The people of Myanmar is currently experiencing major political dynamics in their country. Myanmar’s military is launching a coup against the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. Suu Kyi, Myanmar President Win Myint and other leaders of National League for Democracy (NLD) party were detained on Monday morning (01/02/2021).
On the social media of Twitter, several people of Myanmar were seen tweeting reports about what is happening in their country to gain the world’s attention. In order to get a clearer view of what they are saying, and also of what the general users of Twitter are saying about the current situation in Myanmar we did a brief analysis of tweets that are related to the keyword ‘Myanmar’.
Using Python scripts, we extracted a dataset of 1047 tweets and 801 retweets on 01/02/2021 14.55 PM (GMT+7). The resulting dataset included tweets with keyword ‘Myanmar’ and other tweets that had a relation of either quote tweet or reply tweet with the tweets that contain the keyword ‘ Myanmar’. The dataset were then sorted by retweet counts to get the most popular tweets. Data visualizations were conducted in the form of word cloud, user network graph and tweet network graph.
Here are the top 5 popular tweets regarding the topic ‘Myanmar’:
- A description about what is happening in Myanmar, tweeted by a personal account.
What’s Happening in Myanmar: An Informative Thread pic.twitter.com/LxlCUpUj7R
— haseul says rt pinned 📌🕊 (@jinsoul_vcr) February 1, 2021
- A short breaking news about the cop in Myanmar, tweeted by a popular news account.
BREAKING: Myanmar’s military takes power and declares state of emergency for a year
— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) February 1, 2021
- A plea from a supossedly Myanmar citizen for the world to know the situation in Myanmar before the communication in the country is totally cut off.
❗❗❗ 🇲🇲🇲🇲🇲🇲❗❗❗
— Peraya Home_Myanmar (@perayahomemm) February 1, 2021
We , Myanmar citizens need the world to know what’s happening in Myanmar right now before our wifis are cut off.
They already cut off TVs broadcasting lines, phone services in order to prevent us reaching to the world.#saveMyanmar#myanmar pic.twitter.com/lFJcKbsOda
- A news tweet about the condition in Myanmar from a internationally renowned news outlet.
Myanmar political leaders, including Aung San Suu Kyi, detained by the military, her party says https://t.co/VpWECK3dWL
— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) January 31, 2021
- An infomation (with no provided source) about the telephone and internet communication that are down in the Myanmar capital city of Nay Pyi Taw, tweeted by a popular news account.
BREAKING: Telephone and internet communications are down in Myanmar’s capital amid possible coup.
— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) January 31, 2021
Ten of the most common words in the dataset are depicted in word cloud as follows:
The user network graph that visualizes the conversation with the topic ‘Myanmar’ between Twitter users are as follows:
The graph shows that a significant proportion of the conversation are linked between each other, as many of the communities formed (shown in different colors) are linked with other communities. Many tweets are isolated or linked in small communities of less than 10 interacting users.
The tweet network graph that visualizes the relation of tweets are as follows:
The tweet network graph can only show a maximum of three-node-long links because we only investigated up to three levels of tweet engagements. The graph shows significant proportion of tweets with high retweet counts as shown by their sizes. Some of the tweets created three-node-long conversations. Most of the tweets are not connected or responded by other tweets.
The top 15 most popular tweets are as follows:
The anonymized dataset of tweets used in this analysis can be found at Github.