Hiding dissent in plain sight: Political participation of microcelebrity accounts on Turkish Twitter

Microcelebrity involvement in politics has recently gained some attention in academic research but the emphasis is mainly on the microcelebrities that exist in settings where freedom of speech is protected. Whereas in settings like Turkey where explicit dissent is criminalised and denied public attention, digital spaces maintained by microcelebrities constitute an important site for dissident narratives gaining much needed visibility. At the same time, their visibility and reach put these accounts at a considerable risk of being detected and penalised by the authorities. In this thesis, I explore the ways Twitter microcelebrities partake in anti-government political talk on Turkish Twitter through an analysis of 97 microcelebrity accounts in the 3 months leading up to the 2018 presidential and parliamentary elections. This election period is particularly important as it took place under a state of emergency and during which the opposition parties were denied access to mass media, which meant that a large portion of political discourse was confined to online spaces. I find that despite the staggering risks, Twitter microcelebrities consistently framed partaking in anti-government political talk during elections as a duty for all microcelebrity accounts due to their ability to command public attention. In doing so, they distanced themselves from specific political parties and created narratives that appeal to a politically diverse audience by placing the emphasis on their common aim of replacing the AKP government. In fulfilling this demanding task, to mitigate the risk of lending visibility to potentially incriminating content, these accounts disguised their criticisms behind a creative language relying on their internet culture literacy and the vernacular of the oppositional subcultures in Turkey. I argue that while microcelebrity accounts promote a politics of recognition among politically diverse audiences and create a space for strategic unity, these evasion strategies that increasingly inform the conventions of political talk in online spaces, inevitably create a divide by giving political agency exclusively to those who are “in on” these online conventions