Deepfakes, Cheapfakes and Twitter Censorship Spoil Turkey’s Elections | WITH CABLE

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At night of the most important elections in Turkey in the last two decades, Can Semercioğlu went to bed early. For the past seven years, Semercioğlu has worked to teyitTurkey’s largest independent fact-checking group, but that Sunday, May 14, was surprisingly one of the quietest nights in the organization he can remember.

Before the vote, opinion polls had suggested that incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was losing support due to the devastating tremors in southeastern Turkey that killed nearly 60,000 people and a struggling economy. However, he managed to get just under 50 percent of the vote. His main opponent, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who heads the Millet Alliance group of opposition parties, received around 45 percent, meaning the two will meet in a second round scheduled for May 28.

“That night we didn’t have much work to do because people were talking about the results,” says Semercioğlu. “The opposition supporters were sad, the Erdogan supporters were happy, and that was what everyone was mainly discussing on social media.”

It was a rare moment of respite. The days before the vote and after, as the second round approaches, have been intense in Teyit, whose name translates as confirmation or verification. The morning after the election, reports of stolen votes, missing ballots and other inconsistencies, most of which turned out to be false or exaggerated, flooded social media. Semercioğlu says that his colleagues’ working hours have doubled since early March, when Erdoğan announced the election date. This election cycle has been marred by a torrent of misinformation and disinformation on social media, made difficult by a media environment that, after years of government pressure, has been accused of systematic bias toward the sitting president. That has intensified as the Erdogan administration struggles to stay in power.

“We have been working 24/7 for a long time. In these elections, misleading information about the antecedents and statements of politicians predominated. We frequently find statements out of context, distortions, manipulation and cheap fakes”, says Semercioğlu. But this was not a surprise. And, he says. “We are seeing a similar flow in the second round.”

The job of fact-checkers has been complicated by the willingness of candidates—both government and opposition—to use manipulated material in their campaigns. On May 1, a small Islamist outlet, Yeni Akit, published a doctored video allegedly showing the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an organization designated as a terrorist group by both Turkey and the US, endorsing Kılıçdaroğlu. On May 7, the same video was shown during one of Erdoğan’s campaign rallies.

“It was shocking that Erdoğan showed a doctored video showing Millet Alliance candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu together with PKK militants at rallies. It was a clearly manipulated video, but it was widely disseminated and adopted by the public”, says Semercioğlu, adding that although it was discredited by Teyit“It was quite effective.”

The video was widely circulated and made it into search results for the opposition candidate.

“When internet users turned to Google to search for Kılıçdaroğlu that day, fake news was among the top suggestions made by the algorithm,” says Emre Kizilkaya, a researcher and managing editor at diario.com.tr, a non-profit journalism website. Kizilkaya says your investigation has shown that Google results are a primary source of news for Turkish consumers, “who typically lack strong loyalty to certain news brands.” During the run-up to the election, he says that Google’s results disproportionately favored Media that were friends of the president.