In today’s multi-media ecosystem, political actors and groups have used platforms such as Twitter to present themselves as the “voice of the people,” fostering desired political opinions and social interactions, and problematising them as legitimate or illegitimate. Social media affordances allow opinions to be expressed and rendered quantifiable, comparable, and accountable through counters and rankings. However, these same affordances are also mobilised to fabricate sociality, popularity, and representation—through coordinated or self-organised practices involving automation, bots, and trolls.
It is undeniable that social media offer affordances to express opinions and render them quantifiable, comparable, and accountable through counters and rankings. On the other hand, these affordances are also extended to fabricate sociality, popularity, and representation through coordinated or self-organised fabricating practices, using automation, bots, and trolls. In the global context that “popularity—measured through likes, retweets, and reactions—becomes the sole currency of political legitimacy” (Werber 2025, p. II), we problematise claims to popularity and representation. Recent developments in AI-generated content and AI techniques—such as large language models, chatbots, and synthetic media—have further expanded these possibilities, enabling new ways of fabricating visibility, narratives, and engagement. These tools not only accelerate the spread of political narratives but also reshape how international audiences encounter and interact with political issues originating in non-Western contexts. By leveraging cross-platform social media data, the workshop will also explore how such content circulates beyond national boundaries and how international publics interpret, adapt, or contest these narratives.
Focusing on Turkey as a non-Western setting, the workshop will discuss investigate popularising and depopularising practices in relation to the current specific social and political developments, conceptualising them as a social dimension of fabrication. While the desired people, issues, and opinions are deliberately popularised through these diverse popularising practices, undesirable dissident people, issues, and opinions are depopularised through both technological and legal means, such as court proceedings, arrests, blocking accounts, and the shutdown of some platforms. The workshop will be based on case studies on current political issues (from the arrest of the prominent journalist Fatih Fatih Altaylı to the corruption operation to Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the presidential candidate of the opposition party CHP). It will try to explore and compare different fabrication practices and instruments, the roles of different actors from political parties to platforms, and their effects on the public and democracy.
Throughout the workshop, a balance is maintained between scholarly analysis and practical insight. By combining keynote theories, case studies, global comparisons, and hands-on media exercises, the agenda ensures that participants not only discuss how political issues are popularised or depopularised in Turkish social media but also actively engage with the socio-technical tools and global frames that shape these processes. This holistic design – rooted in sub-project C01’s themes of representation, AI, and popular engagement and collabored with Working Group “Global Dimension of the Popular” – creates an enriching experience with tangible scholarly outputs.

Objectives

1. Examine popularisation and depopularisation as fabrication in Turkish political social media, focusing on how people, opinions, and issues gain or lose visibility.
2. Analyse fabrication tactics—bots, trolling, coordinated campaigns, deepfakes, AI-generated content, and algorithmic curation—as tools for shaping “the popular.”
3. Situate social media within a wider media ecology, tracing its interplay with political and cultural currents in Türkiye.
4. Compare Turkish cases with global practices to highlight shared patterns and local specificities, fostering cross-context discussion.

Please see the detailed program below. The workshop language will be English. In the analysis of Turkish content, the translations will be provided, and the organisers will support the participants.