The accuracy crisis of (online) journalism in Turkey: Unverified news reports during the 2018 presidential campaign

Abstract

With the ever-increasing Internet penetration rates in Turkey, different types of information disorder which spread through social media started to shape public and political agenda as never seen before. The number of false news stories generated with the intention of spreading either disinformation or malinformation (targeting reputation of political candidates) typically increase dramatically during election campaign periods. As such, before the 2018 presidential elections in Turkey, in which Tayyip Erdogan won by getting nearly 53% of the votes and got new executive powers, a heated debate between the two opposing camps of the election campaign not only spread to the digital platforms, but also the false news in digital platforms were used in different proportions in the political campaigns. The Turkish news verification initiative teyit.org had detected 29 major different false news claims in circulation across the social media in the two-month period before the elections. However, among 136 social media accounts, which circulate these claims that reach hundreds of thousands of people, not all are anonymous or a troll social media accounts. In fact, considerable percentage of those accounts belong to well-known news outlets, which take viral social media content as a news source without verifying. In this chapter, the aim is to demonstrate the spread of information disorder in an election period through internet news sites by analyzing the raw data gathered by teyit.org. Emphasis will also be given to the correction or removal rates of false news from these sites after verification proves them false in order to understand the spillover effect and the survival rate of disinformation against truth. © 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.