Browsing by Author "Bas, Ozen"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Citation Count: 1
An analysis of social media content shared by right-wing extremist groups in the United States, the Great Britain and Australia
(Istanbul Univ, Fac Communication, 2023) Baş, Özen; Bas, Ozen
The extreme right movements have increasingly appeared on social media, especially on Twitter and Facebook, coinciding with the 2019 New Zealand attack, the 2019 El Paso incident, and Britain's exit from the European Union in 2020. This study examines the content and the form of extreme right-wing activities on Facebook and Twitter to promote their ideologies. A qualitative content analysis was conducted on posts shared by extreme-right groups on public Facebook and Twitter accounts in Great Britain, the United States and Australia. The sample spans from March 15, 2019 to February 5, 2020. The posts were coded according to a coding instrument developed based on the existing literature spreading extremist ideologies on social media. The coding instrument consisted of categories and subcategories such as 'the protection of western values', 'anti-LGBT activism', 'anti-feminism', 'anti-Islam', 'anti-immigrant sentiments', 'fostering the white race', and 'anti-elitist populism'. Findings suggest that the most prevalent extremist ideologies on Facebook and Twitter posts were 'anti-elitist populism' and 'the protection of western values'. Also, extremist groups heavily shared posts that combined texts and images to spread their ideologies on social media.
Citation Count: 0
The Genderization of American Political Parties in Presidential Election Coverage on Network Television (1992-2020)
(Usc Annenberg Press, 2022) Baş, Özen; Bas, Ozen
This content analysis investigates the genderization of political parties in network news coverage of U.S. presidential campaigns over the past 28 years. Based on Bem's seminal Sex-Role Inventory, classic news values and leadership qualities were operationalized as masculine, feminine, and gender-neutral. Republicans were presented as more masculine and less feminine and gender-neutral than Democrats. These trends fluctuated some, but the differences between parties intensified over the course of the 8 presidential elections. The findings have implications for future studies that investigate the viability of gendered and transgendered candidates against the backdrop of political party identity.
Citation Count: 0
Multimodal online dissident culture in Instagram: A critique of the Turkish economy
(Sage Publications inc, 2024) Baş, Özen; Bas, Ozen
Ever-present mass surveillance has blocked the flourishing of a traditional dissident culture in Turkey. Focusing on popular 'just for fun' Instagram accounts during the lira's freefall that began in the autumn of 2021, this study seeks to identify the creative strategies for digital social resistance embedded in multimodal content sharing of posts, which are composed of visuals, text, and sound. For this, we employed a multimodal-type analysis of Instagram posts regarding Turkey's economic crisis, followed by an interpretative content analysis aiming to (1) identify, categorize, and compile a typology of the main countersurveillance strategies inherent in multimodal posts, such as memes, edited videos, and animations, Photoshop-crafted still images, and (2) explore the contextual traits of the connected dissident culture. We discuss how these multimodal-type posts support connected dissident group formation while maintaining confidentiality while criticizing governmental conduct of economic policy making in Turkey.
Citation Count: 0
Nationwide research on the uses and motivations of dating apps by young adults in the cultural environment of Turkey
(Sage Publications inc, 2023) Audry, Aylin Sunam; Baş, Özen; İnceoğlu, İrem; Cöbek, Gözde; Cobek, Gozde; Alkurt, Saygin Vedat
Since Tinder's worldwide popularity, location-based dating apps have become widespread. The existing literature mainly focuses on a single app in European and US contexts and pays little attention to other cultural contexts. This paper addresses this gap by examining dating app choices and motivations of young adults (18-29 years old) in Turkey. It examines the intersectionality of socio-demographic variables in a cultural setting that is quite different not only from European and US contexts but also from other Muslim-majority contexts. Deriving from the nationally representative survey (n = 1,498), our research finds statistically significant differences in dating app preferences and adults' motivations regarding location, sexual, gender, and religious identities. This study underlines the crucial role of cultural geography and its social fabric in mobile dating, even within the same national setting.
Citation Count: 1
The Role of Legacy Media and Social Media in Increasing Public Engagement About Violence Against Women in Turkey
(Sage Publications Ltd, 2022) Baş, Özen; Ogan, Christine L. L.; Varol, Onur
Evidence that women have paid the price of what has been labeled the shadow pandemic is found in the increase in violence against them. The rates of femicide and lack of trust in the Turkish judicial system of the authoritarian government are worrisome. Protests have been made in the streets and through social media in response. Our goal was to determine the role of legacy news media and social media in bringing awareness of the femicide issue to the public and how affective publics function surrounding a relatively unaddressed societal problem using datasets created by women's organizations. We conducted a content analysis on 150 sampled femicide cases in Turkey before and during the pandemic taken from online news sources. We investigated the quality of traditional news media coverage and the volume of social media users expressing emotional reactions to individual femicides over time. Results suggest that the journalistic performance of covering the issue of femicide fails to detail essential facts, and awareness and concern for the issue are evident in the Likes, retweets, shares, and expressions of emotional engagement provided to the victims, while online reactions to femicide have increased substantially since 2019, contributing to the formation of affective publics. The study makes a conceptual contribution to the understanding of legacy media and social media's roles in spurring public engagement about serious social problems in autocratic political contexts while advancing the methodological tools of combining social scientific techniques with computational ones.
Citation Count: 0
Seeing the Black Lives Matter Movement Through Computer Vision? An Automated Visual Analysis of News Media Images on Facebook
(Sage Publications Ltd, 2023) Baş, Özen; Bas, Ozen
In this study, automated visual analysis was used to explore how the political leanings of news media are associated with their visual representation of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. We analyzed more than 9,000 images posted on Facebook pages run by U.S. news media between August 2014 and October 2020 using commercially developed computer vision tools and a topic modeling algorithm. The results show that images used in BLM-related news coverage can be categorized into 10 distinctively themed groups that overlap with the main types of protest images uncovered by manual content analysis. Furthermore, news sources engaged in different visual representation practices depending on their partisan leanings. The patterns uncovered in this study imply that (de)legitimization of protests may take either active or passive forms. These findings contribute to theorization of the way news media might use social media platforms to (de)legitimize social protests, which may influence public opinion on social issues.