2017, pro-AKP newspapers engaged in smear campaigns against the Open Society Foundation,
Amnesty International, and foreign and Turkish academics and philanthropists, accusing them
of having secret meetings to overthrow Erdogan and create chaos in Turkey (Star 2017).
The online sphere has not been immune to repression, polarisation, and manipulation either.
The AKP’s earliest attempts at imposing strict controls on online communications came in
2007, with the passage of the country’s first Internet Law, which allowed the AKP to criminalise
content that it deemed harmful to the youth (Akdeniz and Altiparmak 2008). Soon, govern-
ment agencies and courts began to use this law and existing anti-terror laws and penal code
provisions to ban websites with so-called harmful content, as well as to curb Kurdish political
expression that allegedly threatened Turkish national unity. By the end of the 2000s, the number

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Bilge Yesil

of blocked websites had reached tens of thousands, and users’ access to information had been
severely limited and freedom of speech violated (Kinikoglu 2014; Yesil 2016a). The AKP’s
attempts to control the online space intensified in the 2010s as politically engaged citizens, dis-
enchanted with government interference in news media, came to rely on digital outlets to share
news and information or to express critical opinions (Tunc 2014; Bulut 2016; Parks et al. 2017;
Coskuntuncel 2018). Especially after the nationwide Gezi protests and the revelations of a mas-
sive corruption scandal in 2013, the AKP government imposed further restrictions to combat
the alleged threats of online communications. The following year, it hastily amended the Inter-
net Law and authorised the blocking of websites without a court order. It also amended the Law
on State Intelligence Services and the National Intelligence Organization (MIT), expanding the
online surveillance of citizens (Yesil et al. 2017).
After the botched coup in 2016, the AKP declared a state of emergency, under which it
passed decree laws that facilitated the interception of digital communications and the collec-
tion of private data from state institutions and private companies. Perhaps more worryingly,
law enforcement began to call on citizens to inform the authorities of social media users who
posted anti-state and/or terrorist content. Since then, it has become customary for the AKP’s
‘informant network’ in state bureaucracy and public institutions and its supporters to report
critical voices to the authorities on charges of terrorism (Topak 2017).

Social media manipulation

In addition to creating strict new legal tools to control the digital realm by surveilling and
prosecuting users, the AKP began to increase its user presence on social media sites in order to
co-opt their information-sharing function, with the goal of suppressing critical news and dis-
seminating government-friendly content. It was during the Gezi protests that the AKP officials
came to recognise that social media, especially Twitter, served as a space for protest organisa-
tion and as a source of news and information. As the protests were underway and new forms of
citizen journalism were beginning to take hold, the AKP hastily began to form its own social
media team (Karatas and Saka 2017; Saka 2019). There is no publicly available information
as to who put together this team and how, but there are a number of analyses that offer some
clues. According to one explanation based on leaked emails, a pro-government NGO operative
suggested to Erdogan’s son-in-law that ‘a team of professional graphic designers, coders, and
former army officers with training in psychological warfare’ could be formed in order to deliver
pro-government messages on Twitter, ‘counter critical narratives in foreign media outlets’ and
‘weaken the protest networks on social media’ (Sozeri 2016a). According to Erkan Saka, an
academic who conducted interviews with some of the leading pro-AKP Twitter users, private
individuals with connections to higher echelons of the party wanted to ‘seize the moment’ and
proposed to form a social media team and/or engaged in pro-government messaging themselves
(2018: 165).
Despite the lack of clarity about its beginnings, the AKP’s social media team is known to
have grown and professionalised a few months after the Gezi protests. In September 2013, a
team of 6,000 ‘volunteers’ was formed in order to ‘promote the party perspective and monitor
online discussions’ while ‘correcting the [opposing camp] with valid information, always using
positive language’ (Albayrak and Parkinson 2016). However, in a few months, it became evident
that ‘hundreds of pro-government accounts mobilize[d] quickly, creating offensive hashtags
and pouring on slurs’ to intimidate journalists and academics who wrote critical pieces about
Erdogan and the AKP (Kizilkaya 2013). These so-called volunteers thus came to be referred to
as ‘AK trolls’, a designation used to draw attention to their aggressive tactics. To this day, the

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term refers to anonymous or identified, paid or unpaid social media users who engage in online
harassment and doxing, as well as orchestrated information operations on behalf of Erdogan and
the AKP.

