Studio Session 1 Reflection- Turkey

Going into this assignment, I really had no knowledge of the Turkish Gezi Park protests, so I was excited to learn more about their impact related to the Internet. In our research yesterday, our group started out tagging articles that summarized the protests, and then moved deeper into understanding the impact that social media, especially Twitter, was used to amplify the protests.

We were really interested by the penguin, which became a symbol of the revolution after a documentary of penguins was aired by CNN as an act of censorship during the protests in order to bar the content from broadcasts. The penguin became widely used during the movement, and there were lots of articles and political comics noting the penguin’s connection to the revolution. I definitely think this will be an interesting topic to explore further as our research continues, especially considering the use of the penguin through social media outlets to discuss the revolution.

Additionally, I am looking forward to learning more about the governmental social media “trolls” in Turkey during the protests. I was familiar with the idea that other governments had used the media to go undercover and promote political propaganda, but I didn’t realize that this was also evident through social media. In fact, many trolls were employed during the time to open fake Twitter accounts and spread slogans, comment on negative journalistic pieces, as well as manipulate people to spread false messages and trick people. I think this is especially compelling, because it considers the fact that people are so eager to believe anything they read on the Internet, which is an issue I think will be very interesting to delve deeper into.