Social Media Platforms

Rodeo

Contributor
Moderator
DefenceHub Diplomat
Messages
1,330
Reactions
31 5,067
Nation of residence
Turkey
Nation of origin
Turkey
Foteign media creators already modify their content to target Turkish speakers
Please eloborate. What are these channels? I have hundreds of channels that i follow on youtube and they have no content targeted at Turkish audience

and they can profit from Turkish ad networks. We have a sizable population and and a sizable foreign audience.

They already profit on Turkish ads(or any ads that are in viewers' mother tongue.)

For instance, i'm learning to build an 8 bit computer from this wonderful channel. He doesn't upload his videos on DailyMotion or Vimeo etc. Why would he post on your platform?

 

Zafer

Experienced member
Messages
4,683
Reactions
7 7,389
Nation of residence
Turkey
Nation of origin
Turkey
Please eloborate. What are these channels? I have hundreds of channels that i follow on youtube and they have no content targeted at Turkish audience



They already profit on Turkish ads(or any ads that are in viewers' mother tongue.)

For instance, i'm learning to build an 8 bit computer from this wonderful channel. He doesn't upload his videos on DailyMotion or Vimeo etc. Why would he post on your platform?

The social media with questionable content comes from X for the most part. Youtube has relatively small questionable content. X present a dark theme to Turkish viewers and this is another reason to give them a hard time. If it were not for Alon Musk twitter would probably have gotten a harsher treatment. People should also take into account that Turkish laws required the suspension of the power of the minister communication and transportation a few weeks or days before elections (not sure if this law is still in place) to eliminate a biased policy by the ministry. While such a harsh tradition is in place making wild west of social media should be totally out of question.

More and more Youtube videos have Turkish subtitles and many of them have Turkish Youtubers who republish the content with Turkish voiceover. They want to make money from Turkish viewers who do not watch foreign language content. This will create job opportunuties for Turkish media creators.
 
Last edited:

Zafer

Experienced member
Messages
4,683
Reactions
7 7,389
Nation of residence
Turkey
Nation of origin
Turkey
We already have its alternative. It's called Yaay, developed by Turk Telekom. You can guess its popularity.

I will register on Yaay right away, as I am not active on X I haven't been looking for a replacement for it. But I have been looking for a local video site which there isn't. Why don't we list comparable local alternatives for social media.

  1. Yaay for X ✔ I am on it
  2. Yaani for Gmail ✔ I am on it


I am on Yaay. Actually I have been on Yaay all along but I didn't know, I just renewed my password.
 
Last edited:

Kartal1

Experienced member
Lead Moderator
Messages
5,174
Reactions
105 19,197
Nation of residence
Bulgaria
Nation of origin
Turkey
Guys feel free to compile a list of Turkish alternatives to mainstream ones. I am sure some of us will find a use for them.
 

Zafer

Experienced member
Messages
4,683
Reactions
7 7,389
Nation of residence
Turkey
Nation of origin
Turkey
  1. Whatsapp / Bip, Dedi
  2. Twitter / Yazbee, Yaay ✔ I am on it
  3. Google / Yaani, Vuhuv ✔ I am on it
  4. Youtube / İzlesene
  5. Flipboard / Bundle
  6. LinkedIn / Kariyernet ✔ I am on it
  7. Windows / Pardus ✔ I am on it
  8. Spotify / Fizy
  9. Facebook / Simitsi, Ellam
 
Last edited:

Maximilien Robespierre

Committed member
Messages
190
Reactions
1 221
Nation of residence
Turkey
Nation of origin
Turkey
goverment can't even protect our private info I ain't gonna trust any social media or mail created by turkey.
Everyones info here is leaked thanks to our weak security systems
 

Maximilien Robespierre

Committed member
Messages
190
Reactions
1 221
Nation of residence
Turkey
Nation of origin
Turkey
I would ban foreign social media altogather. I did warn years ago when I saw even TRT pimping their social media accounts when they came out. It is time for us to make our own and not let even small leaks in.
You are Delusional
 

Sanchez

Experienced member
Moderator
Think Tank Analyst
DefenceHub Diplomat
Messages
2,296
Reactions
79 10,435
Nation of residence
Turkey
Nation of origin
Turkey
Heavy throttling on Twitter and even Eksi tonight. Can't even access without VPN.
 

