One of the world’s largest social media platforms Twitter, announced it has shut down 7 thousand 340 accounts from Turkey on grounds that they violated the manipulation of the blocking policy. Twitter reported that these accounts were found to be linked to the youth activities of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Presidential Communications President Fahrettin Altun said that Twitter’s claim was unreal.
In a statement of Twitter, Turkey as well as in China and Russia “to government-related information dissemination activities” involving a total of 32 thousand 242 on the grounds specified account is removed from the platform.
In its statement, “For Turkey mainly target users on focus, in a coordinated manner network of users in fake operations” in early 2020 that were expressed were determined.
Related part of the announcement:
Technical signs indicate that the party is linked to youth movement and a central network is associated with many hijacked accounts. As a result, there are accounts criticizing President Erdogan and the Turkish government within the network we have disclosed today. These hijacked accounts have been the target of hacking and capturing efforts regularly by the above mentioned state actors. “
Also in Twitter’s statement, “In the analysis we made based on the technical indicators of this network and the behavior of the accounts, it was seen that the fake and hijacked accounts were used for the dissemination of pro-AK Party political discourses and they gave strong support to President Erdoğan. Today, we are disclosing 7 thousand 340 accounts in archives. ”
Twitter said that the research on the identification of these accounts was done in conjunction with the Australian Strategy Policy Institute (ASPI) and the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO).
In the report, @bylockreality and Turkey the Human Rights Defenders ,works on human rights violations, twitter account was shown as an example of non-governmental organizations and @humanrightsdef was targeted by “troll accounts”. In the report, it was stated constantly that these accounts were suspended by Twitter for precautionary purposes as a result of the hacking attempts (by the network under the AKP control), while no suspicious tweets were found in the analysis of HRD’s tweets.
Report’s Turkey part :
standford_turkey_report