This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘Syrian refugees in Turkey face rising hostility

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Monday, February 13th, and this is your FT News Briefing.

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In southern Turkey, Syrians who fled their country’s civil war are facing a new trauma.

Raya Jalabi
They said when the earthquake hit it felt like we were being punished for surviving the war.

Marc Filippino
And social media companies are leaning into short-form videos. We’ll talk about YouTube’s latest move to bring in more content creators. I’m Marc Filippino and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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More than 33,000 people are reported to have died after last week’s earthquake in Turkey and Syria. Those who survived are struggling after being displaced from their homes. The FT’s Raya Jalabi was just in the city of Gaziantep.

Raya Jalabi
As soon as I got to Gaziantep, I just saw makeshift tents all over the city. People sort of burning bonfires with whatever they could find to stay warm because the temperatures would’ve been absolutely freezing all week. And they’re just sort of sitting outside looking shell-shocked and completely grief stricken.

Marc Filippino
Gaziantep is also a city where many Syrians found refuge after fleeing their country’s civil war. Raya spoke to them and found that they are especially vulnerable after the earthquake.

Raya Jalabi
In the last few years as a sort of economic crisis has started to bite in Turkey, a lot of Turks have turned more hostile to the Syrian population there. So I was talking to a lot of the refugees this week who are saying that there’s been so many increasing tensions between Turks and Syrians in the last few years that this sort of felt like a final straw. I was talking to this woman, Layal Khleif, and she sort of fled Syria years ago and made her way up to Akçakale. And she was talking to me about how much tension there had been just in the last week. She said as soon as the earthquake hit, she went to seek shelter with her entire family at the nearby mosque. And at one point, they were kicked out of the mosque by Turks and some of them, their direct neighbours, who said that the mosque should only, the shelter should only be open to Turks.

Marc Filippino
Raya, what else did you find when you spoke to Syrians in Turkey? And how are they managing in the aftermath of the earthquake? Do they have the same sort of access to aid as Turks?

Raya Jalabi
For many Turks in southern Turkey, they generally tend to have a social network or family in other parts of the country. So as they’ve all been fleeing northward in the last week to seek safety elsewhere, they have that option. But for many Syrians, they don’t. They either don’t have the money, they don’t have the social network. And in many, many cases, they don’t have the legal ability to move across provinces. So they’re sort of stuck in place. And in many of the places that I was visiting this week, you know, they’re terrified of staying in a city where we’re still feeling aftershocks six days later. And especially for Syrians who lived for years under bombs and shelling in Syria, they come to Turkey looking for safety. And all of a sudden this earthquake in the early hours of the night just jolts them out of bed and takes them straight back to being in Syria. I had so many people who were telling me it felt like I was back in that moment where I almost died in that shelling in Aleppo. And it’s heartbreaking to hear that they have to relive this trauma over and over again.

Marc Filippino
What else do they tell you, Raya? Is there anything that they said that sticks out in your mind?

Raya Jalabi
A lot of the refugees that I was talking to, they’re afraid that they’re gonna be left behind by the Turkish state because these years of increased hostilities has left them afraid that they’re gonna get left out of receiving government resources. And, of course, there’s an election coming up in a few months. And the Syrian refugee issue has been a political football between political parties in Turkey for a while now. Maybe aid will be weaponised as a political tool to garner more votes because there has been increasing anger rising this week across certain areas. My colleague Ayla was in Hatay province today and she was talking about how in a lot of her interviews, a lot of the Turks were complaining that the Syrians were stealing aid and that they were being favoured and treated better. And so that there’s a risk that that’s gonna get politicised in the next few weeks and months.

Marc Filippino
Raya Jalabi is the FT’s Middle East correspondent.

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Social media companies are leaning in to short-form videos. TikTok is probably the most well-known one, but a big rival, YouTube has upped the competition with a new revenue sharing plan. It’s aimed at luring content creators away from TikTok. To find out more, I’m joined by our technology reporter, Cristina Criddle. Hey, Cristina.

