Social Media Isn't a Threat to the Turkish Government

This article originally appeared on VICE United Kingdom.

It was 11 p.m. on a Thursday night in Yeniköy, a neighborhood in the northern part of Istanbul. My wife and I sat in our living room, watching Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan address his followers at a pre-election rally in the city of Bursa. The rant was about Twitter. “Twitter, shwitter!” he yelled at an ecstatic crowd. “We’re going to uproot it! I don’t care what the international community says. We’re dealing with an international conspiracy here!”

I switched the channel and there it was again – Erdogan's face, contorted and angry. Another channel, the same face – neatly trimmed, Islam-approved mustache bobbing up and down as he continued to shout stuff about the evils of social media, threatening to shut down Twitter and other social networking sites.

Turkey banned twitter and now everyone there is on it

This scapegoating wasn't anything particularly new, either – it's just that the target had changed. Previously, he's blamed an elusive “interest rate lobby”, the US,Israel,"the atheists" and even topless men dressed in leather for the violence and economic losses that came out of the massive Gezi protests last summer. Now, Twitter is the guilty party. “Twitter and all [the other social media outlets] – none of them are bigger than our nation," he proclaimed. The following day, authorities blocked access to Twitter – a move that was denounced by President Abdullah Gul.

Given that a leaked wiretap revealing the illicit goings-on of his government has been released in segments on Twitter every day for the past month, Erdogan’s beef with the micro-messaging site isn't exactly surprising. The government are attributing these leaks to a mysterious “parallel state” (a former suspect was the "robot lobby"), implying that the secretive Fethullah Gülen – a past ally of Erdogan's, but now a rival Islamist leader living in exile in Pennsylvania – is responsible.

The leaks started surfacing right after the reassignment of some 1,700 police officers, and roughly 120 judges and prosecutors, implicated in the "December 17 Operation" – a criminal investigation into government corruption. A number of high profile personalities (including the sons of some of Erdogan’s closest associates) have already been arrested on charges of embezzlement, bribery, smuggling and international money laundering, and inquiries are ongoing.

Leaked calls land Turkish PM in corruption scandal

The source of the leaks are two suggestively named Twitter accounts – Haramzadeler (“Sons of sinners”) and Ba? Çalan (“Prime Thief”) – which have outed Erdogan and his closest stooges’ private conversations. The (unproven) leaks have implied that there are no limits to the prime minister’s reach, suggesting he single-handedly micro-managed the fate of controversial real estate development projects and handpicked university deans (a role reserved for the president),supreme court judges (a role reserved for the High Commission of Judges and Prosecutors, a supposedly independent body) and even popular football chairmen.

The public believed it to be a case of self-censorship when privately-owned national news channels decided to broadcast cooking shows and documentaries about penguins during the massive Gezi protests, but it appears that nearly all of those decisions had been down to Erdogan. He reportedly watched every single TV show – even following the news tickers along the bottom of the screen – and read every piece of news he could.

He allegedly instructed his allies on the editorial boards to interfere with the content he disliked, pulled newscasters off the air and fired voices too critical for his taste. The illicit – and yet to be verified – leaks give the impression of a media system where all the main players, thanks to their interest in maintaining government contracts, hadn't only been complying, but actively cooperating with the government and its demands.

The Prime Minister of Turkey is in denial

Back to that ordinary Thursday night; a few hours after Erdogan’s rant about Twitter, we switched the channel to CNN Türk. On screen was the journalist Abdulkadir Selvi, a known government apologist, who was commenting on the speech we'd just watched:

“[Forces] are trying to redesign Turkey through publishing illegal recordings on this internet [sic]. Unlike how it would play out in the US, UK or France, the court orders are not fulfilled by Twitter or Facebook. If someone listened to President Obama’s private calls illegally and leaked them on Twitter, we know they would be promptly packed away to Guantanamo. When it comes to Turkey, though, nobody cares about court orders or protection of the private lives of its citizens. They have to come open their offices here and respect the Turkish law – that’s what the PM meant, otherwise he neither has [the] will, nor the power, to shut Twitter down, and I would be the first to oppose if he did," he said.

It seemed that Selvi was totally oblivious to the events that followed the rise of WikiLeaks and its massive campaign against America's military and government, in that all the subpoenas, take down notices and identity requests they sent to Twitter admins achieved absolutely nothing.

In fact, Erdogan and his co-conspirators are much luckier than their Western counterparts in many ways. As the leaks show, their focus has been largely local or, at most, regional – an illegal shipment of gold to Iran here, a bribe from Dubai there, a little power mongering and corruption on the side. This stuff is nowhere near as controversial as Edward Snowden’s NSA / GCHQ / PRISM leaks, which exposed outrageous misconduct on a global scale.

And what happened there? Well, Snowden won't be going back to Virginia any time soon, but he isn't exactly locked up in Guantanamo, either. And, despite all the uproar, it seems that operations at the British and American intelligence agencies are continuing as normal.

Erdogan and his allies need to understand what their Western counterparts have already grasped – that we're living in a society where it's much easier to revolt through social media updates than through lobbing Molotovs at government buildings, but eventually less effective. We spend every day waiting for the next leak, like our parents spent every week waiting for a new episode of Dallas. And like JR Ewing, Erdogan has become a baddy of light entertainment – someone we love to hate, just another player in a society obsessed with spectacle.

That's why all the leaks in the world ultimately won't make any difference to Erdogan or his government. No social media response to a government scandal has the power to change anything – it's all just part of the grand spectacle, turning the tyrant into a TV villain. Which is why the prime minister needs to drop his assault on Twitter, because, in the end, people will naturally lose interest in the drama. Just like Berlusconi, Bush and Sarkozy, the ratings will drop, and Erdogan will fade away into obscurity.