As firefighters work day and night to battle wildfires in southern Turkey, #HelpTurkey became a trending hashtag, but careful examination of the hashtag’s origin and the accounts that popularized it revealed a sinister effort from abroad to denigrate Turkey and harm its national unity, with some innocent users unwittingly getting caught in the plot.
In an interview with Anadolu Agency, Marc Owen Jones – an assistant professor at Qatar’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University and an expert on disinformation and social media – shed some light on how false identities and automated accounts were being used to smear Turkey.
“The HelpTurkey hashtag, which reached 2.7 million people, was definitely manipulated,” he said.
Source: Anadolu Agency