Echoes of Division: Social Media, Disinformation, and Emotional Politics in Turkey’s 2023 Elections

Yıl 2024, Cilt: 2 Sayı: 2, 27 - 52, 31.10.2024

İnci Secem Avcı

Öz

This study examines the relationship between disinformation, social media algorithms, and emotional discourse during the 2023 presidential elections in Turkey. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), it explores how emotionally charged content in social media posts by two key political figures during this process, namely Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, contributed to political polarization. The findings show that posts with higher emotional engagement received significantly more interactions, reinforcing divisive narratives and echo chambers. This interaction pattern suggests that the nature of the content is crucial in how it is disseminated and discussed online. The findings highlight the role of social media algorithms in amplifying content that elicits emotional responses, thereby deepening political divides and affecting public opinion. The study provides insights into how algorithm-driven amplification influences the broader political landscape.

Anahtar Kelimeler

Disinformation, Social Media Algorithms, Emotional Politics, Political Polarization

Bölünmenin Yankıları: Türkiye'de 2023 Seçimlerinde Sosyal Medya, Dezenformasyon ve Duygu Siyaseti

Öz

Bu çalışma, 2023 Türkiye Cumhurbaşkanlığı seçimlerinde dezenformasyon, sosyal medya algoritmaları ve duygusal söylem arasındaki ilişkiyi incelemektedir. Eleştirel Söylem Analizi (ESA) kullanılarak, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ve Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu gibi bu süreçteki başlıca iki siyasi figürün sosyal medya paylaşımlarındaki duygusal içeriklerin, siyasi kutuplaşmaya nasıl katkı sağladığı araştırılmaktadır. Bulgular, duygusal açıdan güçlü etkileşimlere sahip paylaşımların, çok daha fazla etkileşim aldığını ve ayrıştırıcı anlatıları ve yankı odalarını güçlendirdiğini göstermektedir. Ayrıca bulgular, sosyal medya algoritmalarının duygusal tepkiler uyandıran içerikleri artırarak siyasi bölünmeleri derinleştirme rolünü vurgulamaktadır.

