Suchergebnisse

Social uprisings clearly show that social media tools, especially Twitter, help news spread more than the press does recently. In some cases Twitter substitutes traditional media if censorship is enlarged to such a level that the mainstream media channels prefer not to reflect the actual volume of the protests. Twitter is also utilized by politicians during such events to reinforce "us vs. them" division, and to gain support and legitimization for their own actions. Using critical discourse analysis, this paper aims to investigate the recurring speech patterns in the tweets of top-level politicians during the Gezi Park protests that started in Istanbul Turkey in June 2013 and spread the country rapidly. We study the tweets to draw conclusions on whether the politicians' statements represent marginalization and polarization efforts during the Gezi Park protests. In this paper, we consider social uprising as a communal expression of both political and apolitical opposition to the party in power. Our analysis reveals that the politicians' tweets are mainly characterized by a discourse that guides the public into some conscious direction that may reproduce marginalization and polarization among the public at large.

Twitter, as a free and 140-character microblogging service, is used for many purposes, including political and administrative perspectives. While administrative use is mainly motivated by citizens-administrators interaction, including politically elected, political use is highly visible during election times, not necessarily confined to these times. In this study we focus on a 3-month period twitter use by mayoral candidates in Turkey, particularly at metropolitan cities starting from the first of January till end of the March 30, 2014 when local elections were held. Tweets are categorized as of six types (i.e. information and news sharing, location and activity sharing, personal messages, direct interaction with citizens, better public services, support mobilization) derived from literature. We aim to show, at local scales, how and for which purposes twitter is used at local elections other than that of political campaign. Our results reveal that candidates for metropolitan mayors use twitter for mainly location and activity sharing during elections times as expected. What is unexpected for the study results are tweets sent for better public services as the second most tweeted category.