Social media and their participatory role in Turkish politicsAbstractSocial movements have been definitely affected by information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the digital age. Today, they are mostly organized through social media where individuals can communicate easily with each other. In Turkey under an authoritarian regime where mass media have been increasingly controlled, regulated, and censored by the government, social media has been widely used, especially by educated urban youth, to oppose the government by organizing protests. Social media plays a crucial role in Turkish politics, as not only opponents of the government use them, but also government officials and supporters are very much active on social media. Young generations used social media to organize the Gezi park protests in 2013 which have had a great impact on Turkish politics. There have also been whistle-blowers on social media who have been followed by millions of people, including Russian government officials. Turkish government’s efforts to increasingly regulate social media have not succeeded since Turkish society has become more and more tech-savvy in order to have access to social media.1. IntroductionIn Turkey under an authoritarian regime where mass media has been increasingly controlled, regulated, and censored by the government, e.g. censored media coverage during Roboski massacre in 2011, the Gezi Park protests and corruption scandal in 2013, Ankara and Suruç bombings in 2015 etc., social media, as diverse as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Ek?iSözlük (Sour Dictionary), have been widely used, especially by educated urban youth (92% of students in the Gezi Park Protests (Konda Ara?t?rma ve Dan??manl?k, 2014)) to create groups where they can share their political opinions, to organize protests such as ?nternetime Dokunma! (Don’t Touch my Internet!) and the Gezi Park protests, to denounce corruption by sharing the wiretaps of the president Erdo?an and his family, and to struggle against the islamo-conservative politics of the AK Party (Justice and Development Party) government that has been ruling the country since 2002. Besides, a participatory role has been increasingly attributed to social media since not only opponents of the government, opposition politicians, journalists, and anonymous accounts that share accurate information about Erdogan’s political and daily life use it to express their voice, but also pro-government supporters, the ruling party officers and deputies, and even AK trolls who are paid by the government to constantly circulate pro-government opinions on social media are getting more and more active in the digital world. Nevertheless, the government has been enlarging its controlover social media, and new laws are made orexisting laws are amended concerning the Internet freedom that cause arbitraryblockings of YouTube and Twitter and by prosecuting many people due tocriticizing Erdogan on social media.Therefore, this paper, after elucidatingbriefly the relationship between information and communication technologies(ICTs) and social movements, aims to explain the Turkish political experiencewith social media. Firstly, it reveals social media usage in Turkey. Secondly, theattitude of young generations towards social media is being described. Later,it shows the effect of social media on the organization of Gezi Park protests.It further informs about anonymous social media users and their role in Turkishpolitics. Finally it demonstrates increasing state regulation on the Internetand social media. 2. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social movementsIn contemporary societies due to the increasing usage of theInternet, and especially of ICTs, circumstances of political participation andengagement have been changing. As Gladwell (2010) claims, nowadays activistsand protesters are ‘defined by their tools’.Even though the basic rules and norms of political activitystill prevail, ICTs have been changing the organizational patterns of local andglobal politics (Palfrey & Gasser, 2013). The phenomenon of networkedcitizen results in the constant interaction between public and private spheresof political identities in various political milieus(Loader & Mercea,2011). Therefore, ICTs play a key role in the processes of social and politicalchanges in various countries by allowingindividuals to co-produce and co-distribute information before, during, andafter political engagement (Bennett, 2012; Shirky, 2011). However, it should be noted that social media occupy the role of‘facilitators of protest rather than causes’ (Wolfsfeld et al., 2013:120). Theyare intrinsically related to both the organizational and cultural structures ofsocial movements and the conditions by which these movements are structured(Tufekci, 2014a & Tufekci, 2014d). Besides, these movements arefundamentally critical of modern institutions that are sunk into theaccusations of corruption