Fake news and the spread of disinformation are high on the government’s agenda as authorities often complain of fast-spreading lies on social media, with the purpose of defamation. Cybercrime units of the Turkish National Police strive to keep them in check through their surveillance center.

Police officers comb the social media websites for bots around the clock and report them to relevant judiciary authorities. Seyit Ahmet Dikici, deputy director of the Cybercrimes Department of the police, told Anadolu Agency (AA) on Thursday that in the last 24 hours alone on Twitter, they discovered 26% of tweets were the work of bots and that they were still trying to determine whether another 4% were bot-made tweets.

Bots are usually recruited to promote an event or product but more often than not, they are used to spread false news, according to experts. If left unchecked, they are the main sources of disinformation on social media. In some cases, politicians are targeted by bots that use similar wording in their posts with slight alterations to promote their message. Slander campaigns against politicians end up in courts but bot use often escapes punishment due to the difficulty to determine the sources, which are often abroad. In other cases, they seek to agitate the public through disinformation as a campaign targeting refugees and migrants in the country showed recently.

Along with experienced personnel, Turkish police use artificial intelligence (AI) programs to determine bots. Dikici says almost half of social media bots targeting Turkey were linked to the PKK terrorist group and the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ).

"Social media companies sustain their fight against bots but bots themselves always devise new ways to avoid closures. In May, 23% of 145 million tweets shared by more than 12 million accounts were the work of bots. We examined 10 trending tags on Twitter in May in Turkey and found more than 52% of accounts interacting with tags (using them in their posts) were bots," Dikici says. "Checking upon several trending topics, we see that they are manipulated by bots which aim to disrupt public security and order," he added.

An interesting finding of police work on social media is the support that members of different terrorist groups give each other, according to Dikici, regardless of how ideologically different they are. "FETÖ, in particular, has been active on the social media, since Dec. 17-25," he said, referring to disguised coup attempts by FETÖ infiltrators in law enforcement and judiciary in 2013. "They used everything, from bots to accounts that were dormant before (the coup attempt). Their activation in that process was certainly no coincidence," he said.