Social Media Manipulation in the Post-Truth Era: The Saudi Twitter Campaign to Boycott Turkish Products

Social media platforms such as Twitter (X) and Facebook were extensively used by activists during the Arab Uprisings that began in Tunisia on December 17, 2010, and spread to Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and Syria, and were heralded during this period as “liberation technologies”. However, it is now broadly acknowledged that social media has become an effective tool for information control in the hands of authoritarian regimes. In this context, the study examines social media manipulation in the post-truth era by analyzing the Twitter boycott campaign launched by Saudi Arabia against Turkish products between October 3 and 16, 2020. While there is extensive literature on the social media operations of major powers such as the United States, Russia, and China, research on similar activities conducted by Middle Eastern countries remains limited. From this perspective, the study aims to contribute to the literature on social media operations in the Middle East. Furthermore, the boycott campaign provides an empirical example of how social media is strategically used for narrative control and perception management in international relations. The research was conducted using the Opinion Analysis Model that combines Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, and the findings were visualized through Gephi. The results demonstrate that the boycott of Turkish products in Saudi Arabia went beyond being a mere economic reaction and reveal that anti-Turkish political discourse was systematically disseminated to large audiences through nationalist emotional content and misleading information.