Azerbaidjan

President Ilham Aliyev joined the Twittersphere in July 2010 with two accounts, @azpresident in Azeri and @presidentaz in English. Ilham Aliyev does not tweet personally but his staff uses the accounts to live tweet salient quotes from his speeches, notably when he lambasts Armenia for the current stalemate in the negotiations over Nagorno-Karabagh and Armenia’s responsibility in what he terms the “Khojaly genocide”, the killing of hundreds of ethnic Azerbaijani civilians from the town of Khojaly on 25–26 February 1992 by Armenian forces. His most popular tweet in Azerbaidjani reads: “The 20th anniversary of the Khojaly genocide, considered to be one of the most terrible and bloody tragedies of the 20th century.” In English the most popular tweet is: “Independence is the biggest asset, the biggest achievement, the biggest value for us.” Both accounts are only broadcasting and do not engage with his followers. There has been no @reply nor @mention and he only follows his own English account and the institutional account of the presidential administration.

The presidential administration started to tweet in April 2011 and is fairly prolific with over five tweets a day. The tweets mostly refer to the activities of President Aliyev and link back to content on the President’s official website. Some of the tweets are in English but most are kept in Azerbaijani. Like the personal account of the Azerbaidjani president this account doesn’t try to engage in conversations with his followers. The account has never sent a single retweet, @reply or @mention. It is worth noting that they often tweet from a platform called ‘Twitlonger’, a tool allowing for tweets longer than 140 characters.