����vlog����

The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges. 

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's top opponent was sent to prison on March 23. Istanbul's popularly elected mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, widely expected to be nominated as the main opposition's presidential candidate for the 2028 election, rejected accusations of corruption and terrorism, vowing that he "."

In the city where I was born, I now observe these developments with unprecedented concern for Turkey's democracy. I was particularly disturbed when prominent journalist Ismail Saymaz, a good friend and former colleague, was detained in the same operation last week before being released to house arrest. On March 25, seven reporters were sent to prison, including internationally acclaimed AFP photojournalist Yasin Akgul and Bulent Kilic, through what  by Turkish law-enforcement officers.

I felt disgust at the decision of Istanbul University's executive board, my alma mater, when they annulled Mayor Imamoglu's diploma shortly before the police operations. Independent legal experts are unanimous in their opinion that the board’s decision violated numerous legal rights and norms, apparently intended to disqualify the mayor from challenging Erdogan in the presidential election.

Yet I felt pride as students from my university took to the streets to reclaim what Shoshana Zuboff has termed "the right to the future tense," sparking some of the largest protests Turkey has seen in more than a decade. Every night at 8 PM, my neighborhood in Istanbul’s Asian side fills with the sounds of people banging pots and pans from their windows while flashing their lights on and off in a civic protest.

Yet I felt pride as students from my university took to the streets to reclaim what Shoshana Zuboff has termed "the right to the future tense," sparking some of the largest protests Turkey has seen in more than a decade. 

Still, the government is acting as if martial law has been declared, persistently violating constitutional rights—from restricting travel in and out of Istanbul to deploying brutal police tactics against peaceful demonstrators. At least nine journalists have been injured in recent days while covering the protests, and access to all social media and messaging platforms for almost two days.

Although the suppression of fundamental rights and freedoms is nothing new in Turkey, what Erdogan is doing today is not a totalitarian coup of a corporatist, theocratic, or communist nature. In Zuboff's terms, this represents a coup des gens that can only be observed in the instrumentarian rule of Surveillance Capitalism.

A few flashbacks can provide us with historical perspective to understand what has changed, what has remained the same, and what may soon change in Turkey. I will conclude with a brief analysis of how these developments relate to Turkish citizens' right to the future tense, and how they may one day affect any of you through the “frame of human life.”

Beyond the Arab Spring: Turkey's Digital Resistance in Global Context

In the last days of May 2013 at Hilton Istanbul, I was interviewing Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki as a reporter for Hurriyet, Turkey's newspaper of record at the time.

Marzouki was on an official visit to give a speech at the Turkish Parliament. In , his main message was simple: Whether the system is presidential or parliamentary does not matter much. A dictatorship can emerge from any regime. What can truly prevent it is only the collective will of citizens—a "coalition of moderates" that transcends polarization and unifies people around the common ground provided by constitutional rights and freedoms.

A dictatorship can emerge from any regime. What can truly prevent it is only the collective will of citizens—a 'coalition of moderates' that transcends polarization and unifies people around the common ground provided by constitutional rights and freedoms.

After we concluded the interview, the president of Tunisia—the country of the first successful change of government during the Arab Spring—went up to the hotel's balcony, pointed at a nearby park, and asked me whether there was a public protest because he could hear loud Turkish slogans. I confirmed that, yes, a group of students had erected tents there a couple of days earlier to protest the government's decision to demolish the park and build a shopping mall. They were protecting the trees and had managed to fend off the first bulldozers.

That night, Turkish police violently dispersed the peaceful demonstrators with tear gas and plastic bullets before burning down their tents. This abhorrent injustice targeting such young, innocent people triggered the largest public protests in Turkey's history as millions of citizens took to the streets. The Gezi Movement had begun.

Based on my observations in the streets and analysis of social media data, that the Gezi Movement was neither centralized or planned. Its virality was due at least partly to the involvement of thousands of young, urban, white-collar citizens with a talent for crafting highly effective communication.

In this regard, Turkey's Gezi was never like the Arab Spring, which primarily comprised popular uprisings against long-standing dictatorships with largely closed and planned economies that had little or no history of democracy.

Gezi, in fact, was far more aligned with the Indignados Movement in Spain and Occupy Wall Street in the U.S.—a spontaneous combustion of youth-led protests against increasing inequalities and the greed of financial and political elites, seen as disconnected from the populace, in Turkey which has a constitutional tradition dating back more than 200 years.

What linked all these global protests at the time was Twitter. The Gezi youth's viral creativity on this social media platform was widely covered by international media. The Turkish government attempted to counter it but failed. In 2014, a day after that Twitter had removed pro-Erdogan trolls and bot networks, the Turkish government the platform for the first time.

