Social media giant Twitter’s manipulative algorithm appears to have resurfaced in another case related to Turkish elections. On Wednesday, the name of Yavuz Ağıralioğlu, a lawmaker from the Good Party (IP), quickly entered the trending topic list, but just as it rose in the ranks of most talked about topics, his name disappeared all of a sudden.
Ağıralioğlu laid bare the disagreement between his party, the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), and other members of the six-party opposition bloc at a news conference. His speech, broadcast live by many TVs, was among rare displays of a dispute between alliance members. In addition, Ağıroğlu has aired his frustration over the CHP’s talks with the pro-PKK Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), something the alliance seeks to keep low-key to not offend their more nationalist electorate.
In one hour, there were about 60,000 tweets about Ağıralioğlu. Yet, he swiftly disappeared from the trending topic list on Twitter, despite thousands of tweets that continued well after the end of the news conference.
Twitter’s newly updated algorithm has promoted posts by terrorist sympathizers ahead of Türkiye’s presidential and parliamentary elections on May 14, a monthlong study by the Turkish newspaper Sabah analyzing suggested tweets found.
The social media platform’s algorithm, which now divides the timelines into “For you” and “Following” sections, deliberately conceals apolitical content or content created by supporters of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party). Instead, it puts tweets on users’ timelines from individual and bot accounts of supporters of the PKK terrorist organization and the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ).
The incident occurred less than two months before the much-anticipated vote and raises questions about purposeful manipulation. It also considers the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the consulting firm worked for Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign in the United States and gained access to the personal information of millions of Facebook accounts for voter profiling and targeting. SCL Elexion, the parent group of Cambridge Analytica, has opened offices in Türkiye as well.
Despite being for real users, Twitter has also become a breeding ground for bots effectively wielded by terrorist groups and individuals serving specific purposes.
In the past month, since the Feb. 6 earthquakes hit Türkiye’s southeast, a disinformation campaign began to spread on especially social media platforms to incite fear, concern and panic among citizens.
Sabah’s report delved into Twitter posts made between Feb. 6 and March 13 regarding the earthquakes and discovered that of the 266,334,080 million posts made by 21,493,445 accounts, a total of 5,362,720 were made by bot accounts, corresponding to roughly 25.55% of the total.
The report found that some 27% of these 5.3 million posts, 1,493,256 to be exact, were made by bot accounts managed by FETÖ and the PKK.
Moreover, 33% of all posts mentioning the word “ordu,” Turkish for “the army,” and accusing the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) of being late in its response by two days were made by bots.
Twitter is also awash with bot accounts that emerged after municipalities run by the CHP started allocating bigger budgets to agencies organizing social media campaigns. For instance, many bot accounts shared the same tweet saying they were a villager from the central province of Konya who “cannot afford the costs of his/her tractor” and would no longer vote for the AK Party, despite voting for the party for two decades.
Elon Musk responded to the criticism of the social media platform’s manipulative algorithm last Saturday and said they hoped to earn people’s trust.
Musk stated that Twitter would “open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31.” The Twitter CEO claimed that “our ‘algorithm’ is overly complex & not fully understood internally. People will discover many silly things, but we’ll patch issues as soon as they’re found!”
“We’re developing a simplified approach to serve more compelling tweets, but it’s still a work in progress. But, of course, that’ll also be open source,” Musk said. “Providing code transparency will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to rapid improvement in recommendation quality. Most importantly, we hope to earn your trust.”
Musk had called out Twitter’s newsfeed algorithms “manipulative” in May 2022, prompting founder Jack Dorsey to respond and disagree with the claim.
“You are being manipulated by the algorithm in ways you don’t realize,” Musk had said. Dorsey disagreed with Musk, saying the function was a means of updating followers on trending news and was quickly changed.
Twitter last month was criticized by the European Commission for its alleged shortcoming in tackling disinformation. European Commission Vice President for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova has singled out Twitter for failure to comply with the EU’s code of practice on disinformation.
Like other social media companies, Twitter must report on data on how much advertising revenue the companies had earned from disinformation actors, the number or value of political advertisements accepted or rejected, and detected instances of manipulative behaviors.
The microblogging site is among the breeding grounds for disinformation and manipulation in Türkiye.
British academic Marc Owen Jones said on his Twitter account Türkiye faced a possible influence operation following the 2021 forest fires in the country’s south, pointing out the “#HelpTurkey” hashtag created on Twitter in the wake of wildfires. Many social media users took to Twitter to express their sorrow and to call for global help for Türkiye, also prompting a nationalistic reaction over the call’s perceived implication that the country is portrayed as unable to fight the blazes.
Election manipulation has been under the spotlight recently with the proliferation of social media platforms.
An Israeli company tried to influence over 30 elections worldwide for clients through sabotage, hacking and spreading misinformation, an undercover media probe revealed last month. It added to a growing body of evidence that shadowy private firms worldwide are profiting from invasive hacking tools and the power of social media platforms to manipulate public opinion.
The firm was dubbed “Team Jorge” by investigating journalists who posed as potential clients to gather information on its methods and capabilities. Its boss, Tal Hanan, is a former Israeli special forces operative who boasted of being able to control supposedly secure Telegram accounts and thousands of fake social media profiles, as well as planting news stories, the reports say.
The investigation was carried out by a consortium of journalists from 30 outlets, including The Guardian in Britain, Le Monde in France, Der Spiegel in Germany, and El Pais in Spain, under the direction of the France-based nonprofit Forbidden Stories.
“The methods and techniques described by Team Jorge raise new challenges for big tech platforms,” The Guardian wrote. “Evidence of a global private market in disinformation aimed at elections will also ring alarm bells for democracies worldwide.”
