The new Caucasus Barometer is out and I did some analysis on voting behaviors. (Here’s 2011 and Here’s 2012.)
These voting rates seem to match up with the official reported rates.
Wow – this is all over the place. Georgia isn’t a surprise, Armenia is interesting, and Azerbaijan is depressing.
Interesting with regard to the reported turn outs.
What is my analysis? The Armenian twittersphere is SMALL.
As has been the norm with these hashtags, foreigners and locals are divided.
So now that some real stuff is happening in Armenia, we have a new hashtag! #barevolution or Բարեւոլյուշըն in Armenian – so this is a play on words. Raffi say “Barev, Hayastan” to the crowd – meaning “Hello, Armenia.” Moreover, the word “arev” means sun.
I’m not really sure if this has totally caught on as a hashtag yet, but it might.
So there is a cute logo for this.
But this makes hashtag analysis a bit more difficult. While Eastern Armenians (those in the Republic of Armenia) would say Barev, Western Armenians would say Parev. And the way that “ev” is spelled is different.
So, here are the hashtag analyses for Feb 23, 10am Yerevan time.
#armvote13 – will post later
Feb 19 noon
Feb 19 5:30pm
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!
Okay, the hashtag is a bit back to normal.
Here’s the full report.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here are links to the #iditord hashtag
More infographics! This time on attitudes toward parliamentary elections (and parliament itself) in Armenia.
As usual, please let me know if you have any questions. I know that there were no gender differences in any of these reported
