Censorship still works — just not the way you think
Turkey’s government is trying to drown out, not hush up, critics
By Asher Kohn
There’s some egregious censorship going on in Turkey right now — censorship so bad that it’s funny. As the country’s journalists investigate the bombing that killed 11 foreigners in the tourist destination of Sultanahmet, the government has told the media toe the line or keep quiet. One television station responded with an ironic headline stating that “Something happened in Sultanahmet.”
But that’s not the scary thing. There’s another, more disturbing, kind of censorship at work in Turkey and many other countries. This form relies on internet trolls, not arrests. “In the age of the Internet, censorship works best by attacking filters,” says Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina.
In the past, Turkish leaders have opted for the heavy-handed approach most usually associated with censorship. The remarkably paranoid 19-century leader Sultan Abdul Hamid II was, for example, legendarily anxious about the size of his nose. References to Sarayburnu, the spit of land where Topkapi Palace is located, were forbidden in the press because Sarayburnu is synonymous in Turkish with the palace nose.
Then there’s the country’s constitution. Written in 1980, it prohibits insulting the nation’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. This led to YouTube being blocked in 2007 after a Greek uploader posted a video stating “Ataturk is gay”.
But top-down approaches don’t work so well when anyone can get online and fight back. Then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was widely ridiculed for the heavy-handed YouTube ban. Similar backfires occurred in 2010 when WordPress was blocked in Venezuela, and in China the same year when a man with political connections tried to censor news of his hit-and-run killing of a college student. Egyptian authorities turned off the whole country’s internet during 2011 protests there, but it didn’t save President Mubarak. The old ways do not work as well anymore. Effective censorship is done not by deletion, but by confusion.
In Turkey, that work is done in part by a 6,000-person Twitter army recruited by the government. In 2014, New York Times reporter Ceylan Yeğinsu wrote about ISIS recruitment in Turkey, a story which the Times illustrated with an image of Erdoğan leaving a mosque. Worried about the optics of a headline about ISIS appearing next to an image of the head of state, the Turkish government criticized Yeğinsu, prompting its supporters, and presumably its paid recruits, to attack Yeğinsu.
Attacking Yeğinsu’s patriotism and dual nationality was common, with many calling her an operative of foreign powers. A Turkish journalist tweeted that “Yeğinsu misinformed the reader.” The Times replaced the offending image and offered a correction, but also condemned the “coordinated campaign to intimidate and to impugn the motives of the reporter who wrote the story.” Meanwhile, the troll army claimed victory:
“Pro-government ‘journalists’ in Turkey spend a lot of time finding errors in tweets of random government opponents, or other journalists,” says Tufekci. By attacking anti-government officials and skeptical reporters, they can cast doubt on their opponents’ reporting and even the platforms they use. This is how censorship works in a democracy. As Tufekci puts it, “many ordinary people give up trying to discern facts from this apparent sea of fiction.”
This isn’t a Turkish invention. Another New York Times reporter found himself linked to skinheads and Nazis after he investigated a Russian troll factory.
This sort of censorship isn’t strangulation but death by drudgery. Most people don’t have the time to find the facts. And it’s hard to search for the truth when thousands of people are trying to obscure it.
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