How media structure affects online users’ reaction in Turkey

Abstract

Media has a crucial and dominant role to supply political information for citizens in democratic societies. Press freedom is a key component to evaluate the level of democracy and there is a positive correlation between democracy and press freedom (Karlekar & Becker, 2014). On our research, we look into the changes within the structure of media during the years between 2002 and 2015. By focusing on Twitter users’ activities throughout the Turkish General Election of 2015, political activities are analyzed. Under violations of press freedom in Turkey, this study aims to find out which media outlets are preferred –mainstream and non-mainstream ones–, by Twitter users, for providing the political and social information to support their ideas. Our results show that there is a correlation between the users’ ideologies and their media outlet preferences. The ones who sympathize the ruling party share the national mainstream media outlets’ links whereas the ones who sympathize the opposing parties’ share the international mainstream media outlets’ links.