Sanchez

Experienced member
Moderator
Think Tank Analyst
DefenceHub Diplomat
Messages
2,296
Reactions
79 10,435
Nation of residence
Turkey
Nation of origin
Turkey
It is all good on Yaay, yaaaay.
Do you have a recommendation for me on where to read Maduro's next course of action in Guyana, why France is not joining the Red Sea Op and Poland's next procurements?

If anyone thinks shutting ourselves off in this world and age where you have to have a VPN to even access twitter, they deserve the brain drain we have been experiencing. There's a reason why this didn't work in the past and won't work in the future.
 

Zafer

Experienced member
Messages
4,683
Reactions
7 7,389
Nation of residence
Turkey
Nation of origin
Turkey
Do you have a recommendation for me on where to read Maduro's next course of action in Guyana, why France is not joining the Red Sea Op and Poland's next procurements?

If anyone thinks shutting ourselves off in this world and age where you have to have a VPN to even access twitter, they deserve the brain drain we have been experiencing. There's a reason why this didn't work in the past and won't work in the future.
Not just yet.

Note that twitter did not become a thing overnight.
If you keep getting fed with information from manipulative sources you will find yourself manipulated in the end. AI can beat a person without even getting noticed. Beware!
 

Sanchez

Experienced member
Moderator
Think Tank Analyst
DefenceHub Diplomat
Messages
2,296
Reactions
79 10,435
Nation of residence
Turkey
Nation of origin
Turkey
Not just yet.

Note that twitter did not become a thing overnight.
If you keep getting fed with information from manipulative sources you will find yourself manipulated in the end. AI can beat a person without even getting noticed. Beware!
Only way to get ahead of this is learning to differentiate between what's true and fake, and you can only do that by reading more, not less. I don't like being manipulated by neither foreign agents nor local agents. Yes, who controls the dripfeed of the media you consume matters, but no, you can't get a hold of this by banning 99% of the sources in the world. That is the only way to stagnate. There's a reason why CPNs exist and China is the biggest user of VPNs in the world. Also why Ottomans and Japan lost against imperialists and had to change their ways, because when the bad guys came with repeater rifles, they were still using smoothbores. Censor never worked, never will, it's due to how we are wired as thinking animals. If you don't retrieve the freely available information out there, someone else will and will beat you, every single time.
 

Bogeyman 

Experienced member
Professional
Messages
9,192
Reactions
67 31,253
Website
twitter.com
Nation of residence
Turkey
Nation of origin
Turkey

mi6-phone-1168x440px.jpeg

Poking the Bear: Social Media and Human Intelligence Recruitment​



Recent CIA social media campaigns have shown how the past can be weaponised to encourage modern-day potential agents to work with the West. The UK’s intelligence agencies would do well to take note.


The CIA recently released a video appealing to Russians disillusioned with their government to spy for the US agency. It is the third time that the agency has produced such a video, aiming to capitalise on concerns within Russia’s intelligence agencies and wider government over the implications of the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

A CIA spokesperson said that two previous campaigns, launched in 2022 and 2023, had been extremely successful, being viewed more than 2.1 million times across multiple social media platforms including Telegram, Facebook, X (previously Twitter) and Instagram. The CIA joined Telegram, the popular Russian social media platform, in May 2023, having previously issued instructions in 2022 on how disaffected Russians could contact the agency on the Dark Web.

This latest Russian-language video, titled ‘Why I contacted the CIA: the motherland’, follows the story of a fictional officer in Russia’s military intelligence agency – the GRU – reflecting on the legacy of his father, a Russian paratrooper, and his own son’s future. ‘My father was a practical man –[he] believed in Russia’, the official says, ‘He talked of cosmonauts and scientific achievements that the whole world admired’. Now, the narrator says, the real enemy is Russia’s leadership.

‘Our leaders sell out the country’, he says, ‘for palaces and yachts while our soldiers chew rotten potatoes and fire ancient weapons’. At the end of the video, the narrator says he wants to save Russia by contacting the CIA for his son’s future. ‘The people surrounding you may not want to hear the truth. We do’.

The video now has over 22,000 views on the CIA’s dedicated Russian-language feed.

