Erdogan and his leadership had little public engagement on Gezi Park development, so people used social media to have their own conversations, develop their sense of collective opposition, and then organize their protests.

The country-wide protests are actually the result of how Turkish politicians and citizens use media. The country's political elites have been trying to dominate public life through broadcast media, by controlling state-owned newspapers and television stations. But like most people, Turks like to manage their own communication networks. They prefer mobile phones and the internet as sources of news and information. And in times of crisis, they trust the information that comes from their own friends and family. The result is a kind of media cold war that pits politicians, political parties and broadcasters against civic groups, citizens, and social media.

This is not to say that Erdogan hasn't pushed a religiously conservative agenda. He has tried to curb drinking and outlaw adultery. But he has a history of reading public opinion well, learning from popular protest, and reigning in the conservatives in his party. He scrapped the law defining men as the head of household. For the 2007 elections, all of 62 female candidates running for election discarded their headscarves. He prevented 150 incumbent deputies from running again, either because of their conservative Islamic views or because they voted against letting U.S. troops pass through on the way to Iraq. So sharia law is not really on the national agenda, the ruling AK Party has done a good job, and Erdogan has been an effective leader. The economy is booming, many parts of the country are developing well, and government is not crippled by corruption.

Everyone in Turkey can tell a story about how they turned on the TV hoping for news about current events, but found game shows, beauty pageants, and nature documentaries. Even Erdogan's devotees know that the state-run news programs are grindingly uncritical. The pall of media control even has an impact on foreign broadcasters like CNN, which aired a penguin documentary within Turkey while its international broadcasters covered the clashes. Even when the country's newspapers and broadcasters began reporting on the crisis, they spun the story as being violent and local to Istanbul. Another friend, who attended the protests on Saturday, said "you see misinformation on Twitter. But social media has played a corrective role to faults in the other available media." On the days he joined in, he was part of peaceful demonstrations, and he found the Twitter streams telling stories about how the protests were country-wide and mostly nonviolent.

These days, Turks find themselves caught in the crossfire between highly politicized media organizations, so it is not surprising that when people want news they trust their own networks. The country has a dedicated community of startups designing apps, building games and generating content for the country's rapidly growing population of internet and mobile phone users. Half of the country's 75 million people are under 30. Half of Turkish citizens are online, and they are Facebook's seventh largest national audience. Government ministers and strategists do have Twitter accounts, but they still tend to treat social media as a broadcast tool, a way of pushing their perspectives out to followers. Erdogan has a twitter account with more than 2.5 million followers, but recently opined that "This thing called social media is a curse on societies."