Speakers: 
Kerem Altıparmak
(online presentation)

Kerem Altıparmak is a lawyer, a human rights defender, and a professor. He is currently a member of the Ankara Bar Association and legal consultant to the International Commission of Jurists. He was the director of the Human Rights Centre at the Faculty of Political Science of Ankara University until October 2017. He had taught human rights law at graduate and post-graduate levels at the Ankara University until he resigned in October 2018. In 2017, Altıparmak established the Freedom of Expression Association with Prof. Yaman Akdeniz (Istanbul Bilgi University). The Association deals with a variety of issues from internet censorship and academic freedom to press freedom and artistic expression.
Together with Akdeniz, he made successful appeals to the Turkish Constitutional Court to get Youtube and Twitter bans lifted in 2014 and won another case in 2015 before the European Court of Human Rights after Turkey banned access to Youtube. Altıparmak has won the ‘Turkish Publishers Association Award’ (2014), ‘Halit Çelenk Legal Prize’ (2015), ‘Columbia Global Freedom of Expression Award’ (2016), ‘Press Association of Turkey’, ‘Press Freedom Prize’ (2016), and ‘Franco-German Prize for Human Rights and the Rule of Law’(2017). He has widely published in Turkish and English. He has a PhD degree from Leeds University (2002).

Onur Varol

Dr. Onur Varol is an Assistant Professor at the Sabanci University Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences and Principal Investigator at the VIRAL Lab. His research focuses on developing techniques to analyze online behaviors to improve individual well-being and address societal problems using online data. He was awarded Young Scientist Awards (2022) by the Turkish Science Academy. He also received TUBITAK 2247-D National Leader Researcher Grant in 2022. Prior to joining Sabanci University, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University. He completed his PhD in Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington (USA). His thesis focuses on the analysis of manipulation and threats on social media and he was awarded the Indiana University Distinguished Ph.D. Dissertation Award in 2018. He has developed a system called Botometer to detect social bots on Twitter and his team ranked top 3 worldwide at the 2015 DARPA Bot Detection Challenge. Varol has published his studies on social bots in various journals such as Nature Communications and Communications of the ACM and presented them at different conferences such as International Conference of Web and Social Media (ICWSM) and World Wide Web (WWW).

Pınar Dağ

Pınar Dağ works as a lecturer in the New Media Department of Kadir Has University. She is the co-founder of the Data Literacy Association (DLA) and Data Journalism Platform Turkey. She has been working in the fields of data literacy, open data, data visualization, and data journalism. Since 2012, she has been organizing workshops for journalists on these issues. Dağ has also been taking part in the pre-jury of Sigma Data Journalism Awards for two years.

Moderator: 
Banu Tuna

Banu Tuna graduated from Istanbul University’s Faculty of Communication in 1996. She received her master's degree from Bilgi University Faculty of Law, Human Rights Law program in 2021. The topic of her thesis is "Sexist Language and Harassment Towards Female Journalists in Social Media". She has been working in different positions of journalism from reporting to editorial directing for 25 years. Currently she is the President of the Istanbul Branch of the Journalists Union of Turkey. She is also a member of Journalists Association of Turkey (TGC), International Press Institute (IPI) and founding member of Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA). She has been working as an editor at Truth Justice Memory Center since December 2019.