Performing Populism on Twitter: Trolls, Political Polarization, and Lynching in Turkey

• In Event: Mediatized Populism and the Remaking of Democracy in Asia and the Middle East

Abstract

This paper interrogates the recent political trolling phonemonenon (governing AKP’s AK Trolls) in Turkey to ask: what is the relationship between the practice of Twitter trolling and Chantal Mouffe’s understanding of democracy as agonism? Scholarship on digital media and politics has foregrounded the user but ignored how political claims for the people are made within networks (Chakravartty and Roy 2015). Discussions on Turkey’s mediascape and politics have reproduced the binaries regarding the potentials of digital technologies in terms of challenging power structures or increasing government control. Political communication researchers ignored how populism intersects with digital media, especially in the context of the Global South (Albertazzi and McDonnell 2008). In conversation with different theoretical approaches towards populism (as strategy, as discourse, as ideology, and as political logic), we interrogate the political implications of AKP’s having an eye on Twitter as the digital realm of “mediated populism,” the framework under which we analyze “AK Trolls.” In a world where digital political conversation is increasingly carried out by either paid professionals or automated bots, our study of Twitter trolls in Turkey contends that politicization of trolling produces not civil dialogue but rather a form of mediated populism through which subjects are interpellated to their own political camps and reproduce political polarization rather than a productive agonism (Mouffe 2013). Despite its potentials for deliberative democracy, Twitter does not seem to necessarily emerge as a space of discussion, the case of AK Trolls reveals. If we were to think of Twitter as a virtual street within which strangers encounter each other and contribute to public discussion, the case of AK Trolls looks more like lynching along ethnic, religious, and gendered lines through hashtags and mentions.

Author

• Ergin Bulut, Koc U