Medical Populism, Nationalism and Parody: Unmasking Digital Dissent in Turkey's COVID-19 Landscape

This chapter examines the contentious political expressions of social media influencers in Turkey amidst government failures of curbing the spread of COVID-19 while promoting the country’s reopening to foreign visitors in May 2021. Led by populist authoritarian leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s COVID-19 pandemic response was criticized by the country’s leading medical professional organization for being undemocratic, incoherent and untransparent. This chapter’s digital ethnography of Turkish social media influencers on Twitter (now ‘X’) and Instagram examines diverse forms of political resistance from diverse microcelebrities, journalists and pseudo-anonymous meme accounts. These diverse communities banded together to advocate for greater social welfare for precarious workers, challenging an official government tourism campaign determined to reopen the economy. However, this chapter also draws attention to how influencers’ critiques of medical populism nevertheless perpetuated xenophobic sentiments exemplified by social media posts from a sample of medical influencers criticizing the campaign for humiliating tourism workers and hurting national pride. This chapter argues that social media influencers’ uses of satire and parody in critiquing government policy aligned with the political opposition’s own agenda, and represent opportunities for subaltern resistance within a repressive national context while also perpetuating dangerous nationalist sentiments.