At the very least, CIA and MI6 attempts to troll their Russian counterparts serve to stoke the paranoia the latter already feel

The attempt was naturally mocked by the Russian government. ‘Somebody should tell the CIA that VKontakte is much more popular here than the banned X’, said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. The CIA’s use of social media has also not been without problems; a cyber security researcher was able to exploit flaws in the agency’s Telegram channel to redirect users to his own site.

But the video is an innovative way of targeting disaffected officials. Last July, CIA Director Bill Burns told the Ditchley Foundation that Russia’s invasion created a ‘once-in-a-generation opportunity’ to recruit agents. ‘We’re not letting it go to waste’, he said.

It also echoes similar statements made in July 2023 by Sir Richard Moore, Chief of the UK’s MI6. Speaking at the UK Embassy in Prague weeks after the rebellion by Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, Moore encouraged Russian officials to reach out to his agency. ‘There are many Russians today who are silently appalled’, he said. ‘Our door is always open’.

Whether such campaigns have led to high-level human intelligence (HUMINT) recruitment remains to be seen. Yet at the very least, CIA and MI6 attempts to troll their Russian counterparts serve to stoke the paranoia the latter already feel. Famously, counterespionage is a ‘wilderness of mirrors’, and stoking that paranoia can only be a good thing – as Russia knows from its previous successful campaigns against Western intelligence during the Cold War. Fear of penetration can be just as debilitating as real agents passing information to the other side.

But the videos also tell us a lot about the use of history and nostalgia as a weapon. The CIA’s latest video plays on Russians’ love for the good old days of the Soviet Union to encourage reflection. Equally, while MI6 (rightly) does not reveal the identities of former agents, Moore’s most recent speech draws on the lessons of the past. Prague was chosen as the site of the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, an event that – like the earlier Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 – did much to help Western HUMINT. Then, as now, Russian officials ‘had no wish to be on the wrong side of history’. Soviet actions became an important ideological driver serving Western intelligence. One of those Moore certainly alluded to, yet never named, was Oleg Gordievsky – MI6’s most prized asset in the KGB, recruited in 1974. ‘The totalitarian world was’, Gordievsky wrote, ‘blinded by prejudice, poisoned by hatred, riddled by lies’. It was worth betraying – and others followed.

In today’s world where the UK’s agencies have a growing media profile, perhaps history should be used more fully than it has been up to now


History is not just a feel-good thing. It can be weaponised. Russia’s intelligence agencies know this already, having fully exploited the legacy of the Cambridge Five. The KGB’s successor organisation, the SVR, has openly exploited past successes for propaganda value. The SVR today holds ‘Kim’ Philby as the ‘true example of noble, courageous and principled service’. The stories of the Five are openly celebrated. ‘Putin has provided a financial grant to a project which is cooperating with the press bureau of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service’, says Berenice Burnett, a researcher at King’s College London, whose research focuses on the legacy of the Cambridge Five. The aim is to ‘preserve and promote information on the Five’. It remains likely, she tells me, ‘that Putin’s personal interest, and presidential cash, will continue to flow into expanding the legacy of the Cambridge Five’.

The CIA itself recognises the importance of the past. The case of Oleg Penkovsky, jointly run by US and UK officials, is told through documents available online. The agency has also previously pushed the story of Penkovsky publicly, as well as disclosing the cases of others who followed in his footsteps.

The UK’s role in running Penkovsky, while an open secret, is not officially acknowledged. For MI6, it remains policy not to disclose the names of agents or officers. Only in a few cases has this policy been waived, most notably for Keith Jeffery’s authorised history of the service. The cut-off, however, is 1949, when the service was still finding its feet against the Soviet Union. The service, while undoubtedly having its disasters, has also had significant successes, running several high-level agents inside the Soviet Bloc. Some, like Gordievsky, are known; most are not.

It is right to protect the names of those who volunteer information to the UK’s foreign intelligence agency. But, as even Moore alludes to, the past can be used to encourage modern-day potential agents to work with the West, or even stoke pre-existing paranoia in Russia.

The names of agents will always be hidden – and rightly so. Agents supply information knowing their identity will always be a secret, protecting their families and future generations from harm. But in today’s world where the UK’s agencies have a growing media profile, perhaps history should be used more fully than it has been up to now. We should also play on the past, as our opponents have done. History can be weaponised – let’s poke the bear some more.

 

Follow us on social media

Latest posts

Top Bottom