and repression, andthey do not have leaders to coordinate and organize mobilization processes(Tufekci, 2014d; Tufekci, 2014a). As a consequence of technological developments anddecreasing economic costs of accessing the Internet, social media furnishpeople a chance to actively participate in the production and the circulationof political news and opinions that were previously under the hegemony of politicalparties and mass media organizations (Loader & Mercea, 2011; Bryer, 2011).The mutual connection between individuals, for instance at the moment ofpolitical crises when regimes try to stop online information flow, assists themto employ necessary measures to sustain their connectivity (Howard &Agarwal et al., 2011). For example, as it was the case in the Asiana Airlinesincident, information created by the users of digital media can be the onlysource for the broadcasting of certain events to larger public (Kim et al.,2015).By decentralizing the process of news production andlimiting the control of so called gate-keepers, they allow the wider public to interact and converse among eachother while also creating another scale of the importance of information sinceaccessing these created social milieus becomes more significant than accessinginformation (Meier, 2012). The access of people to information created andbroadcasted in the digital space by following certain e-mail lists and socialmedia profiles and pages therefore is not the same for each user as thevisibility and accessibility of information in these milieus are restricted tosome people who are distinguished by the others with their advantages of beinga sort of member of these groups (Kavada, 2015). On the other hand, social media do not prevent theaccumulation of information by a few entities, such as Facebook, Twitter,YouTube etc., which are the main actors in this new phenomenon (Loader & Mercea,2011). In addition, activists, politicians and journalists that were alreadyengaged in political debates and causes are the ones who use social media mostactively, and users of social media do not completely give up following mediacoverage produced by big media enterprises (Loader & Mercea, 2011).The Internet, according to Kaplan & Haenlein (2010:60),is ‘a platform to facilitate information exchange between users’. Apart frombeing platforms of strengthening existing social networks and aidingindividuals to join other networks or create new groups, social media,moreover, are platforms where new kind of decentralized and non-hierarchicalgroupings are formed (Kelly Garrett, 2006). Besides, by facilitating communication and coordination ofactors engaged in political activity they provide flexibility for theorganization of social movements (Bennett &Segerberg, 2011). For instance,as Howard & Hussain (2011) and Howard & Agarwal et al. (2011) argue,although opposition and dissent against authoritarian regimes had existed formany years in Arab countries, the adoption of social media during the Arabspring and consequently the individualization of information flow were the mainreasons for the success of respective movements since people used them to buildpolitical and social networks and to organize demonstrations simultaneously invarious places.On the other hand, according to Howard & Hussain(2011:47), although the Internet in these countries was only available to tento twenty percent of their population, which were ‘an elite made up of educatedprofessionals, young entrepreneurs, urban dwellers, and government workers’ andas a result an influential part of these societies, the strongest and toughestmovements took place in the countries where people were relatively morenetworked, and their technical knowledge about social media was relativelyhigher. Moreover, social media can be the only available means to public whenconfronting political regimes in authoritarian countries (Howard & Hussain,2011). For instance, they played a crucial role in Iran where traditionalopposition methods are completely suppressed by the government(Eaves, 2009). Asa result, the Internet has acquired a controversial role against politicalelites that rule with the methods and ideas of non-digital era (Howard & Agarwalet al., 2011). At the end, although the size of an individual’s socialnetwork affects his or her possibilities to follow diverse events and issues(Boulianne, 2015), it should be argued that social media allow individualsto personalize information in the digital space and distribute it with otherswhile restructuring the role of NGOs as facilitators rather than as directactors (Bennett &Segerberg, 2011; Shirky, 2011).3. The relationship between social media and politics in Turkey3.1. Social media usage in TurkeyTurkey, according to Howard (2010) has a significantlyonline society that uses social media to follow news and interact with eachother. Howard (2010:96) further claims that ‘Turkey’s political parties arevery active online, information technologies are prevalent, the