26 Jan

What are these knots of string doing all over your blog, Katy?

For the last 2 weeks, I’ve been posting a lot of images on my blog, but I haven’t taken the time to explain what or why or how these are happening.

Azerbaijan, one of the countries that I study, is experiencing some turmoil right now. Briefly, a soldier was killed in the military as a result of hazing. There was a coverup, but it was found out and photos of the soldier’s body came out on social media. As a result, a demonstration was organized, mainly on Facebook, to protest this sort of thing occurring in the military. (It is not uncommon.)

On January 12, the protest occurred.

At first I was involved in social media as I normally am – retweeting, sharing stories, etc. because I have a general interest in democracy and technology in this country. But then I had an idea to analyze the tweets. This seemed especially important to me because there was a bit of a battle occurring on the main event hashtag #protestbaku between pro-government and more democratically-inclined social media users.

So, thanks to Marc Smith, the first social network analysis of the #protestbaku hashtag was created about 3 hours after the protest started using the NodeXL program.

What is a social network analysis? Via Wikipedia:

Social network analysis (SNA) is the methodical analysis of social networks. Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of network theory, consisting of nodes (representing individual actors within the network) and ties (which represent relationships between the individuals, such as friendship, kinship, organizational position, sexual relationships, etc.) These networks are often depicted in a social network diagram, where nodes are represented as points and ties are represented as lines.

And NodeXL is a free tool that works with Microsoft Excel to create interactive network visualizations. It is fairly easy to use once you get used to it.

So with this program, you can see who follows whom on Twitter, who replies to each other, etc. And then it shows this all visually.

After the first January 12 protest, I did a new analysis of all the tweets, then again after the weekend was over. Then a week later I ran the analysis again and again.

The pro-government social media users started a counter-hashtag to shame a journalist. I noticed that there were a lot of strange twitter accounts associated with that hashtag. Analysis of that is here and here. I’m not going to leap to any conclusions, but please read for yourself.

Then on January 23, a riot began in a regional city Ismayilli. There was much tweeting about it, mainly from people not on the ground. But once again I did analysis of the tweets. I also made a graphic of the changing dynamics of the hashtag.

Then on January 26, another protest was organized in Baku and once again the #protestbaku hashtag was used. I kept all the analysis on one page here.

—–

So why am I doing this?

  • I am a social scientist. I like seeing patterns in things and I believe that this sort of modeling can add to understanding.
  • I have the resources (time, computing power, skills) to do this.
  • I like making analyses accessible to people that don’t have the skills that I do.
  • I believe that information (to some extent) should be free. Moreover, I imagine that people in power have tools to understand networks like this and giving this information to everyone is more egalitarian.
  • This information (social media data) is already out there in the world, just not organized in this way.
  • I believe in freedom of expression. I am deeply sad that there is little freedom of expression in Azerbaijan.
  • If this analysis can be a tool for those supporting freedom of expression, that gives me a great deal of joy. I hope that it is not also being used as a tool of suppression, but that is the price one pays for transparency and openness.
  • It is possible that at some point I will write up some of this in the form of an academic article.
  • I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from those involved in these events that this analysis has been useful to them. It isn’t often that this sort of thing can have an immediate application, so this is really cool.

In the meantime, I am happy to answer any questions about this.

 

26 Jan

#protestbaku – part 2

So there is a new protest on January 26. It started at 3pm Baku time. Here’s the analysis for 4pm Baku time.

nodexl

full report

229 users with 3559 in the last 5 hours.

most common words:

protestbaku – the hashtag itself
rt – retweet
ismayilli – the hashtag for the other event of the week
police – obvious
azerbaijan – obvious
detained – telling
sahil – means coast/shore, referring to Sahil Park
eminmilli – at the protest, was detained
polis – police
baku – obvious
və – and
ruslanazad – a main tweeter
azerbaycan – Azerbaijan in Azerbaijani
muntezir – a main tweeter
protest – obvious
turanoza – a main tweeter
saxlanıldı – held
plan – tweeeted “plan b” when protest moved from 1 location to another
huseynovaturkan – a main tweeter
b – from plan b
emin – common name
bağına – garden (?)
ismayil – Khadija Ismayil, journalist
milli – national and surname of Emin Milli

