Information Manipulation Strategies in Mixed Regimes during Economic Crises

• In Event: Disinformation, Misinformation and Conspiracy in the Middle East

Abstract

In recent decades, information manipulation in media has been the defining characteristic in the global wave of democratic backsliding. Information manipulation in the domestic economy is especially critical for regime stability since economic crises may cause regimes to collapse. However, autocrats of our era seem resilient even in times of crisis. How do they manipulate economic news in times of economic crisis? Using the recent currency crisis from Turkey and analyzing the entire corpora of three media outlets with supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods, this paper analyzes the prevalence of different information manipulation strategies. The results show that while pro-government outlets are more likely to selectively attribute positive economic news to government actors and negative news to external actors, they are not more likely to use this strategy as the crisis intensifies. Instead, pro-government outlets manipulate citizens’ reference points about foreign economies by portraying them negatively. They also shift the attention away from the currency news in favor of other topics within the economy. These results shed light on specific strategies autocrats use for information manipulation.

Author

• Fatih Serkant Adiguzel, Sabancı University