If Turkey's pro-government social media trolls were a corporation, their stock would have dropped dramatically over the past three months. Having popped up a couple of years ago as a fresh political startup, promising much to the Justice and Development Party (AKP), they have since experienced a slow and painful decline.

In September 2013, the ruling AKP formed a 6,000-strong team to set the political agenda, drive trends and counter its critics on social media as part of its response to the anti-government Gezi Park protests that shook Turkish streets via Facebook and Twitter as well as on the ground. The initiative, the first of its kind for the AKP, relied heavily on the participation of its youth branches and municipal administrations.

It proved difficult to organize early on and was rather ineffective. For instance, to push a hashtag onto Twitter's international trending list, hundreds of young AKP members and municipal officers had to be online at a given moment — scheduled by party headquarters — tweeting at the same time.

As the AKP's relations with the Gulenist movement soured, the party kick-started a more concerted effort to amplify its influence on social media, hiring expertise from outside the party and wooing “phenomenal” accounts, that is, ones with thousands or millions of followers.