I am a lecturer at the Faculty of Media and Communications at Istanbul Bilgi University.
My current research interests include computational methods focusing on Twitter, data visualization, the political economy of data and digital sociology.
My research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Administratia Fondului Cultural National (A.F.C.N), Danish Agency of Science and Higher Education, Stiftung Mercator and the Turkish Science and Technology Foundation (TÜBİTAK). Supervisors: Brian Alleyne
Established in 2014, SputnikTR (a localized version of Sputnik News) is the most popular pro-Russ... more Established in 2014, SputnikTR (a localized version of Sputnik News) is the most popular pro-Russian media outlet active in Turkey. The news content published by SputnikTR's Twitter account currently attracts the highest engagement rates among the international public broadcasters active in Turkey. SputnikTR's official Twitter account has more followers (1M) than Sputnik News English (326K). This article argues that SputnikTR's Twitter account is used to promote Russian vaccine technologies in Turkey. We believe that it is also a conduit for the dissemination of pro-Russian as well as anti-Western narratives to the Turkish online public. Using a computational methodology, we collected 2,782 vaccine-related tweets posted by SputnikTR's Twitter account between April 2019 and April 2021. We deployed framing as well as critical discourse analysis to study the contents of our dataset. Our findings suggest that SputnikTR uses (a) disinformation as well as misinformation in vaccine-related news and (b) unethical communication techniques to maximize engagement with content posted on Twitter. Our findings are significant insofar as they are the first documented instances of Russian propaganda efforts on Turkish Twitter. These efforts seem to be focused on promoting the Russian vaccine while encouraging public hesitancy toward Western vaccine technologies.
This article tests how media ownership and political leanings influenced textual and linguistic o... more This article tests how media ownership and political leanings influenced textual and linguistic output in the production of narratives during the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe. We focused on digital news reports in Croatia, a country that experienced the highest influx of refugees among the Western Balkan countries in late 2015. Ten news organisations were selected to capture various ownership structures and ideological positions. We collected all articles published by these organisations (N = 352) during the two weeks before and two weeks after the sexual attacks that occurred in the German city of Cologne on New Year's Eve 2015. The dataset was analysed with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Correspondence Analysis. Our computational political economy of communication (CPEC) approach reveals a relative diversity of concepts used in the sample before the event, and an evident clustering of most viewpoints from media actors in the period after the event. There is a noticeable change from a humanitarian rhetoric to a security-oriented rhetoric that mobilises fear to legitimize stronger control of national borders. Based on the analysis, we argue that the majority of digital news media changed reporting style due to widespread moral panic and the economic incentive to commodify audience interest in the topic of the refugee crisis. In contrast, publicly funded news organizations showed that they provide the necessary counterbalance for informing citizens, producing quality content, and ensuring pluralism in the digital news environment. Convergence, user-generated content, and recommendation algorithms are some of the innovations driving technological change throughout the news industry. Commercial interests promoting these innovations aim to restructure the flow of information commodities and marginalize the role of regulation in fostering a democratic public sphere (Mansell, 2011). Ultimately, such changes established monopolies for digital intermediaries and online platforms (Dolata, 2017; Mosco, 2017; Srnicek, 2017).
Using a data set of 2,968 articles collected from 22 different newspapers in Turkey, this article... more Using a data set of 2,968 articles collected from 22 different newspapers in Turkey, this article maps media responses to the ongoing Gulf Crisis. In doing so, we deploy a pioneering methodology derived from natural language processing and correspondence analysis to test whether categorical variables such as political affiliation, ownership, and ideological outlook had any impact on how a news publication covered the Gulf Crisis. In the results and interpretation sections, we attempt to connect our findings to broader discussions on agenda setting, framing, and building consent. Based on our analysis, we propose the following conclusions: (a) Political affiliation, ownership structure, and the ideological outlook all had unique effects on how a publication covered the Gulf Crisis, (b) the progovernment press embarked on a campaign to sway public opinion about the government's decision to side with Qatar. The dimensions of this campaign strongly resembled an executive act of consent manufacturing, and (c) corporate-owned news organizations were the driving force shaping both the public agenda and the dominant framing of the Gulf Crisis in the Turkish mediascape.
