Can Russia Interfere in Turkey Elections?
The 2016 US Presidential Election was a well-known case of Russian-backed social engineering interference. Will an example of the events described in Netflix’s The Great Hack documentary take place in Turkey during the May 14 elections?
One of the most common complaints of Twitter users lately is that they see a lot of posts from accounts they don’t follow on their home feed, on topics they are not interested in. While many people humorize this with the “Twitter corruption” of bad boy Elon Musk, the reality is quite different. Cyber warfare and manipulation techniques, which were first tried in the 2016 US Presidential Elections, and which have increased in dimension with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, can also be applied in the May 14th Turkish elections. It is no political secret that Russia wants the current government in Turkey to remain in power. The Russian press has been reporting on this issue as follows: “You may or may not reach a compromise with Erdogan, but what will happen when he leaves is a complete unknown. And sometimes it’s even worse: you have a clear enemy, but an enemy you know, an enemy you study.” (https://www.gazeteduvar.com.tr/fransada-le-pen-hastaneye-kaldirildi-haber-1613694)
As Dr. Tuğrulcan Elmas of the Indiana University Social Media Observatory points out in his article “Analyzing Activity and Suspension Patterns of Twitter Bots Attacking Turkish Twitter Trends by a Longitudinal Dataset”, in March and April 2023, at least one out of every five daily trending hashtags that rise on weekdays and fall on weekends is fake, i.e. created by bots. Tuğrulcan Elmas points out that manipulation campaigns run by bots usually appear to be in favor of the AKP, and says that the photo of the Millet Alliance’s presidential candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu stepping on a prayer rug, which was the subject of debate earlier this month, was a manipulation campaign that was introduced and spread through bots.
Another danger on Twitter is “news” accounts with many followers and unknown sources. Only the names of these accounts are related to news, they are neither affiliated with a news website nor a media organization. It is not known who manages the accounts. In reality, these accounts were magazine or humor accounts with many followers before the election period, but overnight all their old tweets were deleted and they were transformed into “news channels” with a new makeover. Eight out of 10 news items they tweet are well-known news items about the agenda in order to avoid attracting attention. The real issue is in the remaining 2 tweets. Tweets containing manipulative and untrue information are interspersed with real news to create a perception operation. Of course, these so-called news items have neither a source nor a grain of truth. However, the fact that the account has tens of thousands of followers is enough for the content to spread rapidly. For example, the “prayer rug debate”, which has occupied the public opinion, was brought up and kept on the agenda through such accounts.
Let’s go back to the Turkish academic at the beginning of this article. Speaking to DW Turkish, Elmas also drew attention to the similarities between the activity of anonymous Twitter pages in Turkey and the Russian-originated troll activity during the 2016 US elections. During the 2016 elections, Elmas recalled the discussions about the manipulation of the elections by Russian-originated local news accounts with an American profile, accounts that played to the far-right audience, or accounts that campaigned for black people, and said, “And we are seeing the same situation in Turkey right now.” In Turkey, Elmas says, campaigns are organized against the right-wing audience in which the other side is accused of collaborating with terrorists, while accounts claiming to be opposition, Ataturkist or nationalist also make manipulative posts by gathering the audience of that ideology. Emphasizing that news accounts with unknown sources and mostly biased news accounts are more active in Turkey than in any other country, Elmas points out that manipulation in Turkey is done in a much more coordinated manner than in other countries and that it is taken for granted.
Facebook is more “old school” but more reliable. Meta has partnered with 90 independent verification organizations, including teyit.org and Doğruluk Payı, and will reduce the visibility of false information when it is detected on Facebook. It will send a notification to the person sharing this information and direct them to the correct source with a warning that ‘this information may be false’. The company also announced that it will close coordinated and misleading accounts.
Political parties also seem to be somewhat, if not fully, aware of the situation. IYI Party Secretary General and MP Uğur Poyraz said in a series of tweets the other day, “These were Fethullah Gulen Organisation’s tactics in the past,” and claimed that Fahrettin Altun, Head of the Presidential Communications Department, and his team are currently leading the perception operation. Ahmet Turan Han from Datailor Technology said, “In recent months, we have detected that Russia and Hungary-linked accounts have been intensively directed towards Turkey. These accounts have started to produce Turkish content by deleting their past content. We also observed the most striking examples of this when Muharrem İnce’s rhetoric suddenly became a trending topic on social media,” he said, directly citing Russia as a source. Onursal Adıgüzel, CHP Deputy Chairman for Information and Communication Technologies, said that the bot accounts that carry out perception operations originate from Russia, Hungary, India and Pakistan.
So how do we protect ourselves and our opinions from such misinformation and perception games? In other words, how do we resist manipulation? The truth is, it is very difficult in an era when artificial intelligence can produce images and videos that are close to reality. However, my personal recommendation would be to read a few more tweets about a news item before contributing to its spread or reacting to it, to look at the comments (replies) under the tweet, and to try to confirm it with organizations such as teyit.org and serious international news organizations such as DW Turkish, Voice of America, BBC, EuroNews.
