For any coup to succeed, the overthrowing party needs to control the media messaging. For last week's coup in Turkey, the military failed to tamp down one critical news source: the internet.
On the night of the coup, Turkish citizens received almost all their information through social media platforms, initially only accessible using a VPN to circumvent local restrictions. But once the Turkish government realized social media could act in their favor against the uprising, they lessened the limitations and "boom, our information was coming from the streets rather than TV channels," said Yaman Akdeniz, a professor at Istanbul Bilgi University.
"Nobody seemed to listen to the coup statement and curfew announced from the TRT, the government-owned TV channel, which was controlled by the coupsters," Akdeniz said. "It was not 1980, it is 2016, so smartphones and the internet beat the old coupster tactics."