Benchmarking Demand: Turkey’s Contested Internet

The role of the Internet as a fundamental tool for communication and empowerment is one that should not be inhibited as the limitless nature of the medium allows for a broader, unfiltered, and more democratic exchange of information. These features become increasingly important in conditions where the mainstream media are unwilling or unable to provide the public with the information necessary to function as democratic citizens and maintain political accountability. Though an open Internet tends to be valued by more democratic governments, the percentage of countries adhering to the standards of open and free media is dismally low. In a majority of countries, governments maintain a stringent level of control over many of the mainstream information outlets, making the Internet a vital source of alternative information for the people living within these environments. While media censorship is certainly not a new phenomenon, it becomes especially noteworthy when a country experiences a sudden setback in the realms of media independence and freedom of information. Such cases allow for a more nuanced observation of how much the public values media freedom and their expectations of media performance. Turkey is a striking example of how a sudden dip in media freedom may impact the social and political climate of a country. This survey report is a product of an ongoing research project by faculty and graduate students at the Ohio State University and Koç University with support from the Center for Global Communication Studies’ Internet Policy Observatory at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication. The data in this report was collected between December 20, 2014 and February 2, 2015 and represents the views of 1161 respondents from that time. The goal of the project is to understand how people in Turkey perceive and value the debate over Internet freedoms in Turkey and how they employ the Internet and social media as alternative information resources within a heavily censored mass media environment. This is an important question more broadly as 85% of the globe’s population live within censored media systems like Turkey

URBAN INFORMALITY AND ECONOMIC VULNERABILITY THE CASE OF TURKEY

SUMMARY Based on four different national surveys in Turkey (household, shopkeepers and bazaaris and street vendors), the paper proposes that informality can be better understood as an activity resembling a continuum rather than arbitrary formal/informal dichotomies. Measuring the prevalence of informal practices through six indicators suggests that shopkeepers tend to be more formal than household while bazaaris and street vendors appear more informal. Many factors determine the degree of informality, but degree of economic vulnerability is one of the most important in capturing why and how individuals adopt informal practices. As degree of economic vulnerability increases so does degree of informality

Twitter and politics: identifying Turkish opinion leaders in new social media

Online platforms now provide a valuable medium for political socialization and mobilization. Recent events such as the Gezi Park protests, the Occupy Wall Street, or the anti-government protests in Iran demonstrate how effective social media can be in shaping an individual’s political attitudes and actions. Traditional public opinion research does not acknowledge this emerging data source to its fullest extent. In the following study, findings from the I-POST project, which has been collecting and exploring Twitter data to define how the online political debates are shaped in Turkey, are presented. Having identified over ten million active Turkish Twitter users and produced a social network graph of these users, this study identifies public opinion leadership in the Turkish online discussion space. The findings suggest that who these opinion leaders are may not follow the conventional expectations, but these leaders employ various tactics in managing their online presence and disseminating their ideas. This research endeavor as well as the findings suggests that engaging in cross-disciplinary research with scholars from different backgrounds can advance Turkish studies, in terms of both content and methodology. Most importantly, such interdisciplinary research can render significant leverage towards making Turkey more globally salient for scholarly debates