The main rival of the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the presidential elections on May 14, he accused Russia of using deep fakes in the electoral campaign. These allegations of Kemal Kilicdaroglu they come hours after another candidate dropped out of the race after being the target of an online smear campaign.
“Dear Russian friends,” wrote Kilicdaroglu on Twitter, “you are behind the fabrications, conspiracies, forgeries and tapes that came to light yesterday in this country.” “If you want our friendship after May 15, don’t touch the Turkish state. We are always in favor of cooperation and friendship,” she wrote. Polls give the secular opposition leader a slight edge over Erdogan. If no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, a second round. A third candidate, Muharrem Ince, He retired. She announced his decision after being the target of an online smear campaign, which included fake images of him with women or driving luxury cars.
Ince, leader of a small opposition formation, the Fatherland Partyin the last presidential elections of 2018 it was Erdogan’s main challenger state with the main opposition party, the Chp, obtaining just over 30% of the votes. The 59-year-old politician said that with his retirement the coalition of major opposition parties would not be able to blame him in case of any defeat. Also, not gave voting instructions for another candidate even if i polls indicate that the majority of Ince voters (accredited in the polls with 2-4%) should fall on Kilicdaroglu.
It should be remembered that 2023 is the year of centenary of the Turkish Republic born from the end of the Ottoman Empire at the urging of the general Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (the father of the Turks) and that on May 14, 1950 The Demokrat Partiof conservative orientation, won the elections for the first time by defeating the CHP, the republican party founded by Ataturk himself.
Meanwhile, the incumbent president Erdogan declares that no reporter in Turkey he is imprisoned “for his ideologies or his journalistic activities” noting that the journalists who are in prison owe it to their links with terrorist groups and other crimes. During a meeting with a group of young people at the library of the presidential complex in Ankara, Erdogan recalled that he was in turn imprisoned “for a poem recited during his tenure as mayor”, indicating that his imprisonment was “motivated by ideology”.
High tension 72 hours after the vote and, as reported Human Rights Watch And Article 19, there is a risk that Erdogan and his party for the Justice and Development (AKP) can disproportionately control the entire digital world to influence the outcome of the elections. The Turkish government has, in fact, increased all efforts to censor and strengthen “control over social media and independent online news sites in view of these elections”, writes Deborah Brown, researcher at HRW, and so these elections also matter because I’m a test bed to understand the quality of the news circulating on the net and on social networks. Turkeyon the other hand, boasts the record of blocking access to social media networks during times of political turmoil or crisis, such as the February 6 earthquake.