The Art of Salami Slicing: Erdogan's Methodical Capture of Turkish Media

Hungarian politician Matyas Rakosi is considered the first person who referred to "salami slicing tactics" in politics, where an actor proceeds step by step (usually with minor illegal or unethical moves) or eliminates enemies one by one, staying under the radar until acquiring sufficient power.

Regarding his media capture policies, Erdogan is a master of salami slicing. In his first ten years in power, he slowly acquired control of the mainstream news media, confiscating the assets of leading outlets and distributing them among his allies one by one.

He initially left the judiciary and police to his then-ally, the Fethullah Gulen movement, which launched sham trials against various opposition groups and independent journalists, always with baseless charges, empty indictments, and typically with fabricated evidence and extortion.

As both Erdogan and Gulen demanded absolute power—just like the mob—a turf war ultimately erupted between them around 2013. After realizing they were losing this battle, Erdogan's ally-turned-nemesis, Gulen, launched a military coup in 2016 as a last resort, which ultimately failed.

I was at my newspaper during the night of the coup when Gulenist soldiers stormed in and forced us out, as . Wielding his machine gun, their commander yelled that soldiers should not hesitate to fire at us if we resisted. Meanwhile, his superiors were taking control of the public broadcaster and considering bombing the TV tower in Istanbul, as their WhatsApp chats published in the indictments later revealed.

The 2016 coup attempt by the Gulenists was a classical attempt at totalitarian takeover, as if it came straight out of the 1970s. Although they managed to control some traditional media channels, millions of Turks—even those who dislike Erdogan—were quickly mobilized through digital platforms, including social media, and heroically stopped the putschists’ tanks in the streets.

Thicker Slices: Constitutional Rights Now Under a Full Frontal Assault

Since the failed coup attempt, Erdogan—now equipped with even more executive powers—has been slicing the salami thicker and thicker. For instance, he unabashedly used the failed coup as a pretext and forcefully continue his takeover of what remained of the news media, which was still resisting against all odds.

Independent journalism is again targeted by his government with even stricter legislation, but creative resistance persists.

In one way, what has happened since last week reminds us of some of our recent experiences in this regard. Constitutional rights, including the right to assembly, have been brutally violated as millions of citizens protest Erdogan. Independent journalism is again targeted by his government with , but creative resistance persists.

Similarly, the “mainstream media” largely turned a blind eye to the protests. In fact, this time most outlets aired blatantly pro-Erdogan propaganda and disinformation. As , like in Brazil, CNN's local franchise in Turkey was also taken over by an Erdogan apparatus, which led me to resign from this media group that owned Hurriyet as it was no longer possible to do journalism there.

A significant shift is occurring in how global digital platforms operate in Turkey, particularly regarding their gatekeeper role within the evolving information ecosystem.

A less-reported provision of compels digital platforms to disclose their algorithms, including content recommendation systems, to Turkish authorities. When combined with legitimate state data collection systems, as well as practices, it's reasonable to assume that Erdogan's database for influencing voter behavior, both online and offline, is at least comparable in scale and depth to .

With Erdogan's near-total control of even the “alternative” media now, facilitated in part by digital platforms, the foundation of an informed electorate—a prerequisite for democracy—has significantly eroded. If millions of Turkish citizens are now in the street, millions of others truly believe that Erdogan’s main opponent is a terrorist because that’s what they hear most on all mediums.

In this picture, digital platforms are now more than an accomplice for Erdogan. Here are a few observations:

• Until recent years, Twitter, the leading medium for news-avid Turks, was cracking down on Erdogan trolls and bots, while mostly ignoring Turkish authorities’ demands when they were politically motivated. Now renamed X by its new owner Elon Musk, the same platform has allowed pro-government trolls and bots while recently banning the accounts of , the human rights focused news outlet , as well as the accounts of . Musk several times in the past while reportedly negotiating for his potential Tesla and SpaceX investments in Turkey.

• Until recent years, Google, the primary medium for the average Turk to access news stories, was penalizing producers of clickbait and misleading publishers regardless of their corporation's size or links to government circles. For instance, all links from many large news publishers in 2014 over misleading headlines. Today, however, as Erdogan has taken over all the largest digital publishers, for misconduct including anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech and antisemitism.

• A in 2022 revealed that Turkey has the highest proportion of publishers who continue to monetize disinformation from their partnership with Google despite being flagged by fact-checkers.

