ISTANBUL
\nThe clip lasted 14 seconds, presented by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as proof that his rival in Sunday\u2019s election was running \u201chand in hand\u201d with outlawed Kurdish militants.
\nAired at a huge rally and beamed live on TV, the video showed opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu trying to rally his supporters to the tune of his campaign song.
\nIn the next sequence, members of Turkiye\u2019s banned PKK group echoed that call while clapping their hands to the beat of Kilicdaroglu\u2019s election jingle.
\nThe message Erdogan was trying to project was clear: the secular opposition leader had formed a union with \u201cterrorists.\u201d
\nOnly it was a montage, one of the latest pieces of disinformation to pollute the campaign of one of Turkiye\u2019s closest and most important elections in generations.
\n\u201cHow can a person sitting in the president\u2019s chair stoop this low,\u201d Kilicdaroglu, whose campaign has been endorsed by Turkiye\u2019s main pro-Kurdish party, fumed on Tuesday.
\nRunning neck-and-neck with Erdogan, Kilicdaroglu claims that \u201cforeign hackers\u201d recruited by Erdogan\u2019s team are preparing deepfakes \u2014 manipulated videos and soundbites \u2014 aimed at discrediting rivals days before the election.
\n\u201cDear Russian friends,\u201d he added on Twitter on Thursday.
\n\u201cYou are behind the montages, conspiracies, deepfake content and tapes that were exposed in this country,\u201d he said without explaining why he was blaming Russia.
\n\u201cIf you want our friendship after May 15, get your hands off the Turkish state.\u201d
\nErdogan has responded in kind, alleging that \u201can army of trolls\u201d was working for his rival.
\n\u201cYou are using lies and misinformation. You are devising schemes that even the devil would not have thought of,\u201d Erdogan told the opposition leader on television.
\nTurkiye\u2019s social media became a political battlefield last October, when parliament adopted a law making the spread of \u201cfake news\u201d punishable by up to three years in prison.
\nWeeks later, Kilicdaroglu became one of the first to be prosecuted under the law for alleging that Erdogan\u2019s Islamic-rooted government was responsible for a \u201cmethamphetamine epidemic\u201d in Turkiye.
\nDunja Mijatovic, the Council of Europe\u2019s commissioner for human rights, warned in May that the law\u2019s \u201cextensive use\u201d was having a \u201cchilling effect on journalists and critical voices.\u201d
\nSuncem Kocer, a disinformation specialist at Istanbul\u2019s Koc University, said such charges and counter-charges had never featured to this extent in past Turkish elections.
\n\u201cEverybody is trying to define what disinformation is,\u201d Kocer said. \u201cIt has turned into a weapon to kind of criminalize the opposite candidate or party. This is something new.\u201d
\nBut the actual methods of spreading disinformation remain the same, said Gulin Cavus, co-founder of Turkiye\u2019s Teyit fact checking site.
\nThey appear \u201con social networks, but also during meetings,\u201d in images that are either cropped or taken out of context.
\nIn one example earlier this week, Erdogan showed an excerpt of a newspaper article on a big screen suggesting that Kilicdaroglu had been found guilty of fraud in 1996.
\nIn the original article, quickly unearthed by journalists from Teyit, Kilicdaroglu had actually denounced fraud committed by people who took advantage of Turkiye\u2019s social security agency, which he then headed.
\n\u201cThese videos can make a real impact on people with little training in media and with digital tools,\u201d Cavus said.
\nSome of the disinformation relies on more tried and tested methods such as fake campaign literature.
\nOne leaflet claiming to come from Kilicdaroglu\u2019s team promises to withdraw Turkiye\u2019s troops from Syria and halt all military operations against the PKK.
\nKocer said all this disinformation was unlikely to sway Sunday\u2019s outcome, where turnout among Turkiye\u2019s 64 million voters is likely to be high.
\n\u201cBut disinformation certainly works toward increasing the polarized atmosphere, which is the real danger,\u201d Kocer said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ISTANBUL The clip lasted 14 seconds, presented by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as proof that his rival in Sunday\u2019s election was running \u201chand in hand\u201d with outlawed Kurdish militants. Aired at a huge rally and beamed live on TV, the video showed opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu trying to rally his supporters to the tune […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":330866,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-330835","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n