Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has launched a new political battlefront ahead of upcoming local elections – social media.
Until now, it has been Turkey’s opposition groups – who are routinely denied access to state-controlled television, radio and newspapers – that have used social media as their primary tool for communications.
But Erdogan’s Justice and Development (AK) Party have announced that their campaign for the March 2019 local elections will be fought largely on social media.
“Starting from the 2019 election campaign, we will abandon all methods that cause visual and audio pollution,” Erdogan said on December 6 in Ankara, announcing mayoral candidates for 14 cities across Turkey. He described this as “an eco-friendly campaign”.
“We can hang posters and flags only in our party offices and election coordination centres. Other than that, we will not allow any visual pollution,” he said, calling on opposition parties to do the same.
“We can hang posters and flags only in our party offices and election coordination centres. Other than that, we will not allow any visual pollution,” he said, calling on opposition parties to do the same.
In a statement published later the same day, Erdogan noted that about 51 million people in Turkey had access to the internet, adding, “In such an environment we cannot limit ourselves to conventional propaganda methods because that would not be in line with the revolutionary, innovative soul of the AK Party.”
The move is particularly significant as Erdogan previously been staunchly opposed to social media in general and Twitter in particular.
The networking app proved its political usefulness during the May 2013 Gezi Park protests, in which hundreds of thousands of Istanbul citizens took to the streets to oppose government plans to build over the small green area near the landmark Taksim Square.
These protests soon turned into mass rebellion against then-prime minister Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian rule and ended in a police crackdown in which at least five people were killed and more than 8,000 injured.
At the time, the state-controlled mainstream media offered very limited coverage of these protests, with the only exception being small opposition channels such as Halk TV, Ulusal Kanal and Cem TV.
Twitter soon proved to be the principal means of communication among Gezi Park protestors. According to a study carried out by Somemto, a popular Turkish social media news agency, more than 91 million tweets were sent during the first week of these protests.
According to another study by Turkey-based research and consultancy firm Konda, 69 per cent of the Gezi Park protesters first learnt about the demonstrations through social media.
The Gezi Park protests spurred Erdogan to decry “an evil called Twitter, and it’s full of lies.
“Social media is, in fact, a headache for many societies at the moment,” he told Haber TURK TV in June 2013.
The following March, after audio recordings spread via social media allegedly linked Erdogan to a corruption scandal, Twitter was briefly banned in Turkey, although following an outcry the ban was overturned on April 3, 2014.
Doğan Gürpınar, associated professor at Istanbul Technical University, noted that opposition parties in Turkey had always sought alternative channels to reach their supporters.
“In the 1970s and 1980s, the opposition’s views could be heard at conferences and in student clubs, but Twitter has replaced these venues today as a virtual space for the opposition’s voice,” he said.
Erdogan’s change of mind over Twitter can be seen in his soaring number of followers. He first opened a Twitter account in 2009, although by January 2010 he had only 95 followers. He now has at least 13.4 million followers.
This appears to be a canny political move. According to the web page statista.com, 63 per cent of Turks are active social media users, and 53 per cent use Facebook regularly, while 36 per cent use Twitter.
Erman Bakirci, from the research and consultancy firm Konda, noted that social media had yet to become “a principal source of news for any segment of Turkish society”, although users tended to be better educated than those receiving news from mainstream media.
But he said that politicians were becoming increasingly aware of using social media to target particular demographics.
“At the moment, about 20 per cent of the Turkish population over 18 use Twitter regularly. Half of them use Facebook, and about 40 per cent of them use Instagram,” he said.
The AKP seem to now appreciate Twitter’s unique role. While Facebook appeals to middle-aged and older people, who can be easily reached by mainstream media, Twitter is crucial for reaching a younger audience.
Ahead of the June 2018 presidential elections, some opposition candidates made particularly creative use of Twitter.
Foremost was Selahattin Demirtas, the People’s Democratic Party’s (HDP) candidate, who managed to win 8.4 per cent of the vote, despite having been in prison since November 2016. He ran a highly successful Twitter campaign, focusing on the Kurdish vote, and now has 1.66 million followers.
Another opposition candidate, the IYI party’s leader Meral Aksener, grew her Twitter followers from 138,000 in February 2014 to 2.68 million in October 2018. She won 7.3 per cent of the votes.
Another opposition candidate, the IYI party’s leader Meral Aksener, grew her Twitter followers from 138,000 in February 2014 to 2.68 million in October 2018. Sh
Aksener’s advisor for technology and communication, Taylan Yildiz, said the IYI party used Twitter mainly to target young people and women.
“Even though Twitter and television have a specific intersection, they don’t address the same segment of the audience,” he said. “There is a segment that we could never access even if we aired our ads on TV from dusk till dawn, or participated in talk shows,” he said.
The problem opposition politicians faced was media embargo during the June elections, pointed out İrfan Bozan, deputy executive Editor in mediascope.tv.
“Meral Akşener has struggled with media access since the day she founded the
Gürpınar argued that Demirtaş had showed how Twitter could be used not only to reach a wider audience, but also to gain support through good political messaging.
“Demirtaş made it possible for people to identify with those tweets that he posted from prison,” he said. “For opposition candidates in June’s elections, the only space where freedom of expression was possible was social media, especially Twitter. But lately, even the ruling AK Party have started using Twitter more, because they realized how powerful it can be.”