With increasing attention devoted to automated bot accounts, fake news, and echo chambers, how mu... more With increasing attention devoted to automated bot accounts, fake news, and echo chambers, how much of the theory of a Habermassian public sphere is still applicable to social media? Drawing on Twitter data collected on April 16, 2017, during the night of Turkey's 2017 Constitutional Referendum, we test whether the networks of political communication resemble the communicative structures characteristic of Habermas's "public sphere." The referendum left the country sharply divided; 51.4 percent of the electorate voted in favor of amending the constitution to grant sweeping new executive powers to the presidency, with an overall turnout of 85.46 percent. In this article, we examine whether Twitter users were meaningfully engaged on the night of the referendum, and if their communicative patterns resembled a networked public sphere, that is, a space where information and ideas are exchanged, and public opinion is formed in a deliberative, rational manner. We find ideological uniformity, polarization, and partisan antipathy to be especially evident-mirroring existing social tensions in Turkey. Rather than resembling a public sphere, we found Twitter users to be more likely to communicate on the basis of homophily-rather than to engage in democratic debate or establish a common ground between the two campaigns. 鉴于越来越多的关注聚焦于自动机器人账户、假新闻、回音室,哈贝马斯提出的公共领域理论 中还有哪些内容仍然适用于社交媒体?利用2017年4月16日土耳其宪法公投之夜期间推特收集 的数据,作者验证了政治传播网络是否能模拟哈贝马斯公共领域理论中的传播性结构。公投导 致土耳其政治出现明显区分;总投票率为85.46%,其中51.4%的选民支持修正宪法,以期将新 执行权一并赋予总统。 作者验证了推特用户在公投当晚是否有意义地参与沟通,沟通模式是 否模拟了一种网络化的公共领域,即一个以商讨性和理性方式交换信息、想法,和形成舆论的 空间。作者发现,意识形态的统一性、(政治)极化、党派反感尤为明显-这反映了土耳其 现存社会的紧张局势。与模拟公共领域不同的是,作者发现推特用户更可能在同质性的基础上 进行沟通,而不是参与民主辩论,或在两个阵营之间建立共同点。 关键词: 推特, 土耳其, 全民公投, 公共领域, 政治传播, (政治)极化, 社会网络分析, 哈贝马斯 1 Con una atención cada vez mayor dedicada a las cuentas automatizadas de bots, noticias falsas y cámaras de eco, ¿qué parte de la teoría de una esfera pública habermassiana sigue siendo aplicable a las redes sociales? Basándonos en los datos de Twitter recopilados el 16 de abril de 2017, durante la noche del Referéndum Constitucional de Turquía 2017, verificamos si las redes de comunicación política se asemejan a las es-tructuras comunicativas características de la "esfera pública" de Habermas. El referéndum dejó al país muy dividido; El 51.4 por ciento del electorado votó a favor de enmendar la constitución para otorgar amplios poderes ejecutivos a la presidencia, con una participación general de 85.46 por ciento. En este artículo, examinamos si los usuarios de Twitter se involucraron de manera significativa la noche del referéndum, y si sus patrones comunicativos se parecían a una esfera pública en red, es decir, un espacio donde se inter-cambian información e ideas, y la opinión pública se forma de manera deliberada y racional. Nos parece especialmente evidente la uniformidad ideológica, la polarización y la antipatía partidista, lo que refleja las tensiones sociales existentes en Turquía. En lugar de parecernos a una esfera pública, descubrimos que los usuarios de Twitter tienen más probabilidades de comunicarse en base a la homofilia, en lugar de participar en un debate democrático o establecer un terreno común entre las dos campañas.
How does the technological infrastructure of a communications medium influence the culture of an ... more How does the technological infrastructure of a communications medium influence the culture of an online community? Taking up a socio-technical (STS) approach to online communities and computer mediated communication, this study introduces and explores the communication culture of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) active in Turkey between 1995 and 1996. In the first part of the study, the researcher provides a brief history of BBS networks worldwide and of pre-Internet communication networks in Turkey. In the second part, using a sample from a privately owned archive of correspondences from Hitnet, a national-scale FidoNet-style BBS network popular in Turkey between 1992 and 1996, the study documents how some of the technical constraints on the level of hardware, software, and human-computer interaction (HCI) influenced the communication culture of the Hitnet community. At the same time, the study pays especial attention to the workarounds devised by community members to work around these...
