The Decline of Social Media Censorship and the Rise of Self-Censorship after the 2016 Failed Turkish Coup

41% of users (139,042 of 342,650) in the post-coup dataset voluntarily removed 18% of all post-coup tweets by switching to protected mode, deleting accounts, or deleting individual tweets; the largest groups were active users who deleted some tweets (44% of affected accounts) and users who switched to protected mode (22%).

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Zero pro-Gülen topics appeared in the public tweet set post-coup, while 70% of unreachable (deleted/protected) Gülen-related tweets were pro-Gülen; the unreachable rate for Gülen-related tweets was twice the background rate, quantifying rapid directional self-censorship on politically targeted content within days of a government crackdown.

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Tor usage in Turkey spiked sharply during the initial days of the July 2016 coup—when ISPs were actively throttling Twitter—but declined steadily in subsequent months back toward pre-coup baselines, consistent with post-coup suppression being driven by chilling effects rather than sustained network-level blocking.

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Comparing 5.6M pre-coup tweets (2015 Turkish general election) to 8.5M post-coup tweets (July–November 2016), the authors found 72% fewer government-censored tweets post-coup (142,492 vs. 513,719), with an estimated 43% of that decline attributable to reduced overall Twitter usage in Turkey and the remainder to user self-censorship.

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Twitter's official Transparency Report for July–December 2016 reported 489 censored tweets in Turkey from non-withheld accounts; the authors identified 6,402 unique censored tweets from the same period—approximately 13× more than officially reported—replicating an earlier order-of-magnitude undercount finding by Tanash et al. (2015).

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