The flood of comments on the pages of dissidents also stymies online debate and has a “chilling effect” on others who may consider speaking out, the researcher added. “In this social media age, comments and likes and followers and all these other quantifications are a really good way to let their rivals know that the people are with them.” “In order to maintain their rule, need to give the impression that the people do actually support them,” the researcher said. The troll operation’s top targets include the most prominent critics of Aliyev, center. The Guardian agreed not to name the researcher because they have been the target of coordinated online harassment and abuse over their work. The use of trolls to produce comments that praise the ruling party and criticize the opposition is “one of the social tools of authoritarianism”, said a researcher who studies technology and dissent in the region. They open accounts just to troll me,” he said.Īfter publication of this article, the YAP denied any connection to the Pages leaving harassing comments on the 6 March Azad Soz post. The trolls were easy to spot, he added, in a country which has around three million Facebook users. They were physically located in the capital Baku and spread out inside the youth branch of the YAP, as well as in the interior ministry and state-funded NGOs. He estimated the regime employed about 10,000 full-time trolls. Karimli said state officials had copied the idea of a troll factory from Russia.
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Facebook is popular because we don’t have free information space.” “So Facebook, Instagram and other platforms play a big role here. The only way to express your opinion freely is via social media,” he said.
There are no independent newspapers or TV. Karimli told the Guardian that the attacks on Facebook from the YAP’s “vast army of trolls” were part of a coordinated campaign by the government which included hacking his social media accounts and blocking him from accessing the internet. The party has been subject to what Human Rights Watch has called a “relentless crackdown”. It includes news outlets whose editors have been forced into exile, such as Azadliq newspaper, Azad Soz and Mikroskop Media news outlets whose sites are blocked in Azerbaijan, such as Radio Free Europe and and the political opposition, such as the Azerbaijan Popular Front party (APFP) and its chair, Ali Karimli. She found thousands of Facebook Pages – profiles for businesses, organizations and public figures – that had been set up to look like user accounts and were being used to inundate the Pages of Azerbaijani’s few independent news outlets and opposition politicians on a strict schedule: the comments were almost exclusively made on weekdays between 9am and 6pm, with an hour break at lunch.Ī list of the operation’s top 20 targets, generated by Zhang in August 2020, resembles a list of the most prominent critics of Azerbaijan’s autocratic leader, Ilham Aliyev, who has ruled with an increasingly authoritarian grip since 2003. Zhang uncovered the troll operation in the course of her work as a data scientist for a team at Facebook dedicated to combatting fake engagement: likes, shares and comments from inauthentic accounts. We have made several failed attempts before at getting Facebook to have someone from the Azerbaijani region to explain the context.
“Your report shows how indifferent the platform is to countries not in the spotlight and less known. “Facebook isn’t interested in countries like Azerbaijan,” said Arzu Geybullayeva, an Azerbaijani journalist who lives in Turkey due to threats over her reporting.
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The result appears to allow an authoritarian regime to drown out debate on one of the only venues for free expression available in Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic that ranks 168th out of 180 countries on Reporters without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index. An analysis of one post on the Facebook page for the independent social media outlet Azad Soz (“Free Speech”) found that 294 of the top 301 comments (97.7%) came from Facebook Pages that had been set up to resemble user accounts – the same mechanism used by the CIB operation that Facebook banned. But a Guardian review of the operation’s most common targets found that the trolling operation has clearly returned.
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