Turkey Disinformation Profile

Turkey Media Environment:

According to a 2018 Metropoll survey 70% of Turkish people said they viewed the media as dishonest. Turkey is ranked 154 out of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index. The Center for American Progresses alleges that this mistrust is due to government censorship of media which leads people to seek out independent outlets. Broadcast and print media are predominantly government owned. In the 2018 Reuters Digital New Report they found that the proportion of Turkish respondents who had seen made up news in the last week was the highest in the world at 49%. In the 2020 Reuters Digital News Report they found that 62% of Turkish respondents were concerned about what was real or fake online when it came to news. In 2019 83% of the population had access to the internet. Turkey is exceedingly polarized which contributes to opportunities for misinformation to reach biased audiences. Turkey has internal disinformation from trolls, bots, the news media, and partisans as well as foreign disinformation.

Pro-Erdogan Accounts

After the 2013 protests the government set up nearly 18,000 pro-Erdogan accounts many of which were bots. These accounts were not sophisticated and easily identifiable. By 2017 this operation became more sophisticated, fake accounts would pose as citizens sympathetic to protestors, these accounts would have links to sites which contained malware which would track movements and communications of visitors.

Russian Disinformation in Turkey

Russian information goals in Turkey are to sow distrust in NATO, getting Turkish support for Russian actions in Eurasia, and seeking to influence Turkish politics to support candidates who are more amenable to Russian interests. One of the most successful Russian campaigns against Turkey was a false narrative that the Turkish government was smuggling oil for ISIS during the Syrian civil war. This narrative was designed to generate suspicion of Turkey from it's allies in NATO. Russian media promoted conspiracies that the US was involved in the 2016 coup attempt.

UAE/Saudi Botnet

In April 2020 Twitter took down a network of over 9,000 bots who forwarded the interests of Saudi Arabia and the UAE (although it is unclear if they are linked to either of these governments). The bots targeted Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Turkey's alleged support of militias in Tripoli and Minsurata.

COVID-19 Misinformation

Global conspiracy narratives about COVID-19 have been present in Turkey including false claims about it's origins either as a bioweapon, with Bill Gates involvement or the 5G was related to the virus. Turkish digital news media featured conspiracies and false claims at higher rates than in other countries and these stories frequently made it to social media and received high levels of engagement. The Turkish government put a ban on disinformation related to COVDI and had 229 suspects in custody by May 2020.