Opposition Turkish Cypriot leadership election candidate Tufan Erhurman on Wednesday called out the wealth of online bots writing comments critical of him and supportive of incumbent Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar underneath the latter’s posts on social media.

He said in a social media post that “the ‘troll flower’ will not take root in this country”, before explaining that during his sit-down interview with a panel of journalists last week, “some ‘dear friends’ from around the world … expressed their reactions to me through the angry emoticon”.

He was referring to hundreds of accounts with names which were clearly not Cypriot using Facebook’s “angry” emoticon to react to livestreams of the interview.

Among those to declare their fury at Erhurman’s performance were Khaing Yamin Wai, who lives in Yangon, the capital of Myanmar, Tran Thuy, who hails from the Vietnamese town of Ninh Hoa, other ostensibly Vietnamese accounts including Tran Xuan, Hung Phan, and Nguyen Phuong, and Charity P Tembo from Lusaka, the capital of Zambia.

This had at the time drawn ridicule from some corners of Turkish Cypriot social media, though Erhurman pointed out on Wednesday that in a campaign video he had posted to social media this week, “I now see that the names are Turkish”, and “this time, they are not angry, they are using phrases”.

“For some reason, almost all of them are new accounts with zero followers!”

A multitude of comments were left under the video, most of which consisted of six- or seven-word phrases declaring that Erhurman only cared about the video’s subject – the ‘mixed-marriage problem’ – because of the election, and that nothing would be better were he to be elected.

Commenters on that video on Facebook included Ertac Celebi, who created his account on July 17 and has no friends, but has posted twice since then – once to criticise Erhurman and once to criticise the Greek Cypriots.

Another, Halil Ibrahim Gok, also created his account on July 17 and also has no friends, and has also posted twice, with those posts being written about the same two subjects.

Muazzez Yilmaz, meanwhile, created her account five days prior, on July 12, but has only posted once, criticising Erhurman and expressing her support for Tatar.

Nida Bozkurt is a comparative veteran, having created her account on July 4 and having also posted stock photographs of Kyrenia alongside a post expressing her support for Tatar.

Speaking about the commenters, Erhurman said that “I always say that there are some plants which will not take root in this land no matter how much you plant them”, and that “this ‘troll flower’ is just that”.

“Plant them with foreign names or with local names, but no matter how much you water them, they just will not take root. I have to admit, it was fun, but I still think this time and energy could be spent on more useful things,” he said.