Russia Has Won the Information War in Turkey

Turkey is already one of the countries most exposed to fake news, has one of the highest ratios of bot infections in the world, and is also among the countries with lowest resistance to fake digital news, as measured by the Media Literacy Index. Heavy government controls make the media environment more susceptible to information manipulation by removing alternative voices from the online marketplace of ideas. This also makes Turkey one of the most vulnerable countries to organized computational propaganda during international political crises. In his latest article for Foreign Policy, Centre Visiting Fellow Akin Unver traces the rise of misinformation in Turkish media, and argues that fake news is not needed in Turkish social media; because domestic disinformation is rampant, Moscow has managed to infect both sides of the debate.

 

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