The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Uygar Altinok, whose interest is in online news consumption in Turkey. What happens to informed citizenship under a condition of authoritarian repression as it exists here, where participation is risky, surveillance is perceived to be ever-present, and institutional trust is low?
Turkey has high levels of social media usage, but also substantial digital surveillance and repression; its media and political environment is highly polarised. Information engagement here involves strategic participation or strategic silence, and it is unclear whether informational conditions still mobilise participation.
This project drew on a nationally representative survey, focussing especially on some 800 social media users who did not say that they did not post about government policies – these are the respondents who were still brave enough to discuss such policies in public, then, on Xitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram. The interest here is in election-time engagement with political parties online, perceived agenda knowledge, incidental news exposure, and self-censorship.
So the focus is on direct engagement with elite political actors through such social media platforms, which also carries more expressive risk than activities in less visible private online spaces. The project also measured direct and incidental news exposure, familiarity with current (as of June 2025) events in the news, and strategies for self-censorship in discussion government activities (for fear of government repression and persecution).
Incidental exposure to news was a significant predictor of online political participation; news access through Instagram and Xitter was also a predictor, as was knowledge of current political agendas. Self-censorship was not a significant predictor of political participation: informational mechanisms remained stronger predictors than expressive restraint.
Why would this be the case? One explanation may be that participation does not mean an absence of fear of repercussions: people will still participate strategically. Additionally, what ‘political participation’ means might be interpreted differently across users. Users may also choose to participate in relation to personalised politics but avoid direct engagement with parties or politicians.
This means that informed citizenship still applies in authoritarian regimes like Turkey’s, too, and that participation persists under such repressive regimes, but expressive participation becomes contextual and strategic, and takes place without security. Repression alters the meaning of participation and non-participation.
