Over 14 million tweets for Berkin in two days

Ahmet CAN ISTANBUL / Hürriyet

Over 14 million people tweeted over the course of March 11 and 12 for Berkin Elvan, the 15-year-old victim of police violence who died March 11 after 269 days in a coma.

Following the enormous social media activity during the Gezi Park protests last June when Elvan was injured, this is a record for Twitter in Turkey, daily Hürriyet has reported.

According to the date provided by Keyhole, just a single hashtag, #BerkinElvanÖlümsüzdür (#BerkinElvanIsImmortal), was tweeted 11.9 million times. Fifty-seven percent of tweets related to Elvan’s death were retweeted by others.

Thanks to such numbers, tweets reached around 70 million people across the world.
During the Gezi protests, 20 million tweets were sent each day. There are 12 million Twitter users in Turkey.

TİB to archive all tweets

Meanwhile, Turkey’s Telecommunications Directorate (TİB), which has become an Internet watchdog with the latest “censorship” bill, will start to archive all public tweets, daily Hürriyet also reported.

According to the report, the TİB signed a contract with a company, NGİNE, to retrieve, analyze and host a “Twitter archive” on Dec. 2. After the Dec. 17 anti-corruption investigations, however, the TİB cancelled the contract and decided to find another company. It is now reported to be actively seeking another company to award the 9.5-million-lira contract to.

It is not clear whether the deleted tweets will also be removed from the proposed archive.