Cristina Criddle
Hi.

Marc Filippino
All right, so, first of all, let’s just kind of lay the groundwork here. What we’re talking about here are the short attention grabbing videos that made TikTok so popular. So not just TikTok, we see them on Instagram’s reels and a few other places as well. And now YouTube has something called YouTube Shorts. What’s that all about?

Cristina Criddle
Yeah. So when TikTok really blew up during the pandemic, there was this huge rush towards short-form video or what’s also known as “snackable content”. It seemed that younger audiences especially were just wanting to watch very short clips of content on social media, and that’s then led to companies like YouTube and Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram, to release basically copycat features. And they’ve been really successful too.

Marc Filippino
Which content creators are we talking about here? Anyone that I might recognise?

Cristina Criddle
I mean, you’re looking at people like MrBeast.

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Marc Filippino
I’ve heard of MrBeast. I actually, I looked him up for this conversation, yes.

Cristina Criddle
(laughter) There are a lot of very popular short-form creators. It kind of depends on what you’re interested in, though. One of the creators I chatted to for my piece, Lisa Nguyen, she specialises in food content, short-form food content.

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Cristina Criddle
And she became really popular on TikTok. But then, since trying out shorts on YouTube has found that she’s more popular on there and actually makes more money on there. So she’s kind of shifted a lot of effort towards YouTube. And one of the things she also likes about YouTube is the fact that she can make longer content. So some videos where you can’t really explain how to cook something in 60 seconds, she can make a longer video about it and still do it on the same platform. And that’s one of the things that YouTube is really pushing. Hey, you know, you can do all sorts of content for all different people and you can just stay on YouTube.

Marc Filippino
Yeah, I’m glad that you brought up the moneymaking aspect of this. How do content creators make money and how does YouTube make money?

Cristina Criddle
Well, so far there has been these things called Creator Funds where creators can apply to get a certain amount of money from a fund by the social media platform like TikTok or YouTube. They can also make money through brand partnerships if they do advertising. So that’s a deal made with a brand to promote their products. But now there’s this thing which is revenue sharing, which YouTube has had for a long time on its longer form videos but has introduced to Shorts. And that is where they pull together the advertising revenue. Then they take off the licensing fees for any music used and then they split the profits between the creators and YouTube, giving the creators 45 per cent and taking the rest.

Marc Filippino
What do you think is significant about that?

Cristina Criddle
It seems to be a much more generous offering than other platforms at the moment. TikTok has a form of revenue sharing, but it’s only for the top 4 per cent of creators on TikTok. And even then, although it’s a 50/50 split of advertising revenue, there have been some complaints from creators who are saying that they’re just not making very much, whereas this on YouTube applies to a much wider sphere of creators. And YouTube has a track record of being able to pay creators and it has kept them quite loyal over all of its years of being popular. So I think at the moment it is a really interesting offering. Creators I speak to are really excited about it, as they feel they can trust YouTube to give them revenue. We will see how much more money it gives them, but I think at the moment it’s really coming ahead at prioritising people who make content because they know that they need that to be able to serve advertising.

Marc Filippino
I’ll have to get more into TikTok and YouTube then, Christina to check it out. (laughter) Cristina Criddle is the FT’s technology reporter. Thanks, Cristina.

Cristina Criddle
Thank you.

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Marc Filippino
Before we go, global markets got a shock on Friday. Reports came out that Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, would tap an outsider as the next chief of the Bank of Japan. Kazuo Ueda is an academic and a respected monetary policy expert, but he’s not from the policy establishment. Some analysts wonder if he was chosen because few others wanted the job. Nevertheless, lawmakers are expected to approve him on Tuesday, and if they do, it would be the first time in postwar Japan that an academic leads the BOJ.

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You can read more on all of these stories at FT.com This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Make sure you check back tomorrow for the latest business news.

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