Online talk with Akin Ünver (Özyeğin University)

Grok-assisted “fact-checking” on X increasingly functions less as information seeking and more as a public, performative act. In Turkish-language political conversations, users often invoke Grok and post its answers not simply to verify claims but to signal rationality, discredit opponents, and claim epistemic authority. We conceptualize this behavior as AI-assisted performative fact-checking: a practice in which “asking the AI” becomes an audience-facing political move that converts verification into status signaling, shaming, and narrative control.

We analyse 147,265 Turkish-language tweets referencing Grok collected in 2025. To distinguish informational from performative uses of AI, we introduce the Performative Grok Index (PGI), which operationalises four observable dimensions: interrogative framing (information-seeking intent), addressivity intensity (@mentions as audience design), argument cascade depth (embedding in contested reply/quote threads), and polarization lexicon (politically charged language). Using pattern detection, transformer-based classification, topic modelling, and network analysis, we examine how Grok invocations emerge and spread in online political debate.

Preliminary findings suggest that Grok uses clusters around contested political moments and is frequently used as a rhetorical weapon rather than a neutral tool. Confirmatory outputs travel farther than disconfirmations, which are often reframed as evidence of bias. Overall, AI systems appear less as sources of answers than as instruments of epistemic signaling and narrative struggle in polarised networked publics.

The event is the first of four lectures taking place in the frame of the Summer Lecture Series of SCRIPTS Forum.

Information on the speaker:

Akin Ünver is an associate professor of International Relations at Özyeğin University, specializing in conflict research, computational methods and digital crisis communication. Since 2024, he has been coordinating DE-CONSPIRATOR, a large HorizonEU project with 15 European universities and research labs, tackling foreign information manipulation across Europe. He is a fellow of Carnegie Endowment's Digital Democracy Network and serves as a member of TikTok’s MENA-T Security Advisory Council. Previously, he served as a Research Associate at the Center for Technology and Global Affairs, Oxford University and a Senior Research Fellow at GUARD (Global Urban Analytics for Resilient Defence) at the Alan Turing Institute, and taught courses on crisis communication at Oxford, Michigan, Princeton and Essex.