 Hello, once again, let's talk about media and communication. Today, we examine how polarization in Turkey affects trust in news on social media and also perceptions of misinformation. We have two guests with us today, Çigdem Bosdak from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, again with us, and Sunchem Koçer from Koch University in Turkey. Both our guests will help us understand users' strategies for validating information and this concept of skeptical inertia in a polarized news environment. So altogether, let's unravel this complexity of polarization and its impact on news perception. Çigdem, Sunchem, welcome. Çigdem, too, I'll start with you and to give also some context to our listeners as we record this. There is an election process happening in Turkey, which is always a time of communication overflow on social media and on the news and I would start to ask you about the importance of this research. Thank you, Rodrigo. Misinformation itself has become a key topic in communication and media studies, looking at the increasing possibilities of dissemination of misinformation, also looking at the personalized news and media information environments of the users. It has become very difficult to assess and validate information on the side of the users and because of these difficulties, most of the studies so far also focused or most of the studies up to the point that we did this research, we're focusing more on the side of media literacy, looking at perception of misinformation and an assessment of misinformation as a matter of being able to apply the right skills. And we have seen with Sunjam that the studies focusing on Turkey show that there is a high concern on the side of the users about misinformation and we wanted to understand the Turkish context and understand the user's perceptions and engagements with misinformation. But we also believe that it is important to understand misinformation within particular contexts and the context of Turkey is a severely polarized context. And we saw ourselves during the focus groups and during the research project that polarization was one of the key elements defining how users engage with misinformation. And this was again in the pre-period of elections in Turkey, the previous local elections and we have seen that this polarized environment had a very important impact on the way people search for information about the elections and the political parties as well. Of course, Sunsem Yulen Chingdom wrote in the article that the research gap is the lack of studies exploring the context that influences the relationship between polarization, online news consumption and misinformation in the specific case of Turkey. Is this correct? In general too, the literature tends to treat misinformation as a floating global category in fact and media literacy is often presented as a global solution to misinformation almost like a global antidote. Of course, these things are very important but we need to situate these concepts into specific social and political contexts. That's what we wanted to do with this study. As Shiran was saying, Turkey is severely polarized news users in Turkey often frequently complain about their constant exposure to false news. Trust in institutions in general and media specifically is increasing the law. So how these things affect how people access, use and disseminate information and news. How political polarization influences the users trust in news and their perception of misinformation. We wanted to explore the factors driving social media users assessment of information accuracy what determines their actions for instance in the face of what they perceive as misinformation. And how do they seek to establish because these people continue using news these people continue validating in one way or another the information that they access. How do they establish their trust in this information? Okay, so with this promising context Chigdem, let us know about the findings and I understand that you're going to grasp the concept of skeptical inertia. Let us jump to the findings. We had a in this study we had a multi methods research design. We combined focus groups comparing different age groups and different socioeconomic groups. And we followed up with media diaries and individual interviews. And during the focus groups we saw that people indeed adapted a lot of different techniques for assessing information. These techniques differed according to age groups for example we have although we cannot completely generalize we saw that younger people adapted a bit more complex techniques including things like comparing multiple sources looking at the number of likes looking at the comments and the number of likes within the comments or for example employing methods like image search in Google. But also the older users that we interviewed did have certain strategies for example seeing particular information and validating them through established news outlets and so on and so forth. So all these techniques that can be considered within the framework of media literacy and news literacy were indeed in practice. However when it came to the news articles that were more related to political topics or politicized topics as the interviews define them in that form they also refer to these types of news as political news. Then more effective strategies came into the practice. So they were then evaluating information not on the basis of the accuracy of the information but on the basis of the political stance that they could read within this particular news article or this particular information. So in that sense they would consciously choose to stay in line with their already existing political views. So this was one thing that stroke both of us