country has ademocratic history’. Saka (2014:418) asserts that ‘Turkey is one of the top 20countries for Internet penetration (ranking 11th)’, ‘94 percent of Turkey’sonline population uses Facebook’, and ‘Turkey has the highest penetration ratein Twitter usage globally as well as being second in the world for check-ins onFoursquare’. According to PEW Research Center (2014), in Turkey, 82% ofInternet users access the internet daily, 79% of Internet users use social networkingsites, and 42% of social networking users share their political opinions onsocial networking sites. Besides, as Tufekci (2014b) and Varnali&Gorgulu(2015) highlight, Twitter with around eleven million users in Turkey, plays therole of an agora for people to access political information.In Turkey, the Internet and social media not only have beenincreasingly used by large public, but also mainstream media corporationsattempt to be more active online to reconstruct their relationship with people,who distrust them due to their economic affiliations with the Turkish governmentand its supporters (Open Society Foundations, 2012). The opposition has beenusing social media for a long time and refersthem ‘as a tool to oppose censorship’ (Tufekci, 2014b) while enforcing theirnetworks through WhatsApp, Viber, and Facebook to be politically informedagainst huge media censorship in recent years and to call for demonstrations(Tufekci, 2014c). For example, social media serve minorities, ‘such asenvironmentalist and leftist political groups’, to organize demonstrations anddenounce discriminations exercised by the government (Open Society Foundations,2012:40). Therefore, in Turkey social media can be considered as a tool toreach news and information that big media corporations do not broadcast and as atool increasingly crucial for some people’s lives (Tufekci, 2014c).Even though politicians, generally, do not interact withtheir followers on social media (Open Society Foundations, 2012), recent onlineexperiences of the opposition politicians, such as the usage of Eksi Sozluk bythe leader of the main opposition party CHP (Republican People’s Party), andthe usage of Periscope and Facebook by the leader of the pro-Kurdish party HDP(Peoples’ Democratic Party) to answer the questions of people before theelections in 2015 (Es&Hoyng, 2015) can reveal that social media have beenprogressively used in an interactive manner by the opposition politicians toreach their audiences due to increasing censorship in mass media.Twitter is widely used by government supporters and most ofthe deputies and officials of the ruling party too (Tufekci, 2014c). There arevarious examples concerning the interactive usage of social media by the rulingparty deputies, such as the creation of a poll by the Minister of Finance onTwitter for asking people’s opinions about a possible taxation of meteoritefragments found in a village by villagers (Today’s Zaman, 2015).3.2. Young generations and social media in TurkeyAccording to PEW Research Center (2014), in Turkey, 60% of18-29 years old use social networking sites. Social media in their politicallives play a key role since they do not trust and follow media coverage frombig media corporations (Celik, 2013). As a result, urban youth from middleclass origins, who have been born into the digital world and criticized ‘as anapolitical digital generation’, not only use social media to express theirdissent against the AK Party government, but they also use them to organizedemonstrations and to break long existing social boundaries between diverseidentities (Celik, 2013).3.3. The role of social media in the Gezi Park protestsAlthough only 13% of the population in Turkey have highereducation level, 60% of Gezi Park protesters had either an undergraduate or agraduate degree (Konda Arastirma ve Danismanlik, 2014). Besides, studentsconstituted a relatively big part (37%) of protesters in contrast to theirlower representation (7%) in the country’s demographic situation (KondaArastirma ve Danismanlik, 2014). Only 8% of protesters did not have a socialmedia account (Konda Arastirma ve Danismanlik, 2014). Thus as opposed to the majorityof society (71%) that initially heard about the Gezi Park protests viatelevision, 69% of protesters heard about it for the first time on social media(Konda Arastirma ve Danismanlik, 2014).Finally, people that used social mediafor accessing information about protests were critical towards the policeviolence and Erdogan in contrast to the supportive attitude towards Erdogan andpolice forces of people who followed the news about protests on television(Konda Arastirma ve Danismanlik, 2014).Therefore, as Erdogan called Twitter as a scourge (Gursel,2013), ‘social media played an important role in providing informationregarding developments during the protests and for those wishing to expresstheir support’ (Amnesty International, 2013:50). According to Tastan (2013),social media fuelled the participation of people in