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This study investigates the nature and extent of moral panic (Cohen, S. (1972) 2011. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. 1st ed. Routledge) surrounding Arabic in Turkey from 1999 to 2024, using Ekşi Sözlük, a popular online forum in Turkey. All the topic titles related to Arabic within this time period (N = 1026) were compiled, yielding a corpus of 18,343 comments about Arabic. A six-phase thematic analysis (Braun, V., and V. Clarke. 2006. “Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology.” Qualitative Research in Psychology 3 (2): 77–101) revealed consistent perceptions of Arabic as a threat to Turkey’s linguistic unity, with a strong desire to limit its use. A notable increase in the instances of moral panic coincided with the rise in the Arabic-speaking population after the 2011 Syrian refugee crisis. Prevalent concerns included the use of Arabic as a sign of invasion and erosion of Turkish identity. Further analysis of 3200 comments, annotated based on whether they fuelled the panic atmosphere or resisted it, revealed a prevailing tendency among users to perpetuate the moral panic. Moral panic contexts elicited significantly more subsequent comments compared to non-moral panic contexts, as revealed by negative binomial regressions, indicating the amplifying effect of this moral panic on online discourse. The findings highlight the evolving dynamics of social control in the digital era amidst the complexities of multilingualism.
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