Turkey has shut more than 160 media outlets and arrested about 100 journalists since a failed coup attempt in July.
However, that is just half the story.
Away from shuttered news rooms and busy police stations, trolls have intensified a campaign to intimidate journalists online, hacking social media accounts, threatening physical and sexual abuse, and orchestrating “virtual lynch mobs” of pro-government voices to silence criticism.
Since January, the International Press Institute (IPI) has logged more than 2,000 cases of online abuse, death threats, threats of physical violence, sexual abuse, smear campaigns and hacking against journalists in Turkey.
The campaign has been less remarked upon than the official onslaught against the media, which continued this week with the closure of 10 newspapers, two news agencies and three magazines.
However, its insidious nature is no less unsettling. Female journalists suffer the most, with trolls using hundreds of accounts to brand them as “sluts” or “whores” just for having their work published.
When women are “criticized it is never without a sexual connotation. They are bitches... That is why they are acting [and writing] in a particular way,” says Gulsin Harman, who has been coordinating the IPI’s project, On the Line.
Turkey’s macho culture has exacerbated the reaction to female writers, said Emre Kizilkaya, one of the first journalists to write about the trolling.
“During the anti-government protests in Gezi Park [in June 2013] they were being harassed and targeted in really nasty ways: They got death threats and and rape threats,” he says.
The IPI says it has also seen cases of serious intimidation against pro-Kurdish journalists and Turks who work for international media outlets.
Trolls, often linked to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), have been a feature of Turkey’s online space since the protests at Gezi Park.
Journalists have become accustomed to consistent harassment from “Aktrolls,” as they are known online, but after a failed coup attempt in July — followed by an extreme government crackdown on the media — the abuse has worsened.
The tyranny has extended online to the point that “if a journalist does not regularly pay respect on social media to the people who lost their lives during the night of the coup attempt, they are framed as coup supporters or even traitors,” Harman says.
“It’s almost authoritarian: You are forced to say things. Even if you don’t criticize the government someone will come up on you and say that you didn’t write about x, y or z,” she adds.
Online abuse in Turkey comes in a number of forms, including through hundreds of fake accounts that adopt the personas of public figures to regurgitate abuse.
Kizilkaya, who works for the government-leaning newspaper Hurriyet, but is openly critical of state policies, says he received between 800 and 900 threatening tweets from automated accounts in a matter of hours at Gezi Park.
Once he was sworn at by a fake account of the former US first lady Laura Bush.
Another potentially more damaging form of abuse comes from “influencers,” often pro-government columnists or editors who fiercely defend Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and are “instrumental in choosing targets for larger group of trolls,” said Efe Kerem Sozeri, a Turkish journalist living in exile in The Hague, Netherlands.
“Once a journalist is attacked by a well-known figure, the implication is that there is backing from a higher level,” says Harman, who believes that attackers are thriving in a culture of impunity.
Government loyalists who spot critical comments online have also been known to alert the authorities.
Sozeri points to the case of a Dutch journalist, Ebru Umar, who tweeted a picture of the Turkish flag with a hashtag deriding Erdogan when she was in the country on holiday in April.
The tweet ignited an online “lynch mob” and the husband of Erdogan’s private secretary, Taha Un, also shared Umar’s tweet, calling on the police to “detain this creature this evening.”
She was arrested soon afterward and briefly detained.
IPI has also found evidence of at least 20 cases where journalists were hacked and had their Twitter direct messages exposed for the world to see.
“It’s obvious when it happens, because they kick off by posting a picture of the president apologizing for earlier criticism,” Harman says, sharing two examples.
When journalist Can Atakli was hacked in June, a picture was tweeted with the words: “I apologize to our honorable president to whom I was unfair and bashing all this time with my libels and insults.”
A few days earlier Hasan Cemal’s account shared this message: “I apologize from all the martyrs and Turkish nation for the support I gave to the terrorists [pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic party] HDP.”
Kizilkaya says that pro-government trolling was initially the responsibility of the youth branches of the AKP, whose members came together to discuss what they would tweet and when, “but the government quickly realized this wasn’t very efficient, the people they mobilized had loyalty, but they weren’t online experts.”
By September 2013, efforts had professionalized. The AKP recruited 6,000 people to a new social media team, known as the New Turkey Digital Office, which was responsible for converting AKP sentiments into trending hashtags.
A month later Kizilkaya was subject to an orchestrated campaign of abuse after he criticized the government’s handling of a diplomatic crisis with Lebanon.
He spoke to other journalists who had experienced similar attacks and concluded that there were “obviously centralized, orchestrated social media campaigns to silence criticism of the AKP.”
Gokhan Yucel — who ran the digital office until it was shut down after it “successfully fulfilled its mission” getting Erdogan elected in June last year — denies ever being linked to online abuse.
“My team were all respected people in the field of political communication, digital marketing and branding. I did not employ any ‘trolls’ in the premises,” he says.
However, since the coup the parameters of the debate have changed. Journalists are no longer just attacked for being critical of the government.
“Increasingly they are labeled as terrorists, threatened with libel or being arrested. Even those who used to speak out are running out of energy,” Harman says.
Yucel agrees that the environment is toxic, but says that “if some people are trying to divide or overtake the country, officials must do [what they can] to ensure national security both on the Internet and elsewhere.”
For Bulent Mumay — who had the details of a private telephone call exposed and his home address tweeted — the abuse is “just air” compared with the broader threats to freedom of speech in Turkey.
He says journalists are being arrested and losing their jobs.
“One day you come to your office and you see the door has been closed and there is a warning paper on the door: ‘This paper, radio, TV [station has been] seized or shut down by government,’” says the opposition journalist, who was detained for four days in the post-coup crackdown.
However, while Mumay is adamant that trolling and other harassment will not “change my mind or my journalism,” he says it does “influence my psychology: I can’t sleep well.”
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