{"id":4757,"date":"2015-01-30T12:34:12","date_gmt":"2015-01-30T12:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/media.am\/azerbaijani-men-on-trial-in-karabakh-led-to-new-twitter-battle-between-users-in-armenia-and-azerbaijan\/"},"modified":"2015-01-30T12:34:12","modified_gmt":"2015-01-30T12:34:12","slug":"azerbaijani-men-on-trial-in-karabakh-led-to-new-twitter-battle-between-users-in-armenia-and-azerbaijan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/crossroads\/2015\/01\/30\/4757\/","title":{"rendered":"Azerbaijani Men on Trial in Karabakh Led to New Twitter Battle Between Users in Armenia and Azerbaijan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Azerbaijani residents Dilham Askerov and Shahbaz Guliyev, accused of illegally crossing the Karabakh-Azerbaijan border on June 29, 2014, and killing a civilian and an Armenian soldier, stood before a Karabakh court in the fall of 2014. The group’s third member, Hasan Hasanov, was killed as a result of armed resistance. <\/p>\n

There was a strong reaction to the trial also on social media. Twitter users supporting the detainees adopted the hashtag #saveazehostages<\/a>, thus trying to present the men as hostages. The hashtag was immediately used and shared by quite a number of presumably Azeri users. <\/p>\n

Twitter’s presumably Armenian users, in turn, widely circulated the hashtag #azesaboteurs<\/a>. Thus, Twitter coverage of the trial led to a battle of hashtags between online users of the two countries. <\/p>\n

\"Pic1_TW\"The most active users<\/a> of the hashtag #azesaboteurs<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

The Azerbaijani side attempted to take over the #azesaboteurs hashtag but failed. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"Pic3_TW\"<\/p>\n

Analyzing these two hashtags, American media expert Katy Pearce concluded<\/a> that the #saveazehostages tweets involved an organized and coordinated effort.<\/p>\n

As seen in the graph below, at the center of the #saveazehostages tweets is the official account<\/a> of the youth wing of the ruling New Azerbaijan party.<\/p>\n

\"Pic2_TW\"<\/p>\n

Furthermore, Pearce ascertained that the most active accounts using this hashtag joined Twitter in August 2014. <\/p>\n

Through Startahashtag.com, it became clear<\/a> that the first tweet using the #saveazehostages hashtag was sent by @SenanNajafov <\/a>on October 21, 2014. This account belongs to Senan Najafov, representative of The Council of State Support to Non-Governmental Organizations under the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan and editor of the organization’s official website. <\/p>\n

\"Pic4_TW\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This was not the first Twitter campaign Azerbaijani authorities organized. A similar and more large-scale campaign was attempted by the IRELI youth organization to take over<\/a> the hashtag #armvote13<\/a>, which online users adopted to share information related to Armenia’s 2013 presidential election<\/a>. <\/p>\n

After the last court session in the case of the two Azerbaijani men in Stepanakert at the end of 2014, the conflict again escalated.<\/span><\/p>\n

On December 29, 2014, Askerov was given a life sentence, while Quliyev was sentenced to 22 years in prison.<\/p>\n

\"Pic5_TW\"<\/p>\n

As seen from this graph from Topsy<\/a>, though the #azesaboteurs hashtag has been relatively inactive this past month, it has a tendency to become active and most likely, the hashtag battle will continue in the near future. <\/p>\n

Gayane Mirzoyan<\/strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Azerbaijani residents Dilham Askerov and Shahbaz Guliyev, accused of illegally crossing the Karabakh-Azerbaijan border on June 29, 2014, and killing a civilian and an Armenian soldier, stood before a Karabakh court in the fall of 2014. The group’s third member, Hasan Hasanov, was killed as a result of armed resistance. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4755,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-crossroads"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4757\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}