the Gezi Park protests.Vissers & Stolle (2014) argue that Facebook amplified the mobilization ofpeople during the Gezi Park protests.Saka (2014:420) claims that protesters were already activeon social media before the beginning of protests. Therefore, Twitter played akey role in the proliferation of the Gezi Park Protests since the firstoccupants of the Park adopted it as their tool to distribute the cutting oftrees (Tufekci, 2013). Varnali & Gorgulu (2015) underscore that there was asignificant increase in the number of daily tweets sent within Turkey from ninemillion to fifteen million during the first day of protests. The contrastbetween the censorship of big media corporations and content circulation onsocial media irritated people, and hence they went out on streets to see whathad been happening and participated in demonstrations (Tufekci, 2013). Twitter, during the Gezi Park protests, was considered as anonline platform where people could express their opinions freely and shareoccurring political events (Varnali & Gorgulu, 2015). Protesters by usingsocial media could coordinate spontaneously and broadcast police brutalitywhile affirming their presence in protest fields (Tufekci, 2014a). Protestersconstantly shared their activities in the Gezi Park or in other parts of thecountry via Facebook and Twitter (Gole, 2013). For instance, the individualprotest of Erdem Gunduz by standing silently towards Gezi Park got spreadthrough Twitter, and the hashtag #duranadam (#standingman) became a worldwidetrend topic (Gursel, 2013). However, not only protesters, but also AK Partysupporters widely used Twitter to express their disapproval for protests and tosupport Erdogan by creating hashtags, as diverse as‘#TurkeyStands-BehindThePrimeMinister, #StopLyingCNN,#ReligiousYouthFollowingEachOther’ (Varnali&Gorgulu, 2015:4).3.4. The role of @fuatavni_f and others in Turkish politics @fuatavni_f, anonymous whistle-blower who shares accurateinformation about the juridical system, police force, and foreign policy ofcurrent Turkish government, has around two million seven hundred nine thousandfollowers on Twitter as of April 18, 2016. His previous account before thecourt order that blocked its access within Turkey, according to Akarcesme(2014), ‘had reached over 1 million followers’. Besides, since he has beenrevealing diverse information about the daily life of the president Erdogan(Gurbuz, 2014), he was identified by Erdogan as one of the members of his team(Akarcesme, 2014).Not only people in Turkey follow his Twitter account tolearn what was not said by the government and mainstream media about corruptionscandals (Larson, 2014) or the affiliations of the government with rebelgroups, or even with internationally recognized terrorist groups by supplyingthem heavy weapons and arms, but also a Russian government officer during apress conference repeated the assertions of Fuatavni that had taken place amonth before the shooting of the Russian fighter by Turkish military and hadaccused Erdogan for planning shooting of a Russian fighter to prevent a loss onhis power and influence in the Syrian game (Cumhuriyet Gazetesi, 2015). Apartfrom @fuatavni_f the Turkish government also suffered from many wiretaps, whichrevealed corruptive relationships occurred between Erdogan, his family, fourministers, and pro-government businessmen shared by two anonymous Twitteraccounts @Haramzadeler333 and @Bascalan (Today’s Zaman, 2014).3.5. State regulation on the Internet and social media in TurkeyIn Turkey ‘censorship is now made easier’ (Ermert,2014).Following the Gezi Park protests and corruption scandals the Internetstarted to be increasingly regulated (Akgul & Kirlidog, 2015). As aconsequence, a new amendment, which was considered as against freedom of speechand privacy on the Internet, was passed in the parliament and approved by theex-president Gul (Akgul & Kirlidog, 2015).By repeating that Twitter and YouTube must establishofficial offices in order to sustain their activities in Turkey the Turkishgovernment has been blocking access to Twitter and YouTube many times in recentyears (Akgul & Kirlidog, 2015). Moreover, Turkey was the leader countrythat asked Twitter the most removal requests between July and December 2014(Akgul & Kirlidog, 2015; Lubbock, 2015). For instance, @Haramzadeler333 and@Bascalan were blocked following the dissemination of corruption wiretaps(Akgul & Kirlidog, 2015), and in March 2014 ‘a court order blocked Twitterfor several days’ (BBC Trending, 2014). However, these bans did not causeTwitter users to decrease their online activity, but oppositely increased it(Akgul & Kirlidog, 2015; Farrell, 2014; Saka, 2014; Freedom ResearchAssociation, 2015), more precisely the volume of tweets doubled following theban of Twitter (Es & Hoyng, 2015).According to Es & Hoyng (2015), the AK Party governmenthas been attempting to sustain their power on social media by creating an armyof AK trolls that spontaneously share