The election will be tweeted: Turkish politicians' test with social media

?We are trying to write serious things on our Twitter accounts. But some of our ministers seem to be obsessed with Twitter. One of them boasts about his thousands of followers,? a skeptical Deputy Prime Minister and government spokesperson Bülent Ar?nç said last year in a press conference.

?Tweeting has become a disease. Click click click, sending tweets all day long,? Ar?nç continued his tirade.

?Respected people are boasting about how many tweets they have sent and how many retweets they have got. What nonsense! It has gone out of control. Off with the tweets.?

At the height of the Gezi Park mass protests across Turkey in the summer of 2013, panicked by the unprecedented use of social media, then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an had, in his usual condescending and angry tone, described social media as ?the worst menace to society,? specifically citing Twitter.

However, fast forward to today, three weeks before the June 7 general election, both Ar?nç and Erdo?an seem to have hopped onto the Twitter bandwagon. Both active Twitter users, Ar?nç has 2.25 million followers with more than 2,000 tweets sent, while President Erdo?an has more than 6.3 million followers with more than 3,500 tweets sent. Erdo?an is the third most followed Twitter user in Turkey.

This year?s elections will be remembered, among many other things, as a milestone in the use of social media by politicians and the integration of social media into the campaigns - albeit mostly with no clear strategy. Almost all politicians and political parties have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, which they use to varying degrees of effectiveness. This is the election when social media could no longer be ignored.

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