Top URLs are live videostreams and photos:
http://www.azadliq.org/contentlive/liveblog/24884298.html
http://www.rightnow.io/breaking-news/protestbaku_bn_1359197421844.html
http://bambuser.com/channel/AzadliqRadiosu
https://www.facebook.com/emin.milli/posts/388093684619805
http://bambuser.com/v/3321628
http://instagram.com/p/U8gor1knUu/
http://bambuser.com/v/3321611
http://twitpic.com/byc5tp
http://bambuser.com/v/3321599
http://twitter.com/sakitoglu/status/295097698686734336/photo/1

As far as the groups – they are a little strange to me this time. I’m open to any interpretations/suggestions here!

Here’s the analysis for 6pm Baku time.

nodexl

full report

265 users with 3217 in the last 2 hours (basically since the last analysis was run — in a few hours, I’ll combine all the hours for a full analysis).

4 groups now – group 1 is foreigners and people with a large foreign followership like Emin Milli and FuserLimon. Group 2 are people tweeting in Azerbaijani on the ground. Group 3 is news broadcasters like Muntezir. Group 4 seems to focus on Arzu Geybulla.

But as you can see, all of these people are in a pretty close looped network. They’re mainly following each other.

Here’s the analysis for 8pm Baku time.

nodexl

full report

285 users with 3652 in the last 2 hours (basically since the last analysis was run — in a few hours, I’ll combine all the hours for a full analysis).

2am Jan 26 Baku time – this is the last 7 hours

nodexl

full report

Users: 385
Tweets: 5651

—-

1am January 28 update

full report

23 Jan

#ismayilli hashtag analysis

More stuff happening in Baku.

While I would argue that Facebook is the best place to get news about Azerbaijan, there is some Twitter activity too.

Tonight there was some sort of protest outside of Baku, this via Khadija Ismayil’s Facebook.

“It seems there is a social protest in Ismayilli, 300 km to the north from capital Baku. Protesters burnt cars, allegedly owned by the son of the city governor and tried to burn the ill-reputed motel, allegedly owned by one of the ministers who also happen to be a kin to the city governor. It is getting hot. Crowd is moving towards the house of the governor Facebook users report.”

THIS IS ANALYSIS FROM 12:45AM BAKU TIME
nodexl

Full report

The clusters and groups aren’t that interesting, given the small number of people writing. However, the links to photos and videos are very useful.

THIS IS ANALYSIS FROM 1:45AM BAKU TIME

NODEXL

Full report

While I was running that report, the first video came out, so I ran it again. User Muntezir loaded it and you can see how it spread through this.

2AM BAKU TIME

nodexl

Full report

4AM BAKU TIME

nodexl

full report

11AM BAKU TIME

nodexl

full report

At about 9am Baku time, a new hashtag emerged called #riotsismayilli and I’m collecting those tweets as well, but there isn’t a lot being written there that is unique from the main #ismayilli hashtag.

6PM BAKU TIME

nodexl

full report

The #riotsismayilli hashtag still isn’t catching on very well. (I sort of wish people would stick to one.)

10PM BAKU TIME

nodexl

full report

(Looking at the 10pm analysis – seems to be a language issue for the clusters. Group 1 is tweeting in Azerbaijani, group 2 is English, and group 3 includes news broadcasters (and a mix of languages) and muntezir, who is a key news spreader.

11PM BAKU TIME

nodexl

full report

JAN 25 1AM BAKU TIME

nodexl

full report

JAN 25 5AM BAKU TIME

nodexl

full report

JAN 25 6PM BAKU TIME

nodexl

full report

Once again, Baxtiyar Hajiyev has his own cluster group.

It also appears that the protest event that is scheduled for Saturday has a lot of competing hashtags: silahsiz (without weapons) and 26yanvar (26th of January), for example.
Also note some interesting inappropriate language – looks like 1 tweet became very popular in group 1.

JAN 25 9PM BAKU TIME

nodexl

Full report

JAN 26 2AM BAKU TIME

nodexl

full report

16 Jan

#khadijautan – something is strange here

In a reaction to #protestbaku, a number of Azerbaijani tweeters, especially those associated with the pro-government youth organization, began a Twitter campaign called #khadijautan. This translates to “shame on you Khadija.” Who is Khadija? She is a journalist with Radio Free Europe, known for her investigations of government corruption. (More on Khadija here). What was so shameful? She said “there is a need for mothers in this country who don’t bargain over their son’s dead bodies”[…].” More on this on Arzu Geybulla’s blog.

