23 Feb

on #barevolution — thoughts from Feb 23 (and a Feb 24 addition)

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I have to admit – I am REALLY excited about what is happening in Armenia.

Here’s the tl;dr:

– Last Monday (18 Feb) there was a presidential election that almost everyone assumed would be fixed so that the current regime would win.
– Nonetheless, there was an incredible effort to do election violating monitoring — not from official bodies like OSCE, but from efforts like iditord. Moreover, there was a lot of social media discussion about things going on. Also a lot of events were livestreamed, so many people not in Armenia were paying attention virtually.
– Shockingly, one of the opposition candidate, Raffi Hovannisian, seems to have gotten a lot of the votes.
– Hovannisian are really interesting because he’s Armenian-American (and the son of a famous Armenian American historian), but he moved to Armenia in 1990 and was foreign minister in the early days. There are a small number of people who went early to “help” and have done pretty well, especially given the complicated relationship between people in the Republic of Armenia and the diaspora. But I cannot overemphasize how cool this is that Hovannisian comes from this background.
– Hovannisian campaigned more like an American than an Armenian. He met with people, asked questions, and was fairly honest.

– So when the votes were being counted on Monday, Hovannisian announced that he was the victor.
– Since people were sort of surprised that the election wasn’t totally in the favor of the ruling party, there was sort of a fast rearrangement of ideas and thoughts amongst those against the current regime. (Not many of them were actively supporting Hovannisian.)
– On Tuesday 19 Feb, Hovannisian gave a press conference (which was livestreamed) where he declared himself victor. That night, some individuals went to the Central Election Commission to protest.
– On Wednesday 20 Feb, Hovannisian came to Freedom Square and gave a speech and demanded that current President Sargsyan come to Freedom Square by 2pm on Thursday to hand over the election, so to speak. Some known opposition leaders spoke at this event, lending credibility.
– On Thursday 21 Feb, a planned event in Freedom Square where Sargsyan was supposed to appear was canceled. Hovannisian walked up to the presidential palace to meet with Sargsyan. Afterwards he said that there’d be a rally on Friday to tell people what happened at the meeting.
– On Friday 22 Feb, the next rally was held and more opposition leaders spoke in support of Hovannisian. Hovannsian announced that at the Thursday meeting, Sarsgsyan didn’t accept the offer to have new elections or recount; hold extraordinary parliamentary elections; or to punish all those who violated election rules. Thus, Hovannisian was moving forward. It was  announced that Hovannisian would go to a number of regional cities throughout the day on Saturday 23 Feb to raise support and hold another large rally on Sunday in Yerevan. This reaching out to the regions is pretty unusual, as Yerevan is sort of the “center of the universe” in Armenia. I think that this was a really good plan. The crowds in these cities were pretty large. The livestreaming of the regional rallies was pretty impressive too.

– So on Sunday 24 Feb there is supposed to be something big in Freedom Square again. Let’s see what happens.

ETA 24 Feb 6pm — Hovannisian gave a very brief speech and pledged to continue nationwide rallies – he is going to Ararat, Vayots Dzor, Syunik, and Kotayk.

My friend Mika wrote a beautiful piece in Armenian on why he supports Hovannisian yesterday and Artur reposted it in English. In this Mika reflects on how Hovannisian is operating different from the struggles in 2008 — because of the cloud-computing flexible, DECENTRALIZED style of this. (done with 24 Feb addition).

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So, my thoughts:

– I’m actually more excited about this than I was in 2008. A lot of people are getting on board it appears.
– I don’t love everything about Raffi Hovannisian, but I completely appreciate his more Western-orientation. Is this because I myself am an American? Absolutely. However, the whole post-Soviet leader thing hasn’t been working for Armenia yet so far, so I think that it is worth giving Hovannisian a chance.

My questions:

– I think that Hovannisian and his team are pretty smart, but what’s the actual mechanism for change? What is the next step going to be? How are they going to try to actually wrestle the power out of the current regime’s hands? I ASSUME they have a plan though.
– There are a lot of “missing” people right now. For example, ex-PM (and also a diasporan Armenian) Vartan Oskanyan, who has been sort of a shady character at times, hasn’t said anything yet. He also is connected to CivilNet.TV – which has been a major source of non-government-affiliated news during all of this. But he is connected quite a bit to people in the current regime and other not-so-nice types.
– Former Yerevan mayor Karen Karapetyan was a really interesting figure in the last few years but he got shipped off to Moscow. What will he do?
– LTP, the former great white hope of the opposition (and former President), hasn’t said anything. He is a major liability. Wonder what’s going on here? (ETA 11pm Yerevan time – LTP made a vague statement today.)
– With Hovannisian being diasporan, what role will the diaspora play here? Are they paying attention? Perhaps more than usual because of social media.

– The government hasn’t really done anything yet. Do they have something up their sleeves? Are they still planning? This is a little weird to me.

23 Feb

#armvote13 -> #barevolution

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.

nodexl

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

barevolution

nodexl

parevolution
Anything containing “barev”

20 Feb

#armvote13 hashtag analysis update Feb 20 3pm, 7pm, 8pm

Full report

nodexl

Okay, this is becoming a little weird. I’m not entirely sure what’s happening, but I think that group 2 is still talking about the “hijacking” and group 1 is talking about the election.

For those interested:

#iditord 3pm Yerevan Feb 20
Րաֆֆի 3pm Yerevan Feb 20

Then a rally was held in Freedom Square at 5pm Yerevan time.
Here’s the analysis of #armvote13 at 7pm Yerevan time.

nodexl

Again, group 1 Armenians, group 2 is foreigners, and group 3 is the Azerbaijani crew.

And #armvote13 at 8pm Yerevan time. (Looks similar to 7pm!)

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.