Preaching to Social Media: Turkey’s Friday Khutbas and Their Effects on Twitter

In this study I analyse through machine learning the content of all Friday khutbas (sermons) read to millions of citizens in thousands of Mosques of Turkey since 2015. I focus on six non-religious and recurrent topics that feature in the sermons, namely business, family, nationalism, health, trust, and patience. I demonstrate that the content of the sermons respond strongly to events of national importance. I then link the Friday sermons with ~4.8 million tweets on these topics to study whether and how the content of sermons affects social media behaviour. I find generally large effects of the sermons on tweets, but there is also heterogeneity by topic. It is strongest for nationalism, patience, and health and weakest for business. Overall, these results show that religious institutions in Turkey are influential in shaping the public’s social media content and that this influence is mainly prevalent on salient issues. More generally, these results show that mass offline religious activity can have strong effects on social media behavior.