AK trolls and lynch mobs

As Turkey’s first ‘Twitter army’ and one deployed by an authoritarian regime, AK trolls have
understandably become the nearly exclusive focus of scholarly analysis in this field (Karatas and
Saka 2017; Bulut and Yoruk 2017; Saka 2018; Yesil et al. 2017; Yuksel 2018; Yildiz and Smets
2019; Saka 2019). Who are the AK trolls, then? A network analysis conducted in 2015 revealed
that AK trolls comprise two major groups: identifiable users (e.g. party members, cabinet min-
isters, political consultants, pro-AKP pundits) and anonymous trolls. At the time of this analysis,
the central node in the network connecting these two groups was Mustafa Varank, the chief
advisor to Erdogan (Saka 2019: 55). As Saka notes, the composition of AK trolls has changed
since 2013, tracking intra-party factions, and some prominent AK trolls have even closed their
accounts and left the network (Saka 2018). In 2015, the AKP launched a new entity called
the ‘New Turkey Digital Office’ to counter the negative connotations of the troll designation
and to quell the internal strife amongst its social media team. The director of the office took
pains to distance his 180 employees from AK trolls and noted that they functioned as the AKP’s
‘digital campaign office’. He also noted that this new entity was simply responsible for creat-
ing content about the AKP’s and its local municipalities’ accomplishments and for monitoring
opposition parties’ social media messages (Altuntas 2015). Since then, no information has been
made available about the New Turkey Digital Office or its activities. However, in 2019, the
Oxford Internet Institute, in its ‘Global Disinformation Order’ report, confirmed the existence
of a ‘medium capacity team’ in Turkey that consists of an estimated 500 ‘cyber troops’, a term
used to refer to ‘government or political party actors tasked with manipulating public opinion
online’. The OII found that the Turkish team is affiliated with a government agency or agen-
cies; its members are active on Facebook and Twitter; and they work primarily to suppress
critical voices, amplify pro-government messages, and manipulate media content by creating
memes and videos (Bradshaw and Howard 2019: 5, 6, 18, 19). It is unclear how many teams
are backed by the AKP for purposes of social media manipulation and whether the AK trolls
and the New Turkey Digital Office are the same individuals. However, there is ample informa-
tion about who the AKP-backed team’s targets are and what tactics they use. Among the most
prominent targets are journalists and activists who are critical of the AKP, as well as politicians
from opposition parties. A study conducted by the International Press Institute in 2016 found
that journalists were among the prime targets of AK trolls. They are labelled ‘traitors’, ‘terror-
ists’, ‘terrorist supporters’, and ‘infidels’; humiliated via offensive language, and attacked with
sexual insults and threats (especially females) (2016). In their analysis, Karatas and Saka also
revealed that AK trolls try to silence journalists, activists, and opposition party politicians as well
as ordinary citizens through abusive language, label them ‘terrorists’ and ‘traitors’, and threaten
them with arrest (2017).
AK trolls’ attacks against these targets usually take the form of lynch mobs and unfold in
a number of stages. First, prominent AK trolls tweet about an oppositional figure using non-
threatening language or take a screenshot of their Twitter posts. Next, they mobilise anonymous
trolls who then spam the user in question and/or create an incriminatory hashtag (Sozeri 2015;
Saka 2019: 56). Finally, AKP officials and pro-government pundits retweet the incriminating
tweets, which are then picked up by pro-Erdogan news media only to be reported as facts. In
some cases, pro-AKP users and news outlets even call on the authorities to take action against

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the individual who’s being attacked. For example, when a Turkish-Dutch journalist tweeted
a picture of the Turkish flag with the hashtag #FuckErdogan, online vigilantes mobilised,
and a prominent AK troll @tahaun  (married to First Lady Emine Erdogan’s private secre-
tary) called on the police to ‘detain this creature this evening’. Soon after, the journalist was
arrested and released after a few days, but then blocked from leaving the country (The Guardian
2016).
AKP-backed operatives also rely heavily on bots, especially to push their hashtags to the top
of trending topic lists (Saka 2019: 59–60). There is no research on the current number of bots
used by AKP’s teams, but in 2014, two researchers discovered 18,000 bots that were tweeting
pro-AKP messages during the local election campaign (Poyrazlar 2014). Bots were used in
another social media campaign in 2016 when the hashtag #WeLoveErdogan made it to the top
of the trending topics list ahead of Erdogan’s visit to the United States. When Twitter removed
the hashtag on suspicions of bot activity, AKP officials accused the social media company of
censorship and of being a part of a ‘global [influence] operation’ against Erdogan (Hurriyet Daily
News 2016).

