SAN FRANCISCO/HONG KONG/JERUSALEM ¨C For any coup to succeed, the overthrowing party needs to control the media messaging. For last week¡¯s coup in Turkey, the military failed to tamp down one critical news source: the internet.
On the night of the coup, Turkish citizens received almost all their information through social media platforms, initially only accessible using a VPN to circumvent local restrictions. But once the Turkish government realized social media could act in their favor against the uprising, they lessened the limitations and ¡°boom, our information was coming from the streets rather than TV channels,¡± said Yaman Akdeniz, a professor at Istanbul Bilgi University.
¡°Nobody seemed to listen to the coup statement and curfew announced from the TRT, the government-owned TV channel, which was controlled by the coupsters,¡± Akdeniz said. ¡°It was not 1980, it is 2016, so smartphones and the internet beat the old coupster tactics.¡±
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