20 Twitter accounts monitored over Gezi protests

ISTANBUL

The Interior Ministry has prepared a report regarding the summer’s Gezi Park protests, as part of which 20 Twitter accounts, from which 7,000 tweets were posted during the protests, are put under close examination, according to Turkish daily Star.

The ministry report claims that the tweets “manipulated the protests and spread false news,” Star reported on Sept. 20.

The report also claims that 39 million tweets were written during the protests, and 150 different hashtags were created about the incidents. Around 2 million of the tweets about the Gezi protests were written in English, according to the Interior Ministry’s report.

More than 3.5 million people actively joined the protests that erupted in 80 provinces across Turkey, the report added. The official number of police detainees was 160, mostly in the İzmir province.

The ministry’s report described several groups and political parties as “marginal groups that took an active role in the protests.” The leading group among those was the Marxist-Leninist Liberation Party (MLKP), while the Anti-Capitalist Muslims are also cited among these marginal groups in the report, according to Star.