Gezi Park Protests, Corruption Investigation, and the Control of the Online Public Sphere

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the online sphere. Through the prism of two developments in 2013—the Gezi Park protests and the corruption scandal—it discusses the possibilities and limits of online communications and the AKP's authoritarian reflex toward the burgeoning networked public sphere. It shows that the AKP's regulation and control of the online public sphere along the axes of nationalism, statism, and religious conservatism are not new, and that it has used three types of controls. These are first-generation controls that consist of Internet filtering and blocking, second-generation controls that involve passing legal restrictions, content removal requests, the technical shutdown of websites, and computer-network attacks; and third-generation controls that include warrantless surveillance, the creation of “national cyber-zones,” state-sponsored information campaigns, and direct physical action to silence individuals or group.