Pro-government messaging
AKP-backed social media operatives not only troll, dox, and harass critical voices; they also
seek to mobilise the party’s voter base by disseminating nationalist, religiously informed, and/
or populist content. An example of such an information campaign occurred during the coup
attempt in July 2016. The botched coup was the top-tweeted event in Turkey since the Gezi
protests, especially by pro-government operatives, journalists, and pundits as part of their
efforts to overwhelm Twitter with AKP narratives (Yesil et  al. 2017: 22; Yildiz and Smets
2019). In their research, Yildiz and Smets describe the coup attempt as a moment of ‘extraor-
dinary, often religiously-framed mobilization on Twitter’ wherein anonymous trolls, official
AKP accounts, and identifiable pro-AKP accounts carried out a sustained campaign (Yildiz
and Smets 2019: 350). Their thematic analysis of coup-related posts show that official AKP
and identifiable pro-Erdogan accounts generally expressed devotion to Erdogan, asked citizens
to attend anti-coup demonstrations, and accused the US and Israel of supporting the coup
attempt. In contrast, anonymous trolls adopted threatening, humiliating, and intimidating
tones in their posts. Their tweets were marked by binary oppositions such as ‘us versus them’,
and ‘the nation versus others’ as they attacked journalists and academics and accused them
of being ‘foreign agents’ (364). Such binaries are indeed central to AKP-backed information
operations. As Bulut and Yoruk (2017) note, prominent AK trolls often deploy nationalist,
populist themes in their Twitter campaigns to construct antagonisms between ‘the nation’
and ‘its enemies’. They frame Turkey as the underdog victimised by the ‘West’ and Erdogan
as the ‘man of the people’ who is under constant attack by internal and external enemies. In
tweets that seek to praise Erdogan, they attribute Turkey’s accomplishments to the ‘will of the
people’, especially the pious segments of the population that comprise the backbone of AKP’s
voter base (4105).
Similar pro-government campaigns occurred during other politically charged episodes such
as the constitutional referendum in 2017 and Turkey’s military incursion in North Syria in 2019.
In June 2020, Twitter announced that it took down a network of 7,340 accounts that consisted
of fabricated users and pro-AKP retweet rings. In their analysis of the dataset, researchers at the
Stanford Internet Observatory found that this ‘influence operation’ network was linked to the
AKP’s youth wing and that it carried out these operations and many others in order to circulate
a pro-government narrative and criticize opposition parties (Grossman et al. 2020).

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In my ongoing research, I also found that pro-AKP social media operations against the mayor
of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, are laced with similar ‘us versus them’ and ‘native versus other’
antagonisms. AKP officials and their proxies in the media relentlessly criticise Imamoglu, an
opposition politician who defeated the AKP candidate in local elections in 2019, effectively
ending Erdogan and his allies’ 25-year reign in Istanbul. On Facebook and Twitter, there are
dozens of images of Imamoglu that have been photoshopped to show him as a cross-wearing
Christian with a diploma from the masonic school who buys alcohol on trips to the grocery
store. Designed to depict Imamoglu as a Western-oriented elite who espouses a foreign, non-
Muslim lifestyle and is alienated from ordinary people’s values, these social media posts stoke
nationalist and religious sentiments. Needless to say, they are also circulated by the predomi-
nantly pro-government news media and used as fodder by the AKP as part of its populist politics.

Information operations in the international arena

As noted earlier, existing research on social media manipulation in Turkey has mostly focused
on AK trolls and their domestic operations. Yet there are other actors that specifically target
foreign audiences to propagandise on behalf of Erdogan and the AKP. In what follows, I provide
an overview of these groups and their activities.

