Five million tweets. That’s the task awaiting Turkish police, who have been ordered by the Islamist-leaning government to investigate the posts on Twitter since the civil unrest began nearly 20 days ago.

Social media has been at the heart of the protests, which continue to rock Turkey. It’s the images people saw on Facebook and Twitter that pushed them, literally, on to the streets in country-wide government protests.

Now, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has launched a study that will result in the examination of 5 million tweets, and it hopes, several subsequent arrests. Some 30 people in Turkey’s third-largest city, Izmir, had already been detained for supposedly encouraging people on Twitter to join the protests. The country’s Interior Minister, Muammer Guler, says social media sites are now on the government’s radar and that a complete ban is on the table.

Credit where it’s due: the AKP has tried vigorously to use social media to its benefit during the uprisings. But it hasn’t worked, which might explain the desire for a blanket ban.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for example, is an active user of Twitter, with almost 3 million followers. Ironically though, he follows nobody. One of his most recent notable tweets was when addressing the number of protestors occupying streets banging together pots and pans. “You ought not be in the streets with pots and pans, but instead with computers,” the PM wrote, to which one tweeter replied: “Yes, because I’m sending this tweet from a pan right now.” Needless to say, the PM didn’t acknowledge the humour.

Another example of the AKP’s failure to understand social media is when Ankara mayor Melik Gokcek took seriously an article on the news satire organisation Zaytung‘s website (Turkey’s equivalent of The Onion). Zaytung had reported police had found documents in their dawn raid of the Gezi Park tents detailing how to manufacture an atomic bomb. Gokcek linked to the piece, tweeting: “The brutal plans by the marginal groups in Gezi Park.” More worryingly, it was retweeted 167 times.

And Turkish newspaper Takvim — which some claim could pass as a satirical news organisation — published a fake interview with Christiane Amanpour from CNN. The newspaper quoted the host of CNN’s nightly global affairs program as saying the network had covered the protests on behalf of business interests that wanted to hurt the country’s economy. The online version of the newspaper said it was its way of “getting back” at CNN for “fabricating lies” about the protests — something Erdogan has accused the broadcaster of.

Erdogan has never been shy to silence his critics. Turkey is now the world’s largest prison for journalists, according to Reporters Without Borders. All those detained are, coincidentally, those who have critiqued Erdogan and the AKP regime.

The large majority of the Turkish media have, and continue, to ignore the uprisings. And yet they remain unique in nature — they have no clear leader, no political party driving the unrest, and no real spokesperson. They’re driven by ordinary people fed up with the authoritarian nature of Erdogan and the AKP government.

The media’s deafening silence has only led to more people making use of social media to spread the “real” news. The uniqueness lies in how the use of such sites has created real flavour to the protests. The hundreds of images posted on Twitter of the “standing man” over the past 36 hours — as Crikey reported yesterday — is a perfect example of this.

Unlike the KONY 2012 campaign, social media is leading to real action. And it’s not hard to see why Erdogan and the AKP are frightened of it, and is eager to solve the issue by going to its core.