Review for Bilge Yesil. Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State.
Ur... more Review for Bilge Yesil. Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. 230 pp. $28.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252- 08165-1.
Established in 2014, SputnikTR (a localized version of Sputnik News) is the most popular pro-Russ... more Established in 2014, SputnikTR (a localized version of Sputnik News) is the most popular pro-Russian media outlet active in Turkey. The news content published by SputnikTR's Twitter account currently attracts the highest engagement rates among the international public broadcasters active in Turkey. SputnikTR's official Twitter account has more followers (1M) than Sputnik News English (326K). This article argues that SputnikTR's Twitter account is used to promote Russian vaccine technologies in Turkey. We believe that it is also a conduit for the dissemination of pro-Russian as well as anti-Western narratives to the Turkish online public. Using a computational methodology, we collected 2,782 vaccine-related tweets posted by SputnikTR's Twitter account between April 2019 and April 2021. We deployed framing as well as critical discourse analysis to study the contents of our dataset. Our findings suggest that SputnikTR uses (a) disinformation as well as misinformation in vaccine-related news and (b) unethical communication techniques to maximize engagement with content posted on Twitter. Our findings are significant insofar as they are the first documented instances of Russian propaganda efforts on Turkish Twitter. These efforts seem to be focused on promoting the Russian vaccine while encouraging public hesitancy toward Western vaccine technologies.
This article tests how media ownership and political leanings influenced textual and linguistic o... more This article tests how media ownership and political leanings influenced textual and linguistic output in the production of narratives during the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe. We focused on digital news reports in Croatia, a country that experienced the highest influx of refugees among the Western Balkan countries in late 2015. Ten news organisations were selected to capture various ownership structures and ideological positions. We collected all articles published by these organisations (N = 352) during the two weeks before and two weeks after the sexual attacks that occurred in the German city of Cologne on New Year's Eve 2015. The dataset was analysed with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Correspondence Analysis. Our computational political economy of communication (CPEC) approach reveals a relative diversity of concepts used in the sample before the event, and an evident clustering of most viewpoints from media actors in the period after the event. There is a noticeable change from a humanitarian rhetoric to a security-oriented rhetoric that mobilises fear to legitimize stronger control of national borders. Based on the analysis, we argue that the majority of digital news media changed reporting style due to widespread moral panic and the economic incentive to commodify audience interest in the topic of the refugee crisis. In contrast, publicly funded news organizations showed that they provide the necessary counterbalance for informing citizens, producing quality content, and ensuring pluralism in the digital news environment. Convergence, user-generated content, and recommendation algorithms are some of the innovations driving technological change throughout the news industry. Commercial interests promoting these innovations aim to restructure the flow of information commodities and marginalize the role of regulation in fostering a democratic public sphere (Mansell, 2011). Ultimately, such changes established monopolies for digital intermediaries and online platforms (Dolata, 2017; Mosco, 2017; Srnicek, 2017).
Using a data set of 2,968 articles collected from 22 different newspapers in Turkey, this article... more Using a data set of 2,968 articles collected from 22 different newspapers in Turkey, this article maps media responses to the ongoing Gulf Crisis. In doing so, we deploy a pioneering methodology derived from natural language processing and correspondence analysis to test whether categorical variables such as political affiliation, ownership, and ideological outlook had any impact on how a news publication covered the Gulf Crisis. In the results and interpretation sections, we attempt to connect our findings to broader discussions on agenda setting, framing, and building consent. Based on our analysis, we propose the following conclusions: (a) Political affiliation, ownership structure, and the ideological outlook all had unique effects on how a publication covered the Gulf Crisis, (b) the progovernment press embarked on a campaign to sway public opinion about the government's decision to side with Qatar. The dimensions of this campaign strongly resembled an executive act of consent manufacturing, and (c) corporate-owned news organizations were the driving force shaping both the public agenda and the dominant framing of the Gulf Crisis in the Turkish mediascape.
