#HelpTurkey being used to make Turkey look ‘weak, incompetent’

Last week, prosecutors in Turkey launched an investigation into the social media hashtag HelpTurkey, Anadolu reports.

The government believe this hashtag is critical of its response to the country’s devastating wildfires.

As #HelpTurkey became a trending topic on Twitter, government officials complained of a global conspiracy to make Turkey look weak. “Our Turkey is strong. Our state is standing tall,” tweeted Erdogan’s spokesman Fahrettin Altun adding the hastag StrongTurkey.

İçimizi yakan bu ateşi birlikte söndüreceğiz.
Evlerimizi birlikte inşa edeceğiz.
Yaralarımızı en kısa sürede birlikte saracağız!
Birlikte ve birlikle! #StrongTürkiyepic.twitter.com/CW6yyN2VWd

— Fahrettin Altun (@fahrettinaltun) August 2, 2021

The trending hashtag drew fire from supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who said it was designed to humiliate the government.

One Turkish actor from Istanbul called on all countries to help Turkey while firefighters were battling to contain flames that spread along its Mediterranean coastline.

https://twitter.com/enisarikan/status/1421930238838288386

The US Embassy in Turkey showed solidarity, saying it was helping as Ankara had helped it in its fight against coronavirus.

#Turkey answered our call for help with PPE early in the fight against COVID-19. We are proud to return the gesture and respond to Turkey’s request for wildfire suppression assistance/support. We will always be #strongertogether.https://t.co/QuSwKOR9xy pic.twitter.com/PJEBvFs2kz

— U.S. Embassy Türkiye (@USEmbassyTurkey) August 8, 2021

Elis Gjevori, a journalist based in Turkey, said he had been told that the hashtag had been used as an “influence operation”, adding that it had “eroded any meaningful discussion on the topic”.

The #helpturkey was likely part of an "influence operation" @marcowenjones tells me.

With more than 2.5 million tweets the hashtag has significantly eroded any meaningful discussion on the topic. https://t.co/1Y26AKrUb0

— Elis Gjevori (@Elis_Gj) August 3, 2021

Gjevori had interviewed Assistant Professor at the Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, Dr. Marc Owen Jones, who said the Twitter discussion was designed to make the government “weak, incompetent and desperate.”

3/ Some felt the message being generated on the hashtag was designed to make Turkey look weak, incompetent and desperate. This, coupled with the scale of the campaign, suggested a possible influence operation. To be clear though. The hashtag had many real users. See below. pic.twitter.com/6837Gf827Q

— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) August 2, 2021

Adding that he had mapped the use of the hashtag and found a number of accounts had deleted the tweets once they had been posted, thus registering its use but later avoiding “detection”.

10) Now we know from past EPFL research that influence operations in Turkey often use this tactic of deleting tweets after writing on a hashtag. Here the Twitter algorithm reportedly registers the trend, but the account deletes tweets to avoid detection/be repurposed. pic.twitter.com/28p9B0NvBe

— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) August 2, 2021

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