Anahtar Kelimeler

Dezenformasyon, Sosyal Medya Algoritmaları, Duygu Siyaseti, Politik Kutuplaşma

Kaynakça

• Adal, H. (2024, 02 16). Bianet. Retrieved from Dezenformasyondan önce enformasyona ihtiyacımız var: https://bianet.org/haber/dezenformasyondan-once-enformasyona-ihtiyacimiz-var-291997
• Aïmeur et al. (2022). Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review. Social network analysis and mining, 13(1), 1-36.
• Al-Jazeera. (2016, 07 16). Retrieved from Erdogan resorts to iPhone’s FaceTime after coup attempt: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/7/16/erdogan-resorts-to-iphones-facetime-after-coup-attempt
• Altun, F. (2023, 05 02). X. Retrieved from X: https://x.com/fahrettinaltun/status/1653167475951820804
• Andı et al. (2019). Internet and social media use and political knowledge: Evidence from Turkey. Mediterranean Politics, 25(5), 579-599.
• Ayan, P. (2010). Authoritarian party structures in Turkey: a comparison of the Republican People's Party and the Justice and Development Party. Turkish Studies, 11(2), 197-215.
• Aydın-Düzgit et al. (2023). How Erdoğan Rules Through Crisis. Journal of Democracy, 34(4), 80-93.
• Bakir and McStay. (2018). Fake news and the economy of emotions: Problems, causes, solutions. Digital journalism, 6(2), 154-175.
• BBC. (2018, 05 30). Retrieved from Doğan Grubu'nun satışı Economist'te: 'Son bağımsız medya, rejim yanlısı şirketçe kapıldı': https://www.bbc.com/turkce/haberler-dunya-43592539
• Bengtsson, V. (2018). Right-wing populism and Facebook as the political arena: A quantitative study on political engagement online. Published master's thesis, Lund University institution of political science, 2-33.
• Brady et al. (2017). Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(28), 7313-7318.
• Celep, Ö. (2019). The 2019 municipal elections in Turkey: A democratic earthquake. Turkish Policy Quarterly, 18(2), 137-147.
• Chawla and Mehrotra. (2021). Impact of emotions in social media content diffusion. Informatica, 45(6), 11-28.
• Cobb et al. . (1976). Agenda building as a comparative political process. American Political Science Review, 70(1), 126-138.
• DellaPosta et al. (2015). Why do liberals drink lattes? American Journal of Sociology, 120(5), 1497-1501.
• Demir, V. (2021). Freedom of the media in Turkey under the AKP government. Human rights in Turkey: Assaults on human dignity, 51-88.
• Erçetin and Erdoğan. (2021). ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, please tell me…’: the populist rhetoric of the ‘new’ media of ‘new Turkey’ during the April 16, 2017 referendum. Turkish Studies, 22(2), 290-313.
• Erdoğan, E. (2023, 05 10). X. Retrieved from X: https://twitter.com/RTErdogan/status/1656296376127606786
• Erdoğan, E. (2023, 05 11). X. Retrieved from X: https://x.com/RTErdogan/status/1656545570499043333
• Erdoğan, E. (2023, 05 12). X. Retrieved from X: https://twitter.com/RTErdogan/status/1656907905021493248
• Erdoğan, E. (2023, 05 13). X. Retrieved from X: https://twitter.com/RTErdogan/status/1657270333135544321
• Erdoğan, E. (2023, 05 13). X. Retrieved from X: https://twitter.com/RTErdogan/status/1657270333135544321
• Facebook. (2023, 05). Retrieved from Facebook Ads Library: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=political_and_issue_ads&country=TR&view_all_page_id=497191817041688&search_type=page&media_type=all
• Flew and Iosifidis. (2020). Populism, globalisation and social media. International Communication Gazette, 82(1), 7-25.
• Gall, C. (2018, 10 12). Turkey releases U.S. pastor at center of dispute. Retrieved from The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/world/europe/turkey-us-pastor-andrew-brunson.html
• Gorodnichenko et al. (2018). Social media, sentiment and public opinions: Evidence from Brexit and USElection. European Economic Review, 136, 1-22.
• Gültekin, L. (2023, 02 05). Diken. Retrieved from Kılıçdaroğlu’nun adaylığını niçin riskli buluyorum?: https://medyascope.tv/2024/02/25/chpde-adaylik-sureci-elestirileri-parti-adaylarini-tanitmaktan-cok-gelen-elestirilere-yanit-veriyor/
• Hacıyakupoğlu, Zhang. (2015). Social media and trust during the Gezi protests in Turkey. Journal of computer-mediated communication, 20(4), 450-466.
• Höller, M. (2021). The human component in social media and fake news: the performance of UK opinion leaders on Twitter during the Brexit campaign. European Journal of English Studies, 25(1), 81-96.
• Hughes et al. (2010). Obama and the power of social media and technology. The European Business Review, 16(21), 1-40.
• Human Rights Watch. (2020, 07 27). Retrieved from Turkey: Social Media Law Will Increase Censorship Parliament Should Reject it; Social Media Firms Should Oppose It: https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/07/27/turkey-social-media-law-will-increase-censorship
• Hwong et al. (2017). What makes you tick? The psychology of social media engagement in space science communication. Computers in Human Behavior, 68, 480–492.
• Ide et al. (2017). Emotion intensities in tweets. In Proceedings of the 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2017) (pp. 65-77). Vancouver: Association for Computational Linguistics.
• Katz, R. S. (1997). Democracy and elections. USA: Oxford University Press.
