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Opinion: Does the truth still matter? The Case of the Turkish Election Rally - Anthropology of Social Media.

  • Writer: Iraz Küçüker
    Iraz Küçüker
  • Oct 3, 2024
  • 5 min read

Updated: Oct 4, 2024

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“It does not matter if it is a montage or not. PKK members supported (the opposition) with videos.” These were the words of the current Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, live on national television when asked about the videos he showcased during his electoral meetings for weeks, which portrayed the leader and members of the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK), recognized as a terrorist organization by the Turkish state, clapping and singing along the opposition’s promotion song for the election period. This video, which was not created by the party’s communication office but by a Twitter user, served perfectly to the governing party’s focus on identity politics and instilling fear about the country’s territorial integrity during its re-election rally, and many people and media channels contributed to the distribution of these messages and content to the mass public, regardless of its factuality. Turkey has its fair share of concerns over freedom of the press and fake news. However, this case is particularly striking not only because of the use of manipulated content first-hand by the president in his election campaign, but because of his comfort in admitting on national television that the content used could be fabricated, yet he does not care about it. The public response to this confession was divided, while many supporters of the opposition harshly criticized this statement through social media, many defended the president, stating it reflects the truth of what the opposition party stands for, regardless of the reality of the video. After the backlash he received, the president went on to say: “They are brazenly kicking on a video that is the product of the quick wit of our young people who fit these facts in 5 seconds,” two days after the initial statement, yet the video was taken off of social media through the national television’s copyright claim at the same time.


In “Fake News and Anthropology: A Conversation on Technology, Trust, and Publics in an Age of Mass Disinformation,” Adam Hodges adds a new layer to the discourse around the post-truth society, a concept characterized by the shaping of public opinion through the preference towards information that is in line with personal emotions and opinions, rather than the factual truth, by suggesting that we are now living in a ‘post-trust’ era, where the diminishing trust in public institutions including journalism, mass media corporations, but maybe more relevant to the Turkish case, a distrust against the “elite” consisted of professionals, fact-checkers, and scientists contests the idea that there exists an objective truth. While the generalized distrust against science and the “elite” class with a high degree of education is relevant for Turkey, the concept of post-trust society as described by Hodges does not necessarily fit into the Turkish case exemplified earlier, since it is the trust to the government in power, backed by the advocating media channels that make it possible for the president to admit he does not care about the factuality of the propaganda content he uses in his rallies and not the lack thereof. 


Regardless, it still exemplifies that the truth now belongs to where people’s trust lies, and this trust is not necessarily related to the objectivity or the scientific stance of the resources but rather lies in the content that re-affirms the opinions of the consumer and their social circle. The Turkish example bears a similar case to the “split-public” model that Stalcup mentions in her discussion with Graan and Hodges, where she explains how the trust put in professional journalism was replaced by a certain contrasting aesthetic language in the Brazilian elections in 2018. Precarious for the Turkish case, the affinity to produce and disseminate misinformation happens in two significantly different ways. The voter base is so polarized that on one hand opposition supporters have completely lost their trust in the public media institutions, claiming they only support the interests of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the governing party, and believe that only the sources that criticize the government are trustworthy, regardless of their methods; on the other hand, supporters of the government do not seem to trust fact-checking initiatives which occasionally proves that the president or the government-backed media has been misleading. To understand this stark division, it would also be helpful to return to the concepts of media and epistemological bubbles. While media bubbles or echo chambers describe the communicative divide between different groups of people with differing political opinions or ideologies, which are formed by the internet’s allowances that lead user’s selective exposure to information that resonates with their views, consequently inhibiting their ability to see beyond their ideological space; the epistemic bubble is not an issue of being unfamiliar with different media ecosystems; it is rather an alternate reality where people do not designate what is known as the truth and do not emphasize what is factual and what is not. What is known is constructed in a reading that renders information consistent with this alternative reality that is shaped by fake news and propaganda. They act as reflections of one’s lifeworld and how they relate to where they are situated.


Returning to the case of Turkey, one can assume that the media bubble formed by the oppressive tactics of the government safeguarded the trust it has accumulated during its rule, which consequently led to a formation of an epistemic bubble where most of the supporters of the government rarely questioned the sources of information and the factuality of the news they were exposed to, as it was consistent with where they put their trust for so long, evident by the example provided at the beginning of the paper. However, it is more complex than it seems to be; since the supporters of the opposition are also growingly participating not only in the fact-checking processes but also in the dissemination of misinformation and fake news in the hopes of bursting the bubble the government supporters are in. As an example, the anti-immigrant discourses that became especially popularized by the leaders of the opposition during the period between the first and second round of the presidential election had their considerable share of false information, including the number of Syrian and Afghan asylum seekers living in Turkey, to exaggerate the pressure they put over the country’s economy which ultimately resulted in fueling the hate towards the Syrian population in Turkey and boosted the dissemination of related video content taken out of context in social media. While the opposition and their supporters took such a turn to appeal to the right-wing electoral base and try to find their way into their epistemic bubble to inhibit their relationship with the governing party and Erdogan, they ironically formed their own epistemic bubble,  leaving their appeal for the truth behind. The split public in Turkey is not a split between the fact and the fake anymore; it is becoming more and more a case of two split epistemic bubbles leaving the truth out, lost in space in their quest to dominate each other. 


REFERENCES

Duvar. English. “Kılıçdaroğlu calls Erdoğan 'fabricator' over montage video linking former with 

Gazete Duvar. “Erdoğan: Gençlerimizin kıvrak zekasının ürünü 5 saniyelik video üzerinde 

Graan, Andrew, Adam Hodges and Meg Stalcup. “Fake News and Anthropology: A Conversation 

on Technology, Trust, and Publics in an Age of Mass Disinformation.” Polar Online Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Emergent Conversations: Part 9 (2020).


Hayatsever, Huseyin, Ali Kucukgocmen, and Burcu Karakas. “Erdogan rival sharpens tone on 

migrants before Turkey runoff.” Reuters, last updated on May 18, 2023.


Keskin, Oykum Huma. “Türkiye'deki sığınmacı sayısı: Veriler ne söylüyor?” Teyit.org, May 27, 


Slotta, James. "The annotated Donald Trump: signs of circulation in a time of bubbles." Journal of 



Linguistic Anthropology 29, no. 3 (2019): 397-416.



 
 
 

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