It is no longer news that there was an attempted coup in Turkey when suspected military plotters tried to topple President Tayyip Erdogan. Fortunately for Erdogan, the coup failed, thanks to social media which the president employed to reach out to his supporters despite its blackout.
Erdogan addressed the country via iPhones’s FaceTime video call shown on television. He also tweeted: “I call our nation to the airports and the squares to take ownership of our democracy and our national will.” In addition, he retweeted posts from the Prime minister and the official presidency account condemning the coup.
Social media and Erdogan before the attempted coup were foes as he doesn’t hesitate to block it during crises and political uncertainty. In 2014 he was reported to have said: ‘We will not leave this nation at the mercy of YouTube and Facebook. We will take all the necessary steps in the strongest way including barring social media. He added that the two sites were being used for all kinds of immorality, all kinds of espionage.
With the positive role social media played during the failed coup in Turkey, it has lent another tangible reason to the raging debate on whether governments in different parts of the world including Africa should gag or regulate it.
