Turkish pop culture Twitter accounts mobilize to support Azerbaijan
Tags: Armenia, Nagorno Karabakh, Social Media, Azerbaijan, Turkey

Like most modern conflicts, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict included an informational dimension that played out online. For both Azerbaijanis and Armenians, Twitter was the primary domain through which both sides attempted to present their perspective to the international community.

Much of this activity was authentic, coordinated among individuals in public and private Facebook groups, which often referred to themselves as “social media armies.” But researchers studying the early activity at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) also noted that some of it bore hallmarks of platform manipulation, included copy-pasted spam messages aimed at journalists and news outlets and the repurposing of old marketing bot accounts.

Early analyses showed that activity to pro-Armenian hashtags was greater than activity to pro-Azerbaijani hashtags, coinciding with an online activism campaign in Armenia to encourage Armenians on Facebook to join Twitter, as well as wartime-imposed social media restrictions in Azerbaijan. But an analysis of activity to 12 of the most popular hashtags on each side throughout the course of the entire war showed that pro-Azerbaijani hashtags displayed sharp spikes in activity on October 5, October 11, and October 16, 2020.

After analyzing 24 prominent hashtags used in the conflict, the DFRLab chose two of them that were prominent in the third spike, from October 15–19, for further analysis: #ArmenianAggression and #ArmenianTerrorism. While much of the activity appeared to be from authentic users, there were several distinct communities of disinformation amplifiers, including a particularly active community of accounts tweeting support for Azerbaijan primarily in Turkish that previously tweeted exclusively about K-Pop.

This analysis is a reflection of the complexities of online social interaction amid armed conflict. Throughout the war, users employed simplistic narratives about social media “bot armies” allegedly commandeered by the other side, often with accusations that these online armies were government-run. The reality, however, was significantly more complicated: social media users, many of them youth, mobilized accounts previously devoted to pop culture to tweet pro-Azerbaijan wartime propaganda. The majority of these accounts appeared to be based not in Azerbaijan, but in Turkey, which has lent both rhetorical and material support to Azerbaijan in the war over Karabakh.

Hashtag analysis

On the pro-Azerbaijan side, the DFRLab selected the following English-language hashtags for analysis:



#ArmenianAggression

#DontBelieveArmenia

#KarabakhisAzerbaijan

#ArmenianTerrorism

#StopArmenianAggression

#StopArmenianTerrorism

#ArmeniaKillsCivilans

#StopArmenianOccupation

#ArmenianTerrorism

#ArmenianWarCrimes

#LongLiveAzerbaijanArmy

#WeStandWithAliyev

The traffic to these hashtags was compared to the following 12 pro-Armenian hashtags over the same period:

#StopAzerbaijaniAggression

#StopAliyev

#ArtsakhStrong

#KarabakhIsArmenia

#ArmeniaStrong

#StopTurkey

#ArtsakhisArmenia

#AzeriWarCrimes

#AzerbaijaniAggression

#TurkeyIsATerroristState

#TurkeyIsATerrorState

#StopErdogan

From September 11 to December 7, 2020, pro-Azerbaijan hashtags amassed over twice as many mentions as the pro-Armenian hashtags: 8.5 million vs 4.13 million, respectively. The pro-Azerbaijan traffic also showed prominent spikes in activity on three occasions in October that did not appear consistent with authentic traffic flows. One of the spikes coincided with the first short-lived humanitarian ceasefire agreed to on October 10; another coincided with the announcement of a second attempt at a ceasefire, made on October 16 and expected to go into effect on October 18.