Towards the election: Number of suspicious news sent to teyit.org increased by 80 percent

After the Nationalist Movement Party Chairman Devlet Bahçeli suggested that there must be an early election, President Erdogan has held a press conference announcing that elections will be held at June 24th after meeting Bahçeli on April 18th.

With the start of the election marathon, we have analyzed the suspicious news which we detect over the Internet and social media as well as the users sent us for verification, and shared the information whether they are correct or not.

As we are approaching to the elections on 24th of June, we prepared an election monitoring report related to; how often users engaged with the teyit.org compared to the previous periods, the number of notifications sent to us, the published analyses and the interest of audience.

While preparing the report, we have set two separate comparison periods. We have set the first comparison period as between January 26, 2017, the date when teyit.org published its first analysis about the Constitution Referendum of 2017 and April 16, 2017, the very date of the referendum; and the two months period between April 18, 2018 when early election decision was announced, and June 18, 2018.

As for the second comparison period, it was including the period between January 1, 2018 and April 18, 2018; and another 2-months period from the announcement date of the early elections to June 2, 2018. January 1, 2018 to April 18, 2018. Thus, while we were able to make comparisons between the two elections, we also measured how often users use teyit.org both before and during the election period.

Users visited teyit.org more often during the early election period.

teyit.org website was visited more after Erdogan’s early election statement on April 18th than the first 3,5 months of 2018. As the number of unique users entering the website increased by 45 percent compared to the pre-election period, there was also a 54 percent increase in page views.

Following the announcement of the early election, the number of unique users visiting the website increased by 65 percent compared to the Constitution Referendum period. The number of page views has increased 200%. It reflects that users used teyit.org more often during election periods to find out the right information about suspicious news spreading on the internet and social media.

During the election period, more people started to follow teyit.org

While the number of analyses published on teyit.org has shown a 16 percent increase compared to the first 3,5 months in the early election period, there was also a 27 percent change in the daily follower increase. In the early election period, the number of analyses and the daily follow-up rate increased by 30 percent compared to the Constitution Referendum period. In other words, in the moments of crisis and in the events which concern the big part of the society, the users’ demand for right information increased in simultaneously.

The suspicious content that is sent to the teyit.org to be confirmed increased by 80 percent.

In the early election period, the notices about suspicious news sent to teyit.org to be confirmed appears to have increased by 80 percent compared to the first 3,5 months of the year. There is also a 44 percent increase compared to the number of notices sent during the Constitution Referendum period. Along with the increase in demand, the number of content shared by teyit.org’s social media accounts has also increased. Concurrently, the number of content shared by Facebook and Twitter accounts of teyit.org increased by 9 percent compared to the first 3.5 months of the year, and 30 percent compared to the referendum period.

Editor’s note: When this data is taken into account, it is worth considering the number of social media followers of teyit.org. On January 26, 2017, the number of social media followers of teyit.org was 76,931. It was quickly increased and hit 133,041 on April 16, 2017. This number reached 236,481 on January 1, 2018, while the total number of followers on Facebook and Twitter on April 18 was 281,441. On June 18, the total number of followers reached 313,538. It is important to note that, these numbers show the total number of users, not the number of unique users following the teyit.org’s social media accounts.

Article: Burak Avşar, Translation: Erhan Kuğu