Our Contributor Mustafa Domanic's article appears on Washington Post - FLAGGED ON FACEBOOK

In the same year that YouTube popularized presidential debates in the United States, Facebook is driving the mounting tension between secularists and conservatives in Turkey. One million Turks have joined Facebook since the social networking site, which was initially limited to universities, opened itself to the public in September 2006. Members of the "Turkey" group receive an average of five or six invitations each day to political groups of all kinds, most of them nationalist. Tech-savvy activists designed programs that put nationalist messages on their Facebook "Walls," where friends write comments about one another. A group that encourages users to post a Turkish flag in place of their own photograph already has 100,000 members. But the nationalists aren't the only ones to have mastered the virtual world. A new liberal party uses Facebook almost exclusively to reach out to young people.

Edited by Emily Langer