I parted ways with a non-profit research center as of yesterday. During this experience, I learned a great deal, as I published seven projects (articles) in just six months. The eighth was a visual report, but since we parted ways, it wasn’t published. It was supposed to be published yesterday. You can visit my academic profile to read my visual report about online censorship in Turkey
This experience also brought painful moments. For six months, I worked as a volunteer research analyst and, in the past few weeks, prepared news briefs 2-3 times a week, totaling 26 briefs. However, when I conveyed my expectation for a small stipend (because I intend to relocate next year) in case they received funding and requested an institutional email address (to make my Google Scholar profile public, as I saw editors with institutional addresses), my request was rejected for a strange reason. They also used two of my articles in a grant application however they accused me of using AI in my articles as a basis to terminate my role.
In the meantime, seven of my articles published on the site have been completely removed. Among these, I uploaded my articles about AI and human rights, two articles related to Turkey, and my article on LGBTQ rights to my Academia page. You can read them there.
The strange thing is that the desire to separate me from the institution came after I requested a corporate email address. They refused, claiming those who access institutional documents already have an address. When I responded by asking how an email address could access documents, they accused me of using artificial intelligence, removed me from the Slack group without any notice, and cut ties with me.
The only accurate part of their claim is that I used AI to create short slogans—no more than 2-3 sentences—while preparing 26 news briefs. I hope no one’s career path intersects with people who lack respect for others' work and are unafraid of lying.
I realized that my contributions as a volunteer were not valued by the head of the team. In short, I didn’t want things to end this way. Instead of showing gratitude, they chose to cast blame, which is very painful. And so, this chapter of my story has come to an end.
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