“DESTROYED ARCHIVES”
In another viral video from 2011, former finance minister Mehmet Simsek explained that a special “earthquake tax” introduced after the 1999 quake that killed about 17,000 people in northwestern Türkiye was used to pay for roads and hospitals.
The tax was intended to prepare cities to better withstand earthquakes.
A popular Twitter account, @ArsivUnutmaz, with 720,000 followers, has posted more than 50 similar videos, photos and old documents since the tremor.
Many have been shared tens of thousands of times and received millions of views.
“We have seen many similar Twitter accounts created since the mid-2010s, because after the 2016 coup attempt, the government tried to reset the collective memory,” said Sarphan Uzunoglu, communications professor at Istanbul’s Bilgi University.
Following a media crackdown, “newspapers destroyed their archives to remove certain words they used in the past and that they now consider improper”, Uzunoglu added.
Erdogan unleashed a sweeping crackdown after the 2016 failed coup that placed much of the media under the government’s and its business allies’ control.
Opposition and independent media have published images and reports damaging for the government, but these never make it on Turkish television news.
Mainstream channels broadcast a continuous loop of rescue footage in the first 10 days.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
