Turkey has shut more than 160 media outlets and arrested about 100 journalists since a failed coup attempt in July. But that is just half the story.

Away from shuttered news rooms and busy police stations, trolls have intensified a campaign to intimidate journalists online, hacking social media accounts, threatening physical and sexual abuse, and orchestrating “virtual lynch mobs” of pro-government voices to silence criticism.

Since January this year the International Press Institute (IPI) has logged more than 2,000 cases of online abuse, death threats, threats of physical violence, sexual abuse, smear campaigns and hacking against journalists in Turkey.

The campaign has been less remarked upon than the official onslaught against the media, which continued this week with the closure of 10 newspapers, two news agencies and three magazines.

But its insidious nature is no less unsettling. Female journalists suffer the most, with trolls using hundreds of accounts to brand them “sluts” or “whores” just for having their work published.

When women are “criticised it is never without a sexual connotation … They are bitches, they haven’t been fucked properly. That is why they are acting [and writing] in a particular way,” says Gülsin Harman, who has been coordinating the IPI’s project On the Line in Turkey.



Turkey’s macho culture has exacerbated the reaction to female writers, according to Emre Kızılkaya, one of the first journalists to write about the trolling. He says: “During the anti-government protests in Gezi park [in June 2013] they were being harassed and targeted in really nasty ways: they got death threats and and rape threats.”

The IPI says it has also seen cases of serious intimidation against pro-Kurdish journalists and Turkish citizens who work for international media outlets.

Trolls, often linked to the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), have been a feature of Turkey’s online space since the protests in Gezi park.

Journalists have become accustomed to consistent harassment from “AKtrolls”, as they are known online, but after a failed coup attempt in July – followed by an extreme government crackdown on the media – the abuse has worsened.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The head of Gülen supporters put on to the bodies of chickens in an attempt to depict them as cowards.

The tyranny has extended online to the point that “if a journalist does not regularly pay respect on social media to the people who lost their lives during the night of the coup attempt they are framed as coup supporters or even traitors”, says Harman.

“It’s almost authoritarian: you are forced to say things … even if you don’t criticise the government someone will come up on you and say that you didn’t write about x, y or z,” she adds.

Online abuse in Turkey comes in a number of forms, including through hundreds of fake accounts that adopt the personas of public figures to regurgitate abuse.

Hürriyet journalist Kızılkaya, who has always been openly critical of state policies, says he received between 800 and 900 threatening tweets from automated accounts in a matter of hours in Gezi park. Once he was sworn at by a fake account of the former US first lady Laura Bush.

Another, potentially more damaging form of abuse, comes from “influencers”, often pro-government columnists or editors who fiercely defend President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and are “instrumental in choosing targets for larger group of trolls”, according to Efe Kerem Sözeri, a Turkish journalist now living in exile in The Hague.

“Once a journalist is attacked by a well-known figure, the implication is that there is backing from a higher level,” says Harman, who believes that attackers are thriving in a culture of impunity.

Government loyalists who spot critical comments online have also been known to alert the authorities. Sözeri points to the case of a Dutch journalist, Ebru Umar, who tweeted a picture of the Turkish flag with the hashtag #FuckErdogan when she was in the country on holiday in April.

The tweet ignited an online “lynch mob” and the husband of Erdoğan’s private secretary, Taha Ün, also shared Umar’s tweet, calling on the police to “detain this creature this evening”. Soon after she was arrested and briefly detained .

sağlam irade (@tahaun) lütfen bunu ilgili tüm makamlara iletelim @umarebru bu mahluk bu akşam gözaltına alınmalı! pic.twitter.com/9FEuk2CjCe

Hacking

IPI has also found evidence of at least 20 cases where journalists were hacked and had their Twitter direct messages exposed for the world to see. “It’s obvious when it happens because they kick off by posting a picture of the president apologising for earlier criticism,” says Harman, sharing two examples.

When journalist Can Ataklı was hacked in June, a picture was tweeted with the words: “I apologise to our honourable president to whom I was unfair and bashing all this time with my libels and insults.”

A few days earlier Hasan Cemal’s account shared this message: “I apologise from all the martyrs and Turkish nation for the support I gave to the terrorists [pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic party] HDP.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I apologise to our honourable president to whom I was unfair and bashing all this time with my libels and insults’ Photograph: Screengrab/Twitter

Trolling evolution



Kızılkaya says that pro-government trolling was initially the responsibility of the youth branches of the AKP, whose members came together to discuss what they would tweet and when, “but the government quickly realised this wasn’t very efficient [while] the people they mobilised had loyalty but they weren’t online experts”.



By September 2013 efforts had professionalised. The AKP recruited 6,000 people to a new social media team, known as the New Turkey Digital Office, which was responsible for converting AKP sentiments into trending hashtags.

A month later Kızılkaya was subject to an orchestrated campaign of abuse after he criticised the government’s handling of a diplomatic crisis with Lebanon. He spoke to other journalists who had suffered similar attacks and concluded that there were “obviously centralised, orchestrated social media campaigns to silence criticism of the AKP”.

Gökhan Yücel – who ran the digital office until it was shut down after it “successfully fulfilled its mission” getting Erdoğan elected in June last year – denies ever being linked to online abuse.

“My team were all respected people in the field of political communication, digital marketing and branding. I did not employ any ‘trolls’ in the premises,” he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An employee of the pro-Kurdish television channel IMC TV cries as Turkish police raid its headquarters on 4 October. Photograph: Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty Images

But since the coup the parameters of the debate have changed. Journalists are no longer just attacked for being critical of the government. “Increasingly they are labelled as terrorists, threatened with libel or being arrested. Even those who used to speak out are running out of energy,” says Harman.

Yücel agrees that the environment is toxic but says that “if some people are trying to divide or overtake the country … officials must do [what they can] to ensure national security both on the internet and elsewhere”.

For Bülent Mumay – who had the details of a private phone call exposed and his home address tweeted – the abuse is “just air” compared with the broader threats to freedom of speech in Turkey.

He says journalists are being arrested and losing their jobs. “One day you come to your office and you see the door has been closed and there is a warning paper on the door: ‘This paper, radio, TV [station has been] seized or shut down by government,’” says the opposition journalist, who was detained for four days in the post-coup crackdown.

But while Mumay is adamant that trolling and other harassment won’t “change my mind or my journalism”, he says it does “influence my psychology: I can’t sleep well”.