Tag Archives: armenia

19 Feb

#armvote13 hashtag analysis update Feb 19 5:30pm

Feb 19 noon

nodexl

full report

Feb 19 5:30pm

nodexl

full report

Focusing on the 5:30 analysis, things have gotten really interesting!

Group 1 is full of Armenians, Group 2 is Azerbaijanis (but not pro-government ones) and foreigners (with some foreign Armenians thrown in the mix), Group 3 is Rauf et al.

Group 1 is talking about the actual election, with lots of livestreaming and local coverage. Group 2 seems to be focusing on the hashtag hijacking story as well as foreign news coverage. Group 3 – well, you know what they were talking about.

Today people are protesting and I assume they’ll keep using the #armvote13 hashtag, so I’ll keep tracking!

Previous posts 1 2 3

18 Feb

#armvote13 hashtag analysis 11pm Feb 18

Okay, the hashtag is a bit back to normal.

Here’s the full report.

nodexl

Group 1 is foreigners mixed in with some Armenians. Group 2 is local Armenians. Group 3 are the Azerbaijanis that tried to hijack the hashtag.

Will keep tracking!

Here’s the 1st and 2nd analysis.

Also I did a quick search for Raffi (obviously there are more Raffis in the world, but…) and Raffi in Armenian, just if you’re curious.

18 Feb

#armvote13 hashtag got taken over – looks suspicious

It is now 4pm in Yerevan, 5am in Seattle and I awoke to the #armvote13 hashtag having been taken over.

#armvote13 was a “nice” hashtag for tweeple living in or interested in Armenia to discuss an election. It was really a democratic spirit. (Here are the analyses that I conducted over the past day or so on this hashtag.)

I woke up, saw that something had happened, ran a new analysis and see now that there are 2 groups – Armenians and Azerbaijanis. And the Azerbaijanis in group 2 have hashtags where they tweet about khojaly and ireli.

Hey guys, use Twitter for whatever you want, but I am VERY SAD that this group of Azerbaijanis chose to intrude upon this effort toward democracy. It makes me wonder about their own attitudes about democracy. This essentially ruined the hashtag for those that were actually trying to do something GOOD. If there was a hashtag for how I am feeling right now, it would be #disappointed.

So, onto the tweets.

Here’s the full report (and as always, you can look at the tweets yourself in excel – click at the bottom of the report).

And here’s the image of the hashtag network.

nodexl

In the center of the Azerbaijani side is Rauf Mardiyev. He is the chairman of the IRELI public union – a youth NGO that has very strong ties to the ruling party. He is very active on social media.

But I’ve seen this before. The same group of Twitter users were posting duplicate tweets, a few minutes apart, on a different hashtag.

So I did the same “check for duplicates” and then sort by time posted that I did in the previous analysis. And yes, the same pattern emerged – with the same twitter accounts. (Red/pink means a duplicate – some of those are also duplicates but because the URL shortener is different, they didn’t appear red/pink).

See how they’re only a few minutes apart?

Then I sorted by Twitter handle and looked for some of the names that I saw in the last hashtag analysis. And there they were:

So, what do I think of this? I’m disappointed. The #armvote13 hashtag wasn’t something “political” per se – it was a FUNCTIONAL hashtag for people trying to ensure that an election was carried out democratically. Zombie tweeting on that hashtag is just poor taste.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

18 Feb

#armvote13 and #iditord hashtag analysis

Today Armenia has a presidential election.

I’ve been tracking the election hashtag #armvote13 as well as the election monitoring hashtag #iditord.

When I say tracking, I mean running #nodexl analysis on the hashtags. I explained how I did this for recent events in Azerbaijan here – basically why I am doing this, how I am doing this, what all this stuff means, and some basic methodology.

I’m happy to answer any questions! Also, you can click on the link and download the tweets yourself! It opens in Excel.

For the next day or three, I’ll download all the tweets every hour and upload new visualizations every few hours.

#armvote13 9pm Yerevan Feb 1
nodexl

#armvote13 10am 17 Feb

nodexl

#armvote13 6am 18 Feb

nodexl

#armvote13 8am 18 Feb

nodexl

As I mentioned on Facebook, group 1 is mostly foreigners who tweet about Armenia including organizations.
Group 2 are people IN Armenia.
Group 3 is interesting too – people who are in Armenia but may not be Hayastantsi. There are some diasporans that live in Armenia, the American Ambassador, a wellknown blogger who now lives in the UK, and some other Armenians from Armenia who are not currently on the ground.

