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A bunch of countries just have their own flag as an emoji... The author barely managed to identify which emoji tourists use when posting about their trip on twitter.
the data is clearly fucked given the whole UK mess, and given it's all either small countries, authoritarian hellholes or both which have their country flag I'm inclined to believe it's a "no data" placeholder
I don't think twitter users in authoritarian hellholes are acting like NPCs going "Glory to Artsotzka" every five minutes.
It's tourism, coupled with low twitter use from the local population. Belgium has a bigger population than Belarus and unlike it isn't an authoritarian hellhole. But it's way more touristy. So Belgium has its own flag as the most used emoji but Belarus doesn't.
You can see this pattern pretty clearly in the ME as well. Jordan, Yemen, or Syria don't have their own flag as their most used emoji (despite being both small and undemocratic), because there ain't any tourists there. Qatar does. (A bit surprised about Cyprus though, do they use twitter a lot?)
The data is probably sound, but the methodology is insane.
Given Turkmenistan's past record it wouldn't even shock me to find out there's a law saying people have to do exactly that, but yeah you're probably right