With increasing attention devoted to automated bot accounts, fake news, and echo chambers, how mu... more With increasing attention devoted to automated bot accounts, fake news, and echo chambers, how much of the theory of a Habermassian public sphere is still applicable to social media? Drawing on Twitter data collected on April 16, 2017, during the night of Turkey's 2017 Constitutional Referendum, we test whether the networks of political communication resemble the communicative structures characteristic of Habermas's "public sphere." The referendum left the country sharply divided; 51.4 percent of the electorate voted in favor of amending the constitution to grant sweeping new executive powers to the presidency, with an overall turnout of 85.46 percent. In this article, we examine whether Twitter users were meaningfully engaged on the night of the referendum, and if their communicative patterns resembled a networked public sphere, that is, a space where information and ideas are exchanged, and public opinion is formed in a deliberative, rational manner. We find ideological uniformity, polarization, and partisan antipathy to be especially evident-mirroring existing social tensions in Turkey. Rather than resembling a public sphere, we found Twitter users to be more likely to communicate on the basis of homophily-rather than to engage in democratic debate or establish a common ground between the two campaigns. 鉴于越来越多的关注聚焦于自动机器人账户、假新闻、回音室,哈贝马斯提出的公共领域理论 中还有哪些内容仍然适用于社交媒体?利用2017年4月16日土耳其宪法公投之夜期间推特收集 的数据,作者验证了政治传播网络是否能模拟哈贝马斯公共领域理论中的传播性结构。公投导 致土耳其政治出现明显区分;总投票率为85.46%,其中51.4%的选民支持修正宪法,以期将新 执行权一并赋予总统。 作者验证了推特用户在公投当晚是否有意义地参与沟通,沟通模式是 否模拟了一种网络化的公共领域,即一个以商讨性和理性方式交换信息、想法,和形成舆论的 空间。作者发现,意识形态的统一性、(政治)极化、党派反感尤为明显-这反映了土耳其 现存社会的紧张局势。与模拟公共领域不同的是,作者发现推特用户更可能在同质性的基础上 进行沟通,而不是参与民主辩论,或在两个阵营之间建立共同点。 关键词: 推特, 土耳其, 全民公投, 公共领域, 政治传播, (政治)极化, 社会网络分析, 哈贝马斯 1 Con una atención cada vez mayor dedicada a las cuentas automatizadas de bots, noticias falsas y cámaras de eco, ¿qué parte de la teoría de una esfera pública habermassiana sigue siendo aplicable a las redes sociales? Basándonos en los datos de Twitter recopilados el 16 de abril de 2017, durante la noche del Referéndum Constitucional de Turquía 2017, verificamos si las redes de comunicación política se asemejan a las es-tructuras comunicativas características de la "esfera pública" de Habermas. El referéndum dejó al país muy dividido; El 51.4 por ciento del electorado votó a favor de enmendar la constitución para otorgar amplios poderes ejecutivos a la presidencia, con una participación general de 85.46 por ciento. En este artículo, examinamos si los usuarios de Twitter se involucraron de manera significativa la noche del referéndum, y si sus patrones comunicativos se parecían a una esfera pública en red, es decir, un espacio donde se inter-cambian información e ideas, y la opinión pública se forma de manera deliberada y racional. Nos parece especialmente evidente la uniformidad ideológica, la polarización y la antipatía partidista, lo que refleja las tensiones sociales existentes en Turquía. En lugar de parecernos a una esfera pública, descubrimos que los usuarios de Twitter tienen más probabilidades de comunicarse en base a la homofilia, en lugar de participar en un debate democrático o establecer un terreno común entre las dos campañas.
How does the technological infrastructure of a communications medium influence the culture of an ... more How does the technological infrastructure of a communications medium influence the culture of an online community? Taking up a socio-technical (STS) approach to online communities and computer mediated communication, this study introduces and explores the communication culture of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) active in Turkey between 1995 and 1996. In the first part of the study, the researcher provides a brief history of BBS networks worldwide and of pre-Internet communication networks in Turkey. In the second part, using a sample from a privately owned archive of correspondences from Hitnet, a national-scale FidoNet-style BBS network popular in Turkey between 1992 and 1996, the study documents how some of the technical constraints on the level of hardware, software, and human-computer interaction (HCI) influenced the communication culture of the Hitnet community. At the same time, the study pays especial attention to the workarounds devised by community members to work around these...
Review for Bilge Yesil. Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State.
Ur... more Review for Bilge Yesil. Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. 230 pp. $28.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252- 08165-1.
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Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. 230 pp. $28.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-
08165-1.
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=52484
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. 230 pp. $28.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-
08165-1.
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=52484