I imagine that these groups will change over the next few days.

#armvote13 9am 18 Feb

nodexl

Here are links to the #iditord hashtag

#iditord 10am 17 Feb

#iditord 6am 18 Feb

#iditord 8am 18 Feb

07 Feb

Baby Makin’ in the Caucasus

There are a number of initiatives to try to increase the number of babies born in the Caucasus.

But how many kids do people want?

It seems that Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Georgians have very different feelings on this question.

Also noteworthy is that only in Armenia do women and men see things differently.

But there certainly is a regional component to this.

am1

Armenians in Yerevan and regional cities only want about 3 kids, while rural Armenians on average want 3.47 (obviously not .47 of a child!)

az1

In Azerbaijan, there is a straight line from Baku, to regional cities, to rural people. But it is fair to say that Azerbaijanis mostly want about 3 kids.

ge1

Georgians, on average interested in having more than 3 kids, don’t differ regionally.

 

For other analysis on babies in the Caucasus, check these posts:

Qualities in boy and girl children

Too many boys in the Caucasus

04 Feb

Low level corruption in the Caucasus

While corruption is without a doubt a major issue in the Caucasus, many think about higher level corruption rather than day-to-day corruption.

This is an analysis of the 2011 Caucasus Barometer. All differences are statistically significant. Although these questions were asked with a great deal of privacy, there is certainly a social desirability effect here.

People are asked if avoiding paying a fare on public transit was “ever justified” (scale 1 = can never be justified, 10 = can always be justified) and although this is a fairly low stakes behavior, people in the Caucasus were fairly (pun intended) against it.
fare1

And what about taxes? There are reported issues with people paying taxes at all levels. But again, people in the Caucasus were not keen on this.

taxes1“>taxes1

And everyone’s favorite – bribes!

No one in the Caucasus could justify accepting a bribe or present.

takebribe1

As far as giving bribes, few could justify it.

givebribe1

And when asked if they have given a bribe, NO GEORGIANS had given one! Wow. 6% of Armenians and 29% of Azerbaijanis though. This is interesting given the past two charts.

paidbribe2

Overall, I’m not sure if justification of corruption has any implication on actual behaviors of corruption. It might not be justifiable to pay a bribe, but you do it anyway.

I think that it is telling that Georgians are the least tolerant of all of these types of low level corruption activities.

02 Feb

Social media in the Caucasus Part 2 — չորս քառակուսի, dörd kvadrat, ოთხი მოედანზე

After yesterday’s post on my thoughts on social media in the Caucasus, I came across Foursquare maps of Yerevan, Baku, and Tbilisi. I love this sort of visualization and how you can sort of see the life of the city in it.

Foursquare is a mobile-based “game” (it gets its name from an American (?) children’s game where four kids bounce a large rubber ball between them in a square). One “checks in” at places. So, you’re at your kid’s school, you get on your phone and your GPS recognizes where you are and you “check in” to the school. Or you’re at a bar and you “check in.” If you’re the most frequent person that “checks in,” you become “mayor” of that place. Mayor is sort of meaningless, except when businesses give benefits to the mayor. The coffeeshop in my old neighborhood gave 50% off to the mayor!

Anyway, it is fairly popular amongst the geek scene in the Caucasus, so this is a little interesting.

Here’s Yerevan’s last three months of check-ins, as points of light

yerevanbw

And close up

yerevanbwclose

And the most popular check in spots in Yerevan (not sure if this is for all time or just recently)

popularyerevan

Here’s Baku’s last three months of check-ins, as points of light

bakubw

And close up

bakubwclose

And the most popular check in spots in Baku (not sure if this is for all time or just recently)

popularbaku

Here’s Tbilisi’s last three months of check-ins, as points of light (I cannot figure out how Foursquare spells Tbilisi, so I went to Batumi and scrolled over)

tbilisibw

And close up

tbilisibwclose

And the most popular check in spots in Tbilisi (not sure if this is for all time or just recently)

tbilisipopular

Here is the link for looking at most popular and this is the light visualization page.