AJIT-e: Academic Journal of Information Technology

Öz

With the advance on communication technologies, basic dynamics of the strategies followed in the field of political communication and foreign politics changed significantly. Countries, political actors and producers of foreign politics especially at the crisis periods begin to use social networks actively at the field of foreign journalism which is one of the essential key element for international relations system with the purpose of informing citizens. Yet, social network users according to their personal and collective identity features with sharing short and specific information about the cases like person, event, location, organization and etc. are a part of a network which we call technological grapevine. The participative nature of social networks enable sharing the political information with lots of people at the same time, becoming the voice of their thoughts and creating a discussion platform on related social networks. For ten years it’s known that political news actors are using social networks intensively especially Twitter as information fields at political communication. Official twitter accounts of political news actors and institutions with 140 character tweet messages which enable fast, simultaneous and interactive communication are used as news source and some of the tweet messages become hot topic of the media. When its evaluated in this context, the news about making SU 24 Russian plane crashed by Turkish planes due to the rules of engagement at 24th of November in 2015, became a current issue of the media. Twitter accounts of political actors and governmental institutions were used as the source of news related to the event. Because of this event subjects like; usage of social network as the news source during the process of news production, how the social networks must be used by political news actors and institutions, formation of the content and the usage culture gained currency and came up for discussion. Within this study, related with SU 24 Russian Plane crash, a comparative analysis of tweet messages which are shared in Russian and Turkish political news actors official twitter accounts will be done and by means of using twitter in the field of foreign politics, political news actors of two countries, message content and sharing features will be revealed and it will be executed if twitter messages as source of news are used effectively in media or not. In this context, questions of the study are formed like this: depending on transferring the content, how does social media determines the public agenda in an event which has an international dimension and how does it directs the public opinion? Another question that must be answered is the usage of the shared messages as a source of news in traditional media. Considering that for social media users, the agenda existing on the social media is the public opinion and it effects the thought of the users directly, with this point of view, depending on the perspective of analytical empiricism approach, this study is researched by the method of analyzing the context of tweet messages of Russian and Turkish political news actors between the dates 24th November 2015 and 1st of December 2015. While Turkish political news actors are using twitter accounts for sharing direct information, Russian political news actors are using their accounts for sharing indirect information. Within this study, based upon this basic hypothesis, totally 20 official twitter accounts including president’s accounts of both two countries, ruling and opposition parties and their leaders accounts and also the accounts of armed forces as well as two publications with the widest circulation from Russian and Turkish traditional media are taken into consideration. Although there are some differences at communication techniques and strategies the results obtained showed that in accordance with the purpose of legalizing the informing and implementation about foreign politics, political news actors of both two countries are using twitter application interactively and simultaneously, as a news source twitter application takes part in the process of news production and the tweet messages of political news actors can become a current issue.