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.

12 Jan

#protestbaku hashtag analysis

EDIT 5pm Pacific, 5am Baku – Since this has been so popular, I’ve made a more inclusive version here.

Thankfully the hashtag #protestbaku caught on and I was able to archive the tweets for analysis. I helped create it about 3 hours before the protest started.

thebirthofahashtag

So here’s a map of the hashtag (thanks Marc Smith!)

nodexl map

link to full

What does this tangle of wires mean? These are clusters of people who are communicating with one another. You can see that there are some pretty tight networks here. (And if you’re familiar with the Azerbaijani Twitter scene, the clusters shouldn’t surprise you too much.)

Group G1 on the far left consists of a lot of Azerbaijanis who don’t live in Azerbaijan anymore. A lot of the URLs that they were tweeting can be considered ones that allow for them to “keep up” with what happened during the protest.

Group G2 are people that, more or less, were on the ground and centers around Adnan Hajizada. Their URLs tweeted were more of photos than liveblogs or videos. They also were more likely to talk about logistics – where police were, as well as break news.

Group G3 includes people that I’m not really familiar with. They linked to a lot of YouTube videos though and used words that are affiliated with the pro-government groups.

Group G4 is very much pro-government people. Their hashtags used were against the protest, more or less. Rauf Mardiyev, the leader of the pro-government youth group is the center of that.

Group G5 is more opposition but seems to center around Baxtiyar Hajiyev, another opposition leader. I’m not really sure why Baxtiyar’s group is so distance from Adnan’s. Perhaps Adnan (and Emin Milli) have a different Twitter following because of their relatively early fame and frequency of tweeting in English. Looking at Baxtiyar’s twitter confirms that he mostly tweets in Azerbaijani.

Groups G6 and G7 seems to be unimportant.

You can download an Excel spreadsheet of all of this and play around with things like word frequency — no statistical knowledge required.

I also did a TweetReach analysis of #protestbaku. You can do the last 50 tweets for free. I bought a set of 1500 tweets though. Here’s what that found.

– There were 188,045 Twitter users who were exposed to a tweet that contained the #protestbaku hashtag.
– There were over a million “impressions” – 1,075,736 to be exact. That means, essentially, someone’s eyes potentially read #protestbaku over a million times in the last day.

The twitter who got the most exposure was Jamal Ali with 50,300 impressions. The most retweeted and most mentioned was @muntezir.

With that I have a list of tweets, most popular, etc. if anyone is interested.

So what? What does this mean?

A few things…

1. In this protest, Twitter “mattered” – but it mattered in different ways for different people. For people on the ground, it was used a bit for logistics, but mostly for getting information out. For people not present, it was a way to spread information.

2. There is polarization. This isn’t surprising. I guess the amount of guff from the pro-government twitter crowd was a little new for me. They’ve gotten louder in the past year, but their simultaneous tweeting during the protest and use of the hashtag was interesting, to say the least.

3. Personally I “met” a lot of new Azerbaijani tweeters today through this hashtag. Were these people whom I just don’t run into otherwise? Were they people that don’t tweet usually but did for this event? It goes to show that a hashtag has the potential to bring people together.

4. Speaking to the clusters of groups, I wonder if someone who would be interested in pulling people together for greater collection action could focus on those people who are between networks?

I’d love to hear other thoughts on this. I usually keep my comments off to avoid spam, but I’ll turn it on now!