Politika değişikliklerinin cinsiyet algıları üzerindeki etkisi: Türkiye'nin İstanbul Sözleşmesi'nden çekilmesinin sosyal medya üzerindeki yansımalarının doğal dil işleme (NLP) yöntemleri ile analizi

In May 2011, Türkiye became the first country to sign the Istanbul Convention, a groundbreaking treaty aimed at combating violence against women and promoting gender equality. However, in March 2021, Türkiye's ruling conservative party decided to withdraw from the Convention, sparking widespread societal debate and reflecting deeper ideological divisions. This study investigates the shifts in public sentiment regarding women's issues in Türkiye following the country's withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention. Using natural language processing (NLP) techniques and BERT-based deep learning models, a large dataset of 55 million Turkish tweets from over 200,000 users is analysed to examine the changes in discourse related to women's issues across different ideologies, genders, and age groups. To enhance the analysis, GPT-based large language models were integrated to annotate tweets based on challenges women face, such as sexual harassment, domestic violence, and gender-based discrimination, revealing how different topics elicited varied emotional tones and ideological responses. The analysis reveals significant emotional and ideological divides, challenging binary assumptions that pro-equality ideologies would become more negative while anti-gender ideologies would shift positively. Instead, unexpected groups—particularly Islamist women and feminist men—demonstrated the sharpest increases in negativity. This suggests a notable integration of new voices into women-related discourse, defying ideological expectations. While feminist discourse remained consistently critical, it did not escalate significantly, indicating a persistently high baseline of concern rather than a drastic spike. This study further reveals complex interaction between religion, politics, and gender discourse in Türkiye, while Conservatism remained sentimentally stable, Islamism underwent the most pronounced emotional transformation. This study sheds light on the complex emotional landscape where gender and ideology interact in unexpected ways, offering more profound insight into cultural backlash and the dynamics of public discourse on gender equality in polarized contexts.