during the research project how aware the users were about the politicized and polarized environments of information and news in Turkey and they were saying very openly that when they see such an information they instead of although they are so skeptical and aware of this situation they would rather choose to be passive and remain in line with their already existing view. So this phenomenon of being aware of the politicized situation and the biased assessment of news but doing nothing or remaining in line with existing views was referred to as skeptical inertia in our article. Very interesting, thank you Cikdem. Sunsem, I am curious now to hear about the potential policy impacts. Can you tell us more about that? That's often the hardest question right to translate research findings into policy contexts but what we suggest here is to go to the beginning to the starting point, you know, we need to focus on or locate our research efforts next to the users first to begin with, right? We need to understand first of all how they draw the line between what is accurate and inaccurate if we want to really develop resilience in the face of misinformation trying to understand the issue from their perspectives first and we can do that by forming interdisciplinary and intersectoral groups who would engage in conversation from the perspectives of the users to begin with. So that's one thing that we can suggest as a starting point. Of course we can talk about how to decrease polarization in a context like Turkey like, you know, we need more political transparency we need better freedom of press but that is almost beyond the focus of this discussion today. We do what we are trained to do to start by researching with a shifted focus which is on the users. That's good. Cikdem, you both, so you and Sunsem mentioned in this conversation hypolarization in Turkey, low media trust, different behavior from younger and older generations. So it seems to me that there are a lot of several venues for future research here. So what's ahead of us now, research-wise? I think we need, as our research shows, adopting a qualitative in-depth and multi-level study. It is important to also look at this issue in a particular context. So we need firstly more contextualized research projects that look into this topic in depth in particular situated contexts. And I think we both agree that more comparative research could be interesting as polarization, just like misinformation, is not a globally floating term but it is experienced within particular contexts. So polarization might mean very different things in the context of Turkey than in the context of US or Brazil or in any other context, for example. So comparative studies could be really insightful in this regard. And we also believe that looking at the influences of topics, for example, which topics are more vulnerable to misinformation than others, or looking at the different time periods, for example, pre-election periods might be very differently experienced by the users than other periods. These could also all lead to very interesting research projects in relation to misinformation and polarization broadly. And we also believe that it's important to understand what makes users also more resilient to misinformation. Sun-Sem, what other materials, content can you share with our listeners to explore this topic? Sure. There are always the annual studies focusing on different countries, like the Reuters digital news reports and other reports by respected institutes. But this literature is very exciting in and on itself, especially with the recent epistemological discussions around misinformation. For instance, Sasha Altay and his friends are writing about misinformation on misinformation. How we understand misinformation and how we misunderstand misinformation. That's a very interesting article. Also, there is this shift in the literature now towards rather qualitative studies, as exemplified by Garousia Splendore's recent article on advancing a qualitative turn in news media and trust research. Cidem and I write together and separately on this issue. Cidem has wonderful individual articles about online networks in the context of polarization. I do run a lab in Turkey in PodemiLab and we continue our research with my crew. InfodemiLab.com can be visited for the context of Turkey anyway. And overall, this scholarly literature is very exciting. And podcasts shows like this one is reaching out to diverse publics as well. Thank you for the promotion of all the involved people in this talk. For those who are listening to us on the Let's Talk About Meeting Communication website, the recommended materials that Sunson just gave us, you can find them below the video. So all the recommended materials are available for you to check. Cidem, let's bring this conversation to a grand finale. So what's the punchline that perfectly captures the essence of our conversation today? Misinformation itself is not a neutral thing. It happens within particular contexts. And in the very polarized context of Turkey, we saw that polarization, which itself can take many different shapes in different contexts, has a severe effect on the way people perceive information and engage with the information. And for this reason, we would like to emphasize the importance of contextualized, qualitative studies looking at this topic, understanding misinformation from the perspective of the users. Thank you. Cidem and Suitsam, thank you very much for being with us today. For those who are watching us on YouTube, you can find all the resources, the article, and all the materials of this conversation on the Let's Talk About meeting communication website. And you can also listen to this episode wherever you get your podcast.