Bosphorus Global
Bosphorus Global is an entity founded in 2015 by a pro-Erdogan pundit Hilal Kaplan and her
husband. Though they claim Bosphorus Global is an independent NGO, leaked emails have
revealed that Kaplan and her husband received direct funding from Berat Albayrak, Erdogan’s
son-in-law and the minister of treasury and finance (Sozeri 2016b).
Bosphorus Global runs a number of websites and social media accounts to influence both
domestic and international public opinion on behalf of Erdogan.1 According to its website,
Bosphorus Global is primarily concerned with Western media representations of Turkey and
thus aims to create spaces in the international public sphere wherein ‘subaltern groups’, such as
Turks and Muslims, can voice their viewpoints (Bosphorus Global, Mission n.d.). To this end,
Bosphorus Global runs a number of information projects on the web and social media that
target both domestic and foreign audiences. Domestic accounts in Turkish primarily involve
narratives about exposing Gulen and the PKK, while international accounts aim to fact-check
news items published in Western media about Turkey, highlight internal problems of the puta-
tive West, and, of course, inform foreign audiences about the Turkey’s arch enemies, Gulen
and the PKK.
One such account in English is Fact-Checking Turkey, which aims to monitor the ‘factual
accuracy of various news and claims about Turkey’ (Bosphorus  Global, Our Projects n.d.).
Yet unlike genuine fact-checking initiatives, it relies on AKP officials’ or anonymous sources’
statements and unverified media reports instead of publicly available and verifiable information
(Sozeri 2017). It also prioritises extraneous details over core issues and even engages in political
offensives against Erdogan’s so-called enemies. Other English-language accounts, Chronicles
of Shame and Crackdown Chronicles, are exclusively concerned with the West. Chronicles
of Shame seeks to present an ‘archive’ of various acts of racism and discrimination around the
globe against Muslims and refugees and, to this end, publishes abridged versions of news stories
from international media on Islamophobia, racism, and human rights violations in Europe and
United States. Meanwhile, Crackdown  Chronicles  focuses on the ‘inner political contradic-
tions’ of the West: that is, the tensions between Western ideals of democracy and human rights

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and actual practices of press censorship, police violence, and rights violations in Europe and the
US (Crackdown Chronicles n.d.).

Anonymous groups
In addition to Bosphorus Global, there are anonymous accounts that promote pro-Erdogan
arguments in the international arena. For example, in July 2016, a few days after the failed
coup, a group of users began to circulate a narrative on 4chan that accused Hillary Clinton
and the CIA of conspiring with Gulen to topple Erdogan. According to Buzzfeed, these
users were ‘extremely likely’ to be AK trolls, although there is no evidence that confirms
this claim. That question aside, the 4chan posts were ultimately picked up by American
right-wing media outlets Breitbart and The Daily Caller, both of which published their
own stories about so-called links between Gulen and the Clinton Global Initiative (Brod-
erick 2019). Subsequent pieces on Breitbart and The Hill similarly claimed that ‘Gulen’s
vast global network’ was a ‘cult’ and a ‘dangerous sleeper terror network’. These pieces were
penned by Robert Amsterdam, an AKP attorney working on Gulen’s extradition from the
US, and Michael Flynn, who at the time received payments from an AKP-affiliated business-
man (Amsterdam 2016; Flynn 2016). Shortly after the publication of these pieces, the same
pro-Erdogan narrative was picked up by Rudy Giuliani, who began to call for the extradition
of Gulen on cable news channels, thus lending the 4chan misinformation campaign a certain
level of authority (Broderick 2019).
We do not know whether the anonymous 4chan users planned for American right-wing
media and even Trump’s personal attorney to pick up their allegations. Regardless, this episode
shows how pro-Erdogan information operations can cross borders by leveraging the political
salience of symbols foreign to Turkey’s domestic context and allow operatives to influence pub-
lic opinion internationally as well as in Turkey.
On various occasions, these international operations have also taken the form of hacking.
For example, in March and April 2017, a number of German and Dutch state institutions, polit-
ical parties and commercial organisations had their websites and social media accounts hijacked.
The hackers posted swastikas and a message that read ‘A little #OTTOMANSLAP for you, see
you on #April16’ under the hashtags #naziholland and #nazigermany. April 16 was the date of
the referendum in Turkey that would greatly expand Erdogan’s powers as president. Some AKP
ministers had expressed their intention to hold rallies in Germany and the Netherlands in order
to mobilise the Turkish diaspora in those countries. When the German and Dutch governments
discouraged and/or rejected the ministers, tensions flared, and Erdogan accused the two coun-
tries of being ‘Nazi remnants’ and said they would ‘pay the price’ for their treatment of Turkish
officials (Jones 2017). To this day, it remains unknown which group(s) carried out the online
attacks and whether they were contractors hired by the AKP.

