Turkey

Twitter released a dataset containing a network with 7,340 accounts primarily targeted at Turkish audiences, which it linked to the youth wing of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and ‘a centralized network that maintained a significant number of compromised accounts’. The network amplified messages supporting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the ruling AKP. The network also spread messages critical of two Turkish opposition parties (the Peoples’ Democratic Party and the Republican People’s Party). The aim of the operation wasn’t limited to spreading pro-government messages, but also extended to countering domestic dissent by discrediting and harassing opponents. Accounts in the network appear to be a mix of inauthentic and compromised or repurposed accounts created between 2008 and 2020. Twitter disclosed that the network compromised, then repurposed, accounts that had been ‘repeated targets of account hacking and takeover efforts by the state actors’, including accounts originally critical of the government. The tweets published as part of the information operations campaigns were mostly in Turkish, indicating that they were targeted at a domestic audience. However, a small number were in English and sought to propagate Erdogan’s foreign policy stance (for example, relating to Turkish intervention in Syria) to an international audience. There were also a few retweets in German referring to Turkey’s 2017 constitutional referendum; the aim of those tweets appeared to be to garner support from overseas Turkish for the ‘Yes’ vote, which would further consolidate power in Erdogan’s favour.