Social Media and Trust during the Gezi Protests in Turkey

Abstract

The Gezi Protests, an environmental sit-in that turned into a social movement in Turkey, is often compared to the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement with regard to the importance attributed to social media. This paper examines the role that social media played during the protests, with an emphasis on how trust was built and maintained among the protestors. In-depth interviews with 21 active Gezi protestors revealed that social trust and system trust were intertwined in actual practices. On one side, technological affordances worked as an interface that facilitated social identification, which helped in trusting the person behind the information. On the other side, technological affordances themselves invited different levels of trust, subject to both physical constraints and technological barriers.