ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three case studies from Turkey (the Roboski massacre, the Kabata? incident, and the failed coup) to unsettle the simplistic connections established between post-truth, dis/misinformation and digital communication technologies. Instead, we adopt a political economic lens to examine the connections between post-truth and hegemonic narratives and specifically the contexts in which these narratives are produced and maintained. We discuss how the AKP government’s political economic capture of the news media since the 2010s served as an agent of post-truth in each of the aforementioned cases. To highlight the socio-cultural contexts in which post-truth transpires, we also discuss the AKP’s mobilization of its preferred narratives to exploit existing gender, ethnic and national cleavages. We further direct attention to some of the recent strategies deployed by the government to contend with changes in the networked media environment (e.g., establishing troll armies, mobilizing bot accounts). Overall, our focus on the state and media capture enable us to go beyond the typical technology-oriented debates, emphasize the role of hegemonic-contexts in which post-truth regimes thrive, and ultimately extend the predominantly Western emphasis on post-truth scholarship.
