From town squares to Twitter: Turkey's civil rights movement
Two social media campaigns swept Turkey this week, sparking discussions of social media’s reformist, rather than revolutionary, role in the country.
Two unusual social media campaigns marked by the Turkish word "diren" (resist), the emerging umbrella brand of Turkey's new civil rights movements, took the country by storm over the past week, marking a new era in political activism and raising several questions.
The first campaign was a proactive, centrally organized, calculated action planned for July 24. The Freedom for Journalists Platform, comprised of 94 national and local media associations, planned and led the #direngazetecilik (resist, journalism) campaign to raise awareness about press freedom in Turkey.
The campaign's hashtag quickly became a worldwide trending topic on Twitter in the morning and remained on the national trending list for over 10 hours, potentially reaching over 210 million people on the web, according to TalkWalker analytics.
Social media analyst Gonzo Insight "purified" those results by eliminating "trolls who hijacked the hashtag in the evening for unrelated purposes," and found that some 40,000 Twitter users had actively participated in the campaign.
