In the evening of the most important elections in Turkey in the past two decades, Can Semercioğlu went to bed early. For the past seven years, Semercioğlu has worked for Teyit, Turkey’s largest independent fact-checking group, but that Sunday, May 14, was surprisingly one of the quietest nights he remembers at the organization.
Before the vote, polls had suggested incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was losing support amid devastating earthquakes in southeastern Turkey that killed nearly 60,000 people and a struggling economy. Yet 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 about 45 percent, meaning the two will face each other in a second round scheduled for May 28.
“We didn’t have much work to do that night because people were talking about the results,” says Semercioğlu. “Opposition supporters were sad, Erdoğan supporters were happy, and that’s what everyone was mostly talking about on social media.”
It was a rare moment of calm. The days leading up to the vote and beyond, as the second round approaches, have been intense with Teyit, whose name translates to 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 his colleagues’ working hours have doubled since early March, when Erdoğan announced the election date. This election cycle has been marred by a deluge of misinformation and misinformation on social media, complicated by a media environment that, after years of government pressure, has been accused of systematic bias against the incumbent president. That has intensified as the Erdoğan government struggles to hold on to power.
“We have been working 24/7 for a long time. In these elections, misleading information about the backgrounds and statements of politicians prevailed. We often encountered decontextualized statements, distortions, manipulation and cheap fakes,” says Semercioğlu. But this was no surprise. And, he says. “We see a similar flow in the second round.”
The work of fact-checkers has been complicated by the willingness of candidates – government and opposition – to use manipulated material in their campaigns. On May 1, a small Islamist news outlet, Yeni Akit, published a manipulated video allegedly supporting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – an organization classified as a terrorist group by both Turkey and the US – Kılıçdaroğlu. On May 7, the same video was shown at one of Erdoğan’s campaign rallies.
“It was surprising that Erdoğan showed a manipulated video showing Millet Alliance candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu side by side with PKK militants during rallies. It was a clearly manipulated video, but it was widely distributed and adopted by the public,” says Semercioğlu, adding that while it was debunked by Teyit, “it was quite effective.”
The video was widely circulated and found its way into search results for the opposition candidate.
“When Internet users turned to Google that day to search for Kılıçdaroğlu, the fake news was one of the algorithm’s best suggestions,” said Emre Kizilkaya, researcher and editor-in-chief of Journo.com.tr, a non-profit journalistic website. Kizilkaya says his research has shown that Google results are a primary source of news for Turkish consumers, “who typically do not have strong loyalty to certain news brands.” During the election run-up, he said Google results disproportionately favored media friendly to the president.
