The crazy row over #organikhosaf

If you are a foreigner in Turkey and used Twitter in the last couple of days, you were probably puzzled over the frenzy of the hashtag "organikhosaf." Let me try to explain it. 

There is a TV show on the state-run TRT called "Bir Fikrin mi Var?" (Do you have an idea?), which is the Turkish version of the Dragon's Den. People compete with their business ideas and a jury panel of investors test competitors and decide on which idea should be brought to life in the end. After 10 episodes, the winner wins 2 million Turkish Liras. In each episode three ideas compete with each other. 

On one episode, an entrepreneur-to-be woman, wearing a headscarf, presented her idea of mass producing and selling organic compote in markets and shopping malls. She said she solved the problem of compotes that have short shelf lives. On that particular episode there were two other business ideas competing with the organic compote idea. One of them was a floating snorkel and the other was a mobile psychical therapy device. The organic compote idea won on that episode but was later eliminated in the later rounds. 

However, Birgün newspaper reported it claiming that the organic compote idea had won the competition. In their post on social media, they claimed that it was a scientific competition and that the jury chose organic compote over an Alzheimer chip that would cure and assist people suffering from it. 

The events that happened after the news was posted are a classical textbook example of how social media can aid dissemination of misinformation. Unfortunately, we in Turkey are strongly divided as a country.

 Both sides don't really trust each other. For that, either side can be very quick and cruel when judging those whom they deem are in...