pro-government information from fakeaccounts controlled by a few people paid by the government. Besides, around 70people, so far, have been‘prosecuted for insulting the president, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an,an offence punishable by up to four years in prison’ due to their posts onsocial media (Lubbock, 2015). Nevertheless, all these efforts to ban socialmedia have been resulted in creating a quite well-informed population ontechnological devices and especially on ICTs (Lubbock, 2015; Yalkin et al.,2014).4. ConclusionAs a conclusion, it should be stated that social media havebeen adopted by many people in various countries to express their politicalopinion and to participate in political activities and debates. These peopleattribute social media a very significant role in their political and sociallives as in their opinions political institutions have already lost theircredibility.In Turkey social media are considered by wide public as theonly tool to freely express their political opinion. Young generationsespecially in urban milieus use them to coordinate and interact with each otherin the moments of public dissent and anger towards the government. Bycirculating information about demonstrations and police brutality on socialmedia Gezi Park protesters could express their anger and inter-communicateduring street clashes with the police. Furthermore, well-known anonymousTwitter accounts, e.g. @fuatavni_f is followed by every one out of five Twitterusers in Turkey, occupy a crucial role in their struggle against the Turkish governmentand corruption. Finally, although the government hardens access to social mediaplatforms and the Internet in general, these measures result in improving thetechnological skills of social media users since every time a web-site orapplication is blocked more and more people get to know new tools such as VPNproviders to reach them.BibliographyAkarcesme,S. (2014). [Person of the year: FuatAvni] He says ‘Don’t just be afraid,tremble!’ and now everybody is talking about him. Today’s Zaman. Available at http://www.todayszaman.com/national_person-of-the-year-fuat-avni-he-says-dont-just-be-afraid-tremble-and-now-everybody-is-talking-about-him_368416.htmlAkgül,M., &K?rl?do?, M. (2015).Internet censorship in Turkey.Internet Policy Review, 4(2),2.AmnestyInternational. (October 2013). Gezi Park Protests: Brutal denial of the rightto peaceful assembly in Turkey.BBCTrending. (2014). #BBCtrending: The mystery Turk gagged on Twitter. The British Broadcasting Corporation.Available at http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-28658318Bennett,W. L. (2012). The personalization of politics political identity, social media,and changing patterns of participation.TheANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 644(1), 20-39.Bennett, W. L., &Segerberg, A.(2011). Digital media and thepersonalization of collective action: Social technology and the organization ofprotests against the global economic crisis. Information, Communication & Society, 14(6), 770-799.Boulianne,S. (2015). Social media use and participation: a meta-analysis of currentresearch. Information, Communication& Society, 18(5), 524-538.Bryer,T. A. (2011). The costs of democratization: Social media adaptation challengeswithin government agencies. AdministrativeTheory & Praxis, 33(3),341-361.Celik,B. (2013). The diverse revolt of Turkish youth and the production of thepolitical.OpenDemocracy. Available athttps://www.opendemocracy.net/burce-celik/diverse-revolt-of-turkish-youth-and-production-of-politicalCumhuriyetGazetesi.(2015). Rusya, ‘FuatAvni’nintweetlerinihat?rlatt?: Yazd?klar?çokenteresan.Available at http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/dunya/432987/Rusya___Fuat_Avni_nin_tweetlerini_hatirlatti__Yazdiklari_cok_enteresan.htmlEaves,E. (2009). Information is overrated. Forbes.Available at http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/18/foreign-policy-iran-vietnam-rwanda-opinions-columnists-social-media-twitter.htmlErmert,M. (2014). Internet freedom in Turkey: “It just keeps getting worse and worse”.Internet Policy Review. Available at http://policyreview.info/articles/news/internet-freedom-turkey-it-just-keeps-getting-worse-and-worse/323Es,M., &Hoyng, R. (2015). Censorship and conspiracy theories rule the day inpost-election Turkey. OpenDemocracy. Available athttps://www.opendemocracy.net/murat-es-rolien-hoyng/censorship-and-conspiracy-theories-rule-day-in-post-election-turkeyFarrell,H. (2014). Turkey’s Twitter ban is not an example of the streisand effect. The Washington Post.Available athttps://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/03/21/turkeys-twitter-ban-is-not-an-example-of-the-streisand-effect/FreedomResearch Association.(2015). Bas?n Özgürlü?ü.Gladwell,M. (2010). Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted. The New Yorker.Available at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell#ixzz10odV5zGiGöle,N. (2013). Public space democracy.Transit,44, 2013.Gurbuz,M. (2014).FuatAvni: the reason Erdogan banned Twitter?.Today’s Zaman. Available at http://www.todayszaman.com/blogs_fuat-avni-the-reason-erdogan-banned-twitter_343214.htmlGürsel,Z. D. (2013). # potsandpans: Rethinking Social Media in Istanbul during OccupyGezi. Anthropology Now, 5(3), 67-73.Howard,P. N. (2010). The digital origins ofdictatorship and democracy: Information technology and political Islam.Oxford University Press.Howard,P. N., & Hussain, M. M. (2011).The role of digital media.Journal of democracy, 22(3), 35-48.Howard,P. N., Agarwal, S. D., & Hussain, M. M. (2011). When do states disconnecttheir digital networks? Regime responses to the political uses of social media.The Communication Review, 14(3), 216-232.Kaplan, A. M., &Haenlein, M.(2010). Users of the world, unite! Thechallenges and opportunities of Social Media.Business horizons, 53(1),59-68.Kavada,A. (2015). Creating the collective: social media, the Occupy Movement and itsconstitution as a collective actor.Information,Communication & Society, 1-15.KellyGarrett, R. (2006). Protest in an information society: A review of literatureon social movements and new ICTs. Information,communication & society, 9(02),202-224.Kim,Y., Kim, Y., Lee, J. S., Oh, J., & Lee, N. Y. (2015).Tweeting the public:journalists’ Twitter use, attitudes toward the public’s tweets, and therelationship with the public. Information,Communication & Society, 18(4),443-458.KondaAra?t?rmaveDan??manl?k.(2014). Gezi Raporu.Larson,V. H. (2014). This Mysterious Twitter User Predicts Turkish GovernmentCrackdowns. Foreign Policy. Availableat http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/12/16/this_mysterious_twitter_user_predicts_turkish_government_crackdowns/Loader,B. D., &Mercea, D. (2011). Networking democracy? Social media innovationsand participatory politics.Information,Communication & Society,14(6),757-769.Lubbock,J. (2015). Freedom or dignity: media censorship in the new Turkey. OpenDemocracy.Available at https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/john-lubbock/freedom-or-dignity-media-censorship-in-new-turkeyMeier,P. (2012). Ushahidi as a liberation technology.Liberation technology: Social media and the struggle for democracy,95-109.OpenSociety Foundations. (2012). Mapping Digital Media: Turkey.Palfrey,J., & Gasser, U. (2013).Born digital:Understanding the first generation of digital natives. Basic Books.PEWResearch Center.(2014). Emerging Nations Embrace Internet, Mobile Technology.Saka,E. (2014). The AK Party’s social media strategy: controlling theuncontrollable. Turkish Review, 4(4), 418-423.Shirky,C. (2011). The political power of social media.Foreign affairs, 90(1),28-41.Tastan,C. (2013). The Gezi Park Protests in Turkey: A Qualitative Field Research. Insight Turkey, 15(3), 27-38.Today’sZaman. (2014). Twitter withholds account of whistleblowerFuatAvni in Turkey.Available at http://www.todayszaman.com/national_twitter-withholds-account-of-whistleblower-fuat-avni-in-turkey_354648.htmlToday’sZaman. (2015). Turkey says locals will not be taxed for meteorite sales.Available at http://www.todayszaman.com/latest-news_turkey-says-locals-will-not-be-taxed-for-meteorite-sales_404868.htmlTufekci,Z. (2013). Pepper?spray and penguins.Juncture,20(2), 130-132.Tufekci,Z. (2014a). Capabilities of Movements and Affordances of Digital Media:Paradoxes of Empowerment. dmlcentral. Availableat http://dmlcentral.net/capabilities-of-movements-and-affordances-of-digital-media-paradoxes-of-empowerment/Tufekci,Z. (2014b). Everybody is Getting Turkey’s Twitter Block Wrong. Medium.Available at https://medium.com/message/everyone-is-getting-turkeys-twitter-block-wrong-cb596ce5f27#.41s2i993hTufekci,Z. (2014c). The Day the Turkish Government Banned Itself From Twitter. Medium.Available at https://medium.com/technology-and-society/the-day-the-turkish-government-banned-itself-from-twitter-778b806e38e3#.1clm9f8t1Tufekci,Z. (2014d). The medium and the movement: digital tools, social movementpolitics, and the end of the free rider problem. Policy & Internet,6(2),202-208.Varnali,K., &Gorgulu, V. (2015). A social influence perspective on expressivepolitical participation in Twitter: the case of# OccupyGezi. Information, Communication & Society,18(1), 1-16.Vissers,S., &Stolle, D. (2014). The Internet and new modes of politicalparticipation: online versus offline participation. Information, Communication & Society, 17(8), 937-955.Wolfsfeld,G., Segev, E., &Sheafer, T. (2013). Social media and the Arab springpolitics comes first. The InternationalJournal of Press/Politics, 18(2),115-137.Yalkin,Ç., Kerrigan, F., &Vom Lehn, D. (2014). (Il) Legitimisation of the role ofthe nation state: Understanding of and reactions to Internet censorship inTurkey. New Media & Society, 16(2), 271-289.Get Help With Your EssayIf you need assistance with writing your essay, our professional essay writing service is here to help!Find out more