Platform Power, Regulation, and the Political Economy of Journalism in Turkey with Duru Su Kadıoğlu

Join us for a lunchtime colloquium with the Media, Inequality & Change Center's Visiting Scholar, Duru Su Kadıoğlu.

Register on Eventbrite

This talk examines how digital platforms are reshaping journalism in Turkey, focusing on shifts in revenue models, audience data practices, and the growing importance of infrastructures such as search, social media, and digital advertising. It situates these developments within broader dynamics of capital accumulation, market concentration, and data commodification, where global technology companies increasingly structure the conditions of visibility and monetization. Drawing on my dissertation research, the focus is on regulatory and policymaking processes, particularly how the Turkish state engages with platform power through competition law, media policy, and emerging forms of digital regulation. The state is not treated as external to these dynamics; regulation is understood as embedded within existing relations of dependency and asymmetry. Using Turkey as a case study, the study speaks to broader questions of platform governance in the Global South, where these processes unfold under conditions of uneven development and structural dependency, and where platform power and state intervention are closely intertwined.

About the Speaker

Duru Su Kadıoğlu is a research assistant and Ph.D. Candidate in Media and Communication Studies at Galatasaray University. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Bahçeşehir University, and her master’s degree from Galatasaray University. Her doctoral research investigates the political economy of journalism within the context of media policy and platformization, focusing on how the rise of the platform economy reshapes journalistic practices and media regulation in Turkey and the Global South.

She received a Fulbright scholarship as a Visiting Doctoral Researcher and will complete part of her dissertation in the Media, Inequality and Change Center. Her broader academic work engages with critical media political economy, platform studies, alternative media, and the intersections of media and social movements.