A War of Words: An Investigation of Patriotic Astroturfing during the 2020 Armenia-Azerbaijan War

Understanding not only the content but the mechanisms by which information spreads on social media is important because it in fact can have consequences in the “real” world. Pro-Azerbaijani users artificially spamming hashtags and harassing celebrities, most prominently with the hashtag “#DontBelieveArmenia” and targeting celebrities such as Cardi B and Elton, damaged the image of Armenians in public discourse. This activity in turn even harms efforts to gather support and advocate for the Armenian cause internationally – not to mention violates the terms of service of Twitter.

For pro-Armenian users, much of the coordination, some of which was confirmed by Twitter to be affiliated with the Armenian government (and thus taken down), showcased how inexperienced the country is to Twitter campaigns. The primary activities of the accounts taken down by Twitter were impersonations of Azerbaijani government officials, such as Jeyhun Baramov, the Azerbaijani Minister of Foreign Affairs and the spokeswoman for the MFA Leyla Abullayeva. The goal of these accounts was essentially to give the appearance of Azerbaijani political disagreement and internal chaos, thus targeting the local Azerbaijani audiences. The identities of those accounts were eventually called out by the actual Azerbaijani officials, and likely had little to no impact on Azerbaijani audiences. A Stanford Cyber Policy Center report specifically focuses on these “sockpuppet” accounts in detail, with a screenshot from their analysis provided below.

While Azerbaijan has a history of social media manipulation on Twitter, it came as a shock to many Armenians to see their government exposed by Twitter Safety for making fraudulent accounts on the platform. Knowing that the Armenian government has used these techniques, even to a small degree, should make Armenians be more careful when looking at information spread on Twitter on topics regarding both international and domestic issues. Though Twitter’s takedown did not find any Armenian government-affiliated accounts aimed at targeting the Armenian local audience, Armenians should be especially vigilant about the potential use of inauthentic social media for campaign/propaganda purposes during elections or other events where there is a coordinated flow of information. It is worth also noting that most Armenians are not using Twitter but rather, based on website popularity, using Facebook, Youtube, VKontakte and Telegram as their primary social media platforms.

Moreover, much of the activity of Armenians, authentic and inauthentic, probably had a small effect on international audiences. The majority of new users from Armenia likely came through the “Social Media Army” groups on Facebook and only followed one another and government accounts. As a result, though the report does not focus on this, one can conclude Armenians may have created an echo-chamber of pro-Armenian users retweeting the same content to one another rather than a larger outreach to international communities.

It is worth noting that unlike suspicious Armenian activity, there was no public investigation or takedown of suspicious Azerbaijani accounts by Twitter. DPA recommended in its report that Twitter conduct its own internal investigation into pro-Azerbaijani tweets during the duration of the war, and also improve its monitoring of the region during periods of conflict. Additionally, the report concluded there’s a need for improvement in Twitter’s platform monitoring given the particularly disturbing rhetoric highlighted in this report and publicly propagated on social media by official and non-official Azerbaijani users.

For access to the complete investigation, please see the report located on the DataPoint Armenia website.

Social Media Best Practices

It is important to understand how to push your narrative on social media in an adversarial environment but it is also very important to know the ways to protect your mental health and digital security. Unfortunately, many Armenians came across some sort of hate speech during the war on social media and felt threatened. Some even experienced cyber-attacks such as messages or calls with harmful content, reported or stolen accounts. The hate speech and violence on social media puts extra psychological burden on the individual making them often behave irrationally. While it is hard to take control of emotions, always remember that the content on social media is not always authentic. Here are good practices to navigate through social media, especially, when you suspect that there is a chance of astroturfing.

• Check the source and the author of the content. The authentic sources are more trustworthy than random blogs. In case of social media influencers or public figures, make sure that their pages are authentic and the accounts are not stolen.
• Check the dates of the posts and metadata if available. Some pictures include metadata which can show where and when the picture was taken.
• Report activities that violate the Terms of Service (TOS). These include any kinds of hate speech, misinformation and suspicious accounts.
• When encountering hate speech do not engage with it, especially, with replying to the message or comment with a more hateful comment. It is a wiser decision to report this activity to the platform managers, so they can prevent more hate speech dissemination. Moreover, replying with hate speech puts at risk your account’s credibility in the eyes of platform managers, because usually it is really hard to track when and how the hate speech thread started and you become yet another person who exercises harmful practices.
• Do not post personal information that can harm yourself or your loved ones such as farewell pictures with volunteers who join the army. Social media is a highly monitored place, where pictures and videos are being checked and geolocated.