And those using the hashtag think that they succeeded: “With 22K people engaged, apx 200K impressions #KhadijaUtan campaign succeeded. #azerbaijan #protestBaku.”

When I was doing analysis of #protestbaku, I saw that a lot of the Twitter accounts using #khadijautan didn’t have a photo associated with them. That is sort of odd, right? Most people put a picture on their Twitter account.

[Here is a tl;dr:”Turns out… “successful” #khadijautan hashtag campaign was mainly executed by a cyber-zombie army of tweeters that had 1. No profile photo 2. No followers 3. Didn’t send any tweets before this campaign 4. They wrote the same message over and over again. Read this article only if you have basic knowledge of how twitter works and statistics.”]

Only 126 people used this hashtag but they tweeted using it 2198 times (that includes 557 retweets), so it was fairly easy to do analysis on this.

I looked a little closer to my social network analysis map and saw that those Tweeters without photos also tended to not have a lot of friends on Twitter. That’s also a little odd.

So I took a closer look. Link to the full report here.

To understand the following, let’s have a little refresher of high school statistics:

Average or mean = equal to the sum of the values divided by the number of values
Standard deviation = standard deviation shows how much variation or “dispersion” exists from the average (mean, or expected value). A low standard deviation indicates that the data points tend to be very close to the mean; high standard deviation indicates that the data points are spread out over a large range of values.
Mode = value that appears most often in a set of data

Here’s the distribution of followers and following for the people on this hashtag. You can see that the vast majority of those tweeting with #khadijautan don’t have very many other people that they follow or that follow them. The average number of people that #khadijautan Tweeters follow is 194, the mode is 122, standard deviation of 242. This means that even though some people follow a lot of people, most don’t.

The number of followers for one of these #khadijautan was on average 371, and the mode was 7, standard deviation was 562. Again, while some of these people have a lot of followers, most don’t.

followers

And it looked like the users of the #khadijautan hashtag didn’t Tweet a lot.

tweets

The number of tweets for these people is average 5168, mode 45, standard deviation of 11715. Again, a lot of people that don’t tweet a lot were on this hashtag.

Then I sorted the Tweeters by the date that they joined Twitter. 14 of them joined Twitter in the last few days. That isn’t that many.

Here’s the distribution of when these people joined Twitter. As you can see, a lot of them joined recently.

joined

This is unlike most hashtag analyses. It is odd.

But let’s look at the groups – this is essential to understanding what is going on.

graphic

Group 2, for example, are mostly people fighting AGAINST this hashtag (full disclosure, this includes myself).

Group 3 includes individuals that are regular Tweeters from the pro-government opposition group.

Groups 4 and 5 seems really strange to me. I’m not sure what’s going on there. They look like tweet aggregators.

So let’s talk about Group 1 then. The top tweeters are all in the middle, but look at all the accounts that don’t have profile pictures (the blue circles). (This is also the case for Group 3, but not as heavily.) There were 41 people in Group 1 and 34 people in Group 3. That isn’t a lot. They all follow each other. Not many people saw their hashtag.

group1

rauf

Okay, the content of the Tweets. What were people saying on the #khadijautan hashtag?

(I’m going to summarize this, but you can download the whole file here if you want to look at it yourself.)

What ended up surprising me is that a lot of Tweets from these “no profile photo” accounts were basically the same statement over and over again. Not retweets, per se, but just the same statement.

For example, this: “Стремящаяся вести свои политические игры, пользуясь смертью невинного солдата #Khadijautan #aztwi” was said 27 times by 21 different “no profile photo” accounts. This seems really strange to me.

Or this tweet: “X.İsmayıl bazarlıq statusunun Samirə Qubadovaya aid olmadığını dedi. #KhadijaUtan kampaniyası məqsədinə çatmışdır! http://t.co/xCEM83kz” was said 18 times by many of the same people that were tweeting repeatedly in other cases too AND don’t have profile photos.

