Armenia-Azerbaijan: Political Eurovision · Global Voices
Onnik Krikorian

As voting for the Eurovision Song Contest gets underway in Moscow, bartlemot tweets that the telephone number to vote for the Armenian entry in Azerbaijan was censored. In a second tweet, the same user says that instead of displaying a telephone number in the lower section of the screen it was instead left blank. Armenia also staged its own action with Twitter reporting that its host purposely showed a photograph of a statue in the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh three times intended to agitate viewers in Azerbaijan. Eurovision is notorious for its political undertones, but with the two countries deadlocked in efforts to resolve the long-standing conflict over Nagorno Karabakh since the May 1994 ceasefire, some feared the worse when both countries today showed up trending on Twitter.