Turkey claims anti-Erdogan Twitter campaign work of ‘bots’

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Turkey on Wednesday reacted to a viral Twitter campaign against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan involving the word “tamam,” claiming the Turkish leader’s enemies were behind the online movement.

During a televised speech to his ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) weekly parliamentary convention in Ankara on Tuesday, Erdogan said he would leave power if the people voted so in the upcoming June elections.

“Should my nation say ‘tamam,’ then [I] will step aside,” he said.

In many Western Asian languages, tamam means “okay,” and also “enough” in Turkish.

Shortly later, “tamam” took social media by storm with hundreds of thousands of Turkish users hash-tagging it to tell Erdogan “enough” of his now 15-year-long rule as the head of successive governments and an ambitious President vying for more power.

Erdogan’s rivals in the presidential election on June 24 embraced “tamam,” by posting it on their official social media pages.

Turkey charged that the viral campaign was the work of Twitter bots, a software that can automatically replicate or post tweets to the social networking site.

“Seeking to manipulate by using social media is doomed to fail,” presidential spokesperson Ibrahim Kalin told reporters in Istanbul.

“It is the nation that will make the final decision. Manipulations carried out by bots, and fake accounts will not produce a result,” he added.

The spokesperson for Erdogan’s ruling AKP, Mahir Unal, said the tweets were posted from countries where the Turkish President’s “enemies” were active, referring to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Fethullah Gulen movement which Ankara blames for the failed July 2016 coup.

Ketılda arıza vardı, onun için geciktim. T A M A M

— Selahattin Demirtaş (@hdpdemirtas) May 8, 2018

Imprisoned pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) candidate Selahattin Demirtas also joined the tweetstorm.

“There was a malfunction in the kettle, that’s why I am late. T A M A M,” his tweet read, jokingly referring to a prison kettle Demirtas and fellow inmates are supposedly using to make tea.

Demirtas regularly communicates with his supporters via his lawyers who post messages from him.

The trending word had been used over one million times on Twitter since Tuesday.