Since the protests began I have acquired a veritable wealth of new
vocabulary. The chants, the graffiti, the analysis, the tweets – all have
provided a flood of new terms to get my head around. The most overheard one I
think has to be “şerefsiz orospu çocuğu” (shameless son of a whore). But one of
the most memorable I’ve come across was the concept of “bilgi kirliliği” –
translated literally as “information pollution” and meaning the corruption of
information, in other words falsehoods and hearsay masquerading as truths or
objective facts.
I first saw this applied after a friend of mine posted a photo of a man
with horrific back injuries, alongside a caption claiming it showed a protester
who had been run over by a TOMA (armoured vehicle). This may well have been the source of the
injuries depicted – but it had nothing to do with Turkey or these particular
protests.
I have to come clean and admit that, despite my best intentions, I
failed miserably to follow my own advice of using social media in a calm and responsible
fashion when dealing with the protests, to avoid spreading misinformation and
exaggeration and to share only confirmed facts and content. This seems to me
crucial if social media is to be a useful alternative to traditional media,
especially when the latter is plagued by censorship and pro-government bias, as
well as to avoid doing harm to our own cause by spreading panic or lies. But in
the end, I also found myself caught up in the digital histrionics. I made two
textbook errors which I deeply regret.
The first was sharing a photo that had been widely circulating, which
showed the Bosphorus Bridge absolutely filled with people, and captioned as
showing protestors crossing the bridge on foot to get to Taksim from the Asian
side of Istanbul after public transport was suspended. It was in fact a photo
from a previous marathon in the city.
The second was more serious, but in a way more easily justified. I had
been supposed to meet a friend in Taksim Square on Saturday June 1, a day after
the big crackdown, but he got caught up in the police’s assault on protesters
in Beşiktaş. He texted me later on to say what had happened, explaining how
they had thrown tear gas in all directions, that he had gone blind for 5
minutes as a result, and had to rely on strangers to guide him as he fled from
police. He added that police had been using an “orange gas” and I, idiotically,
took to social media to announce that Agent Orange was being used. The reason I
say that this was more easily justified is because I felt quite shaken at the
time and was deeply affected by it. When your friends are being tear-gassed and
attacked for no reason, you want the world to know. When anger and emotion take
over from rational consideration, this is when the slippages are most likely to
occur.
They are also symptomatic of the frustration borne out of the lack of
access to any trustworthy sources of information. We were starved of
information, by the main broadcasters and by politicians, who made statements
talking about dozens of injured people when it was patently thousands. We could
not confirm or deny anything. This was the time when the alternative news
sources – which streamed live footage from the sites of the protests, really
came into their own. But even these often suffered from a lack of accompanying
commentary or analysis to be able to apprehend exactly what was going on.
None of this excuses the mistakes, of course.* I would like to think that
I’ve learned my lesson and wouldn’t make the same errors of judgement again. I resolved to trust only what I had seen with my own eyes or heard directly from trusted eyewitness accounts, but of course you can't be everywhere at once, and the constant flow of information pouring in is at once terrifying by its volume and unpredictability, but also addictive. I have never been such an avid user of social media as I have over the past two weeks. I
suppose the only thing to do, even when enraged and frightened, is to take a
deep breath, count to ten, and try to make as certain as possible, before
clicking, that confirmed really does mean confirmed.
*Then again, some cases are rather exceptional, my newspaper – the Hürriyet Daily
News – reported on June 5th, that the death toll had risen to 3. It later published
an article saying that the death toll remained at two, while the third was merely brain-dead. Crying Agent Orange is bound to cause panic and chaos, but
it seems to me that reporting brain death as actual death is the least of sins
under the circumstances.
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