Agenda setting in social media: Case of Twitter

The new media has caused great changes in social life with its interactive environment, complex network structure and opportunities to provide anonymity. Twitter is frequently mentioned in mass events targeting governments or authorities. Twitter contains the concept of "agenda" and the most mentioned topics or hashtags are presented to users in lists. This feature can be used to draw attention to certain issues or to carry out organized studies. Twitter has appeared in events such as the Arab Spring, the Gezi Park Events, and the Occupation of Wall Street as a medium where activists organize and communicate. However, the attitude, impartiality and reliability of Twitter in such events has also become a matter of discussion. Situations such as Twitter keeping its agenda algorithm secret, not showing the number of tweets and not showing every tweet related to the topic on the agenda increase the aforementioned discussions. In this study, answers were sought to questions about what the hashtags in Twitter Turkey are, the categorical distribution of these hashtags, who created the Twitter agenda, whether Twitter interfered with the agenda, and whether Twitter could be used for propaganda purposes. As a result of the correspondence with Twitter within the scope of the study, API access permission was obtained and the Twitter Turkey agenda was recorded with an amateur software coded in Python language specific to this study between 16 September 2020 and 15 October 2020. The date range selected within the scope of the research was analyzed by dividing one day into two separate periods and examining sixty separate agenda contents. As a result of the analyzes made, Twitter Turkey's agenda generally consists of sports and entertainment content, the agenda is built with the tweets that users usually send to show their side on every issue, the agendas can be manipulated and diverted from its purpose by tweets sent by people and groups with different views, some of the US agenda by Twitter. It has been determined that the number of tweets posted all over the world about these issues has been brought to Turkey's agenda and Twitter can be used for propaganda purposes.