• Kaynar, M. (2023, 04 03). Gazete Duvar. Retrieved from Erdoğan aday olabilir mi IV: https://www.gazeteduvar.com.tr/erdogan-aday-olabilir-mi-iv-makale-1611302
• Kılıçdaroğlu, K. (2023, 05 02). X. Retrieved from X: https://x.com/kilicdarogluk/status/1653142263340359691
• Kılıçdaroğlu, K. (2023, 05 06). X. Retrieved from X: https://twitter.com/kilicdarogluk/status/1654928737492774912
• Kılıçdaroğlu, K. (2023, 05 12). X. Retrieved from X: https://twitter.com/kilicdarogluk/status/1657122943518793730
• Kılıçdaroğlu, K. (2023, 05 13). X. Retrieved from X: https://twitter.com/kilicdarogluk/status/1657326503909048320
• Kılıçdaroğlu, K. (2023, 05 13). X. Retrieved from X: https://twitter.com/kilicdarogluk/status/1657416838836375552 Kramer et al. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(24), 8788-8790.
• Lampe et al. (2006). A Face (book) in the crowd: Social searching vs. social browsing. In Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 167-170). East Lansing MI: Michigan State University.
• Macït et al. (2018). A research on social media addiction and dopamine driven feedback. Journal of Mehmet Akif Ersoy University Economics and Administrative Sciences Faculty, 5(3), 882-897.
• Martin, B. (1998). Information liberation. London: Freedom Press.
• Medyascope. (2023, 04 22). Retrieved from Erdogan mitinglerde izlettiği PKK-Kılıçdaroğlu videosu hakkında konuştu: "Ama montaj ama şu ama bu".: https://medyascope.tv/2023/05/22/erdogan-mitinglerde-izlettigi-pkk-kilicdaroglu-videosu-hakkinda-konustu-ama-montaj-ama-su-ama-bu/
• Mudde and Kaltwasser. (2013). Exclusionary vs. inclusionary populism: Comparing contemporary Europe and Latin America. Government and opposition, 48(2), 147-174.
• Mudde and Kaltwasser. (2017). Populism: A very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Mudde, C. (2004). The populist zeitgeist. Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541-563.
• OdaTv. (2011, 06 30). Retrieved from Ecevit Ruhu CHP’de Dirildi: https://www.odatv.com/analiz/ecevit-ruhu-chpde-dirildi-17873
• Palabıyık, S. (2017). Politicization of recent Turkish history: (ab)use of history as a political discourse in Turkey. Turkish Studies, 19(2), 72-95.
• Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: How the new personalized web is changing what we read and how we think. London: Penguin.
• Phippen J., W. (2017, 04 29). The Atlantic. Retrieved from Why Turkey Blocked Access to Wikipedia: https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/04/turkey-blocks-wikipedia/524859/
• Poell and Van Dijck. (2018). Social media and new protest movements. The SAGE handbook of social media, 546-561.
• Praet et al. (2021). Predictive modeling to study lifestyle politics with Facebook likes. EPJ Data Science, 10(1), 2-50.
• Purhonen and Heikkilä. (2017). Food, music and politics: The interweaving of culinary taste patterns, ‘highbrow’ musical taste and conservative attitudes in Finland. Social Science Information, 56(1), 74-97.
• Reitz, A. (2012). Social media's function in organizations: A functional analysis approach. Global Media Journal, 5(2), 41-56.
• Reviglio and Agosti. (2020). Thinking Outside the Black-Box: The Case for “Algorithmic Sovereignty” in Social Media. Social Media + Society, 6(2), 1-12.
• Saka, E. (2018). Social Media in Turkey as a Space for Political Battles: AKTrolls and other Politically motivated trolling. Middle East Critique, 161-177.
• Smith, A. (2013). Civic engagement in the digital age. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
• Strathern, P. (2000). Foucault in 90 Minutes. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publisher.
• Sülflow et al. (2019). Selective attention in the news feed: An eye-tracking study on the perception and selection of political news posts on Facebook. New Media & Society, 21(1), 168-190.
• Sunstein, C. R. (1999). The law of group polarization. University of Chicago Law School, John M. Olin Law & Economics Working Paper, 3-30.
• Taş, O. (2016). Medya Etiği ve Temsil İlişkisi. Dezavantajlı Grupların Gözünden Medyada Temsil Çalıştayı. Ankara: Ankara University.
• Tucker et al. (2018). Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: A review of the scientific literature. SSRN Electronic Journal, 3-95.
• Valentino et al. (2008). Is a worried citizen a good citizen? Emotions, political information seeking, and learning via the internet. Political Psychology, 29(2), 247-273.
• Wojtasik, W. (2013). Functions of elections in democratic systems. Political Preferences, 4(2), 199-202. Yalçın, H. (2023, 05 26). Türkiye Araştırmları Vakfı. Retrieved from Türkiye Yüzyılı Ne Demek?: https://turkiyearastirmalari.org/2023/05/26/fokus/turkiye-yuzyili-ne-demek/
• Yeşil et al. (2017). Turkey’s Internet policy after the coup attempt: The emergence of a distributed network of online suppression and surveillance. Internet Policy Observatory, 22, 1-27.
• Yeşil, B. (2018). Authoritarian turn or continuity? Governance of media through capture and discipline in the AKP era. South European Society and Politics, 23(2), 239-257.
• Yetkin, M. (2023, 02 05). Yetkin Report. Retrieved from Kılıçdaroğlu's warning for the last ten days and "deep fake" intelligence: https://yetkinreport.com/2023/05/02/kilicdaroglunun-son-on-gun-uyarisi-ve-deep-fake-istihbarati/