In this talk, I will provide an ethnographic investigation into Turkey’s increasingly digitized publics under Erdoğan’s authoritarian populism. Over the last decade, Turkish nationalism has adopted a curious expressive form: Citizens who identify as ‘Turks’ proudly boast of being ‘the most engaged nation on the Internet’ – swarming online polls, forums, comment pages to defend the nation in the new emerging online frontier. In line with authoritarian politics elsewhere, these new publics are composed of a nexus of digital-phantomic – troll armies, bots - and real citizens (Cesarino and Nardelli 2021; Maly 2019; McIntosh 2022). I ask: How are these authoritarian, post-truth publics produced through human and digital-phantomic persons? I provide some preliminary answers by analyzing what in Turkish media, politics and juridical reasoning is referred to as ‘perception operations’ [algı operasyonları]. Part-conspiracy and part-truth, these operations are framed by the government as illicit participation and contribution to public discussion that can lead to defamation, online doxxing, and criminal adjudication. My discussion revolves around data culled from online ethnography and mainstream media of three instances that expose the slippery ground of authoritarian populism (Mazzarella 2019): First, the exposure of Pelikancılar [the Pelicans], a palace-funded group that built a pro-government troll army to shift Turkish public opinion in times of crises, which led to a reframing of what ‘public funds’ and ‘public benefit’ stands for; second, accusation and defamation against citizens self-reporting from the earthquake-affected regions in the first month following the 2023 Earthquake; third, the public incitement of fear towards Syrian and Afghan refugees by far-right populist collectives that have led to instances of public assault and violence against migrants. Finally, I suggest ways in which classic anthropological concerns around public ritual, sacrifice and scapegoating can be used to more comprehensively understand the emerging digital tools of populist governance: troll armies, algorithmic and bandwidth control, filter bubbles, and the production of fake news. Works Cited Leticia Cesarino and Pedro Nardelli, “The Hidden Hierarchy of Far-Right Digital Guerrilla Warfare,” in Digital War 2 (2021): 16-21. Ico Maly, “New Right Metapolitics and the Alrogithmic Activism of Schild & Vriendedn,” in Social Media + Society 2 (2019). William Mazzarella, “The Anthropology of Populism: Beyond the Liberal Settlement,” in Annual Review of Anthropology 48(1) (2019): 45-60. Janet McIntosh, “The sinister signs of QAnon: Interpretive agency and paranoid truths in alt-right oracles,” in Anthropology today 38(1) (2022): 8-12.