Nationalist hacker groups

Similar nationalistic campaigns have been carried out by groups that openly take responsibility
for breaking into foreign websites and social media accounts and are seemingly unaffiliated with
the AKP. Amongst these groups is AyYildiz Tim (Star and Crescent Team), which self-identifies
as ‘a voluntary lobbying organisation to counteract cyberattacks against Turkey’. AyYildiz Tim
hacked the Twitter accounts of former Fox News hosts and contributors and filled their feeds
with pro-Erdogan content. The messages they posted in Turkish read, ‘You are hacked by the

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Turkish cyber army AyYildiz Tim! We got your DM correspondence! We will show you the
power of the Turk!’ and ‘We love the Turks and Muslims in the world. We condemn those who
persecute them, especially in the United States, and we share their suffering. We love Turkish
soldiers, we love Erdogan, we love Turkey’ (Russo 2018).
Another nationalistic hacker group, Aslan Neferler Tim (ANT) (Lion Soldiers Team) describes
its mission as ‘defending the homeland, Islam, nation, flag’ and ‘safeguarding our country in
the cyber world’ (Aslan Neferler, n.d.). Informed by ethnic Turkish nationalism, its operations
target foreign countries that the group deems threatening to or critical of Turkey. For example,
ANT has hacked the website of the Belgian Ministry of Defense, accusing the Belgian govern-
ment of supporting the PKK, and the websites of Austrian parliament and several ministries and
banks because of ‘Austria’s racism against Muslims’ and the Austrian government’s criticism of
Turkey’s human rights record (Souli 2018).2

Conclusion
As discussed in this chapter, the information landscape in contemporary Turkey is being polar-
ised and manipulated by a deep-rooted and accelerating process of state intervention through
new legislative tools as well as via informal or illegal collusion between state and non-state
actors. Turkey’s newspapers, news channels, and social media sites constitute fertile ground
for dis/misinformation operations, especially given a prevailing political culture premised on
‘us versus them’ cleavages. Twitter has become the prime site of pro-government operations,
especially those that exploit nationalist, populist, and/or conservative politics. Perhaps not as
sophisticated or as far-reaching as their Russian and Chinese counterparts, AKP-backed opera-
tives nonetheless troll, hack, and dox intra-party rivals and critical voices, such as journalists,
academics, and activists. As discussed in preceding sections, different groups with organisational
or ideological ties to the AKP have been working to manipulate the digital sphere by suppress-
ing the opposition and amplifying pro-government content.
The proliferation of pro-AKP information operations present an opportunity for new lines
of inquiry. Existing research has shown that AK trolls, pro-AKP accounts, and official AKP
accounts participate in the co-production of nationalist, populist, and/or religiously framed
information campaigns (Bulut and Yoruk 2017; Yildiz and Smets 2019). Future research can
help us reveal how AKP’s ideological perspectives shape such social media operations, both
qualitatively and quantitatively. It would, for example, be interesting to map potential connec-
tions between specific moments of deterioration in the AKP’s relations with Western govern-
ments, media, and policy circles and the deployment of social media operations to discredit
them in the international public sphere. Researchers can also study citizen participation in these
campaigns and the predominantly used discursive and visual themes.
As noted earlier, the literature on information operations in Turkey has been overwhelm-
ingly concerned with pro-government actors. Yet there is definitely a need for more analyses of
social media operatives who are affiliated with opposition parties, Gulenists, foreign actors, and
other potential anti-AKP groups. Other than anecdotal evidence, there is no scientific research
on whether and how opposition politicians, citizens, and activist groups critical of Erdogan ini-
tiate or participate in information operations. AKP officials and pro-AKP pundits often accuse
mainstream secularist politicians, PKK-affiliated actors, Kurdish activists, and Gulenists of car-
rying out ‘influence operations’ against Erdogan, but there is no qualitative or quantitative data
with which to assess this claim.
Last, but not least, there needs to be more research on social media operations (and their link-
ages to broadcast and print media) that are designed by the AKP and state organs to propagandise

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Turkey’s military operations and geopolitical initiatives. For example, when Turkey launched a
cross-border military offensive in north Syria in 2019, there was a sustained Twitter campaign
to communicate with international audiences. Likewise, when the AKP government carried
out similar military operations in 2016 and 2018, it relied on various English language outlets
(including the state-run TRT World and Anadolu News Agency, online news sites, NGOs and
think tanks, paid social media teams, and volunteers) to amplify friendly content in the inter-
national public sphere. It would also be interesting to study whether there are any social media
operations that the AKP undertakes in Africa, the Balkans, or the Middle East – all areas where
Turkey has military and geopolitical objectives.

Notes
1 Access to Bosphorus Global’s Twitter account (@BosphorusGlobal) has been restricted since June 2020
due to ‘some unusual activity’.
2 Other nationalist hacker groups include Akincilar (Raiders) and the Turk Hack Team. For more infor-
mation on these groups’ hijacking of websites that belong to the Vatican, the Library of Congress and
various Greek and Armenian entities, see The National Herald 2020.

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