• Google Search and Google News algorithms, while independent journalism outlets largely due to recent changes in the Google Discover algorithm, which they have denounced as digital censorship. Google representatives, whose photos with are widely available online, have been criticized for their limited responsiveness to journalists and political parties other than Erdogan's. Similarly, the ruling party is drafting a Digital Copyrights Law, and independent media, which would be significantly affected, report being ostracized by both the government and Google, which is expected to make payments to [mostly pro-government] publishers.

• Last week, millions of Turks searched the name of Erdogan's arrested opponent, Imamoglu, and what Google presented them was a menu of "choices" consisting only of four media outlets . In their "news stories," Imamoglu was baselessly accused of being a criminal mastermind, a corrupt mayor, and even a terrorist:

The Google News carousel features four notoriously partisan media outlets controlled by Erdogan when his main opponent’s surname, Imamoglu, was searched last week.

• Meta is to benefit from pro-Erdogan propaganda and disinformation. Following Facebook's established pattern of suppressing dissent in Turkey, Instagram was briefly banned in August, . Although access later resumed, the details of any closed-door agreements with Ankara, as with Google and X, remain unknown.

Coup of the People in the Global Human Web

An observer should take all this historical context into account when analyzing current events in Turkey with an eye to the future. Today's Young Turks are resisting a seemingly omnipotent autocrat who has been in power for more than 20 years, subjugating global corporations. While he harnesses the behavioral surplus of the populace to stay in power through unprecedented, omnichannel propaganda and disinformation, digital platforms do it for profit in Turkey's lucrative market. As such, observers should ask what would happen in their own countries if a similar autocrat held so much power for so long.

In this context, the long Erdogan putsch exemplifies what Zuboff conceptualized as coup des gens (French for "coup of the people") in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019). To describe a form of power seizure that differs from traditional political coups, Zuboff argues that surveillance capitalists, such as major technology companies, have executed a coup des gens by appropriating personal data without consent, effectively bypassing democratic oversight and individual autonomy. This "coup" is not a violent overthrow of government but rather a covert and systemic takeover of human experience for power and profit, reshaping society in ways that prioritize the interests of the few over democratic rule.

What I argue is that surveillance capitalists may include political leaders like Erdogan, who can even become the dominant actor in a coup des gens when major technology companies operate as accomplices in monopolistic socio-political environments like today's Turkey. After all, Erdogan regularly reminds business owners in Turkey and abroad how he cracked down on unions and prohibits labor strikes through police force. As Zuboff explains, what we see here is a new type of coup that "imposes the social relations of a premodern absolutist authority. It is a form of tyranny that feeds on people but is not of the people." Hence, the will of the Turkish voters is forcefully replaced by the will of abstract information systems.

In Zuboff's framework, while classical totalitarianism was about hierarchical administration of terror, the instrumentarianism of the Erdogan-led surveillance capitalism in Turkey focuses on modifying citizens' behaviors. What it produces is not a political religion but radical indifference among most of the populace, who are more dependent on Erdogan than identifying with him.

Yes, Erdogan still employs a set of “classical fascist” tools, but his primary reliance is on the instruments of Surveillance Capitalism, applying them to his own "coalition of too-moderates" while leveraging platforms to construct and reconstruct social relationships that sustain his rule. For citizens, becoming “too-moderate” means losing civic agency—whether willingly or through deception. Students and journalists constitute resilient pockets of popular resistance, shaped by their unique position in the political economy of Surveillance Capitalism.

With their outcry for their right to the future tense, the Young Turks have once again shown that Turkey's democracy is not finished, but this may be the final skirmish before the decisive battle in the ultimate war for it. Observers, especially those in countries where their own autocrats work hand in hand with digital platforms, will closely monitor Turkey as if it were a laboratory demonstrating how malignant Surveillance Capitalism can become.

In On Justice: Philosophy, History, Foundations (2020), Mathias Risse extends Aristotle's idea of the polis, arguing that justice, as a political value, is concerned with designing institutions and practices that balance cooperation and competition, enabling mutual aid. He redefines the "frame of human life" at a species-wide level, suggesting that political values pertain to shaping this global framework to ensure fair distribution and human flourishing.

In conclusion, I assert that our actions regarding justice and Surveillance Capitalism in Turkey in the coming weeks, months, and years will have tangible effects in distant parts of our Blue Planet through what Risse calls the "global human web." I can only hope that, by building much more radical coalitions for human cooperation worldwide, the long-term outcomes will be just, good, and beneficial for the greatest number of people, including the most vulnerable among us.

Emre Kizilkaya, Technology and Human Rights Fellow, Carr Center