This strange behavior happened a LOT.

I think that it is fair to say that there is some sort of robot set up to do these tweets.

I welcome questions on this and encourage people to open the file and look for themselves.

14 Jan

#protestbaku – now that the weekend is over, what happened?

bird
Here’s the at-the-time-of-the-protest analysis.
And here are some updates from Sunday.

nodexl

Link to full.

So 517 people tweeted.

The most “networked” of those 517 are:
aztwi
ilKinHasani
muntezir
hajiyev
eminmilli
FuserLimon
JamalAliBaku
katypearce (that’s me – full disclosure)
turkhankarim
Khadija0576

And the users who were replied to the most:
raufmardiyev
muntezir
katypearce
turkhankarim
ruslanazad
azer_rammstein
petrasovdat
miriw_seyidli
hurriyet
mrnikog

But the users who were “talked about” the most:
fuserlimon
raufmardiyev
ilkinhasani
hajiyev
huseynovaturkan
muntezir
damirama
arxayferecli
islam_shikhali
turanoza

And who tweeted the most?
favstar_pop
asteris
PsychoticLynx
KizlaRepublic
PicoBee
hkubra
bakunews
Smiling_Gem
rrichard09
GoldenTent

Also, my analysis of the hashtag seems to be the most tweeted URL.

So let’s talk about the groups.

Group 1 is full of Azerbaijani tweeters that I don’t know. The center of the network though is the aztwi account, which as I understand is sort of like an aggregation site of Azerbaijani tweets.
I don’t get a sense that this group is on one side or the other. Their hashtags, for example, range from the anti-government raufgetqarnıvıqaşı to the pro-goverment khadijautan.

Group 2 is a mix of on-the-ground people that often tweet in English with foreigners that are interested. eminmilli, fuserlimon, khadija0576, ljmaximus, with the regular crowd (myself included) of Azerbaijan watchers.
Obviously this is the group with which I’m most familiar, but just to share – this group had a hashtag of #humanrights as well as the other popular tags. Like I said the other day, this group did some logistics about police.

Group 3 is Baxtiyar Hajiyev’s group. Like I wrote on Sunday, it seems to me that Baxtiyar exists in a separate network from those mentioned above.
How was Baxtiyar’s group different from Group 2? I’m not entirely sure, but as I said, I think that this may come down to language.

Group 4 is the pro-government youth groups, led by raufmardiyev.
They had totally different hashtags, URLs linked to… basically totally different. They also are notable for their use of the term YOLO as well as their “Shame on Khadija” campaign against a journalist.

I hope that this is interesting for people. I’m happy to run analyses like this on other hashtags or answer more questions!

13 Jan

#protestbaku hashtag versions 2 and 3

Since people are so fond of my first analysis, here’s a new one that is more up-to-date.

This is a bit harder to understand because it now includes all the people that have been retweeting, but hey, thought I’d share…

nodexl

Link to full version

Who is the most popular on this hashtag?

Top 10 Vertices, Ranked by Betweenness Centrality:
aztwi
ilKinHasani
muntezir
hajiyev
eminmilli
FuserLimon
JamalAliBaku
turkhankarim
damirama
abayramov

Group 1 is now pro-government.

Here are their most popular words:
protestbaku
khadijautan
aztwi
azerbaijan
yolo
1/12/2013 12:00:00 AM
əskərölümünəson
əsgәrölümünәson
350çoxolar
əsgərölümünəson

The use of #khadijutan (an offensive tweet at a journalist) and “yolo” make it pretty clear.

Group 2 is the on-the-ground activists that tweet in English plus foreigners that are friendly with them (myself included).

Group 3 looks to be people in Turkey but also includes Bakhtiyar Hajiyev.

Group 3’s most popular words:
protestbaku
azerbaijan
əsgәrölümünәson
әsgәrölümünәson
türkiye
esgerolumuneson
khadijautan
azərbaycan
turkey
azerbaycan

I ran this again on Sunday 12noon Pacific time.

noidexl

link to full

541 people tweeted using this hashtag.

Someone asked about location. People don’t always tell the truth, of course, but 167 of the tweeters listed Baku as their time zone. 264 (49%) of the tweeters listed Baku or Azerbaijan as their location.