A ‘slap’ is necessary for journalism with fake followers

Information Technology Specialist Hakan Topuzoğlu stated that fake follower social media accounts make themselves appear as a very large platform, saying, ‘Since there is no obligation to provide information in site setup, they are spreading like mushrooms.’ Saying that when looking at the followers of the accounts, it can be understood that they are fake, Information Technology Specialist Hakan Topuzoğlu said, ‘With the advancement of technology, social media has become as important as traditional media. In fact, the use of social media has increased even more. Those who know this are aware that there were similar problems in traditional media before, but they tried to manipulate it. How do they do this? By creating bot accounts, meaning opening email addresses through a program and creating accounts through these addresses, these social media accounts make them follow. When entered, 100-200 thousand followers are seen, but in reality, there are no such followers. Users can understand this as follows; when they look at the list of followers, they generally see zero followers and zero posts or 3-5 shares. This helps us understand that it is a bot. Likewise, in an account with 100 thousand followers, a higher interaction is expected. This rate is said to be between 1 and 5 percent by experts. So, if you have 100 thousand followers, your posts should receive at least a thousand likes, but if it is 50-100, we can understand that the rest are actually bot followers.’ Topuzoğlu stated that the lack of obligation to inform when setting up a site leads to its rapid spread, saying, ‘Here, a certain path is followed. First, a news site is established, and establishing a news site is really easy. There are paid and free software related to this. You can set up a news site in a very short time, like 1 day. Unfortunately, you are not currently obliged to inform anyone that you have set up a news site. In fact, there are many news sites without any credits. We also provide services in establishing the infrastructure of many news sites, but we also emphasize the importance of having credits, a phone number, or a contact person. However, unfortunately, due to the lack of a legal obligation, there are many news sites without credits. After the news site is established in this way, a social media account is opened, and the numbers are increased with the bot followers we mentioned. Of course, since the user does not pay attention, they can trust the news here as if it were a very large news site or a very large social media account. Unfortunately, we have experienced this during exam times and election times as well. This leads to the transmission of incorrect information through manipulations. Even if the Disinformation Law is enacted, finding, reaching, or punishing these individuals takes time, so unfortunately, we encounter more and more of these types of social media and news sites like mushrooms every day.’ Topuzoğlu, who also said that in recent times, headlines are thrown as attention-grabbing to get clicks, stated, ‘Actually, there are fact-checking sites on the internet. That is, if we write keywords, they can come up. There are also sites that publish or share false news. It is important to research or trust sites that really have an office, have made some applications related to this, have registered with institutions like the Presidency of Communication or associations officially doing this. Unfortunately, the numbers of sites trying to deceive people to get clicks have also increased a lot lately. They create an attention-grabbing headline and make it clicked by thousands of people. Why do they do this? They do this to be able to get Google and similar ads from there. We need to stay away from these sites. If we are going to get information about an institution, it may also be a method to prefer to get information directly from the site of that institution.’