This month, a series of articles published by The Guardian newspaper revealed how leaders across the world, used Facebook loopholes to harass their critics at home. And how despite having information about these violations, the platform lets these cases sit sometimes for months on end if not more, instead choosing to deal with more high profile cases. “The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses of its platform in poor, small and non-western countries in order to prioritize addressing abuses that attract media attention or affect the US and other wealthy countries. The company acted quickly to address political manipulation affecting countries such as the US, Taiwan, South Korea, and Poland, while moving slowly or not at all on cases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Mexico and much of Latin America.”
The Guardian investigations show that Azerbaijan was on the list of neglected countries. If it wasn’t for Facebook’s former employee Sophie Zhang memo published in September of last year, those inauthentic pages that Facebook removed 14 months later (once the memo was out) likely would have stayed.
But even though those pages have been reportedly removed, hundreds if not thousands more continue to target independent media in Azerbaijan. AIW covered the story of Meydan TV here and The Guardian uncovered a similar pattern of targeting in the case of Azad Soz. AIW now presents its findings on targeting Mikroskop Media, a Riga-based online news platform that covers Azerbaijan.
Mikroskop Media shared with AIW the list of Facebook posts where the platform received a high volume of comments. The preliminary investigation indicates that the Facebook page of Mikroskop Media was also targeted by hundreds of inauthentic Facebook pages set up to look like personal accounts flooding the posts with comments supportive of the ruling government and its relevant decisions.
On March 24, Mikroskop Media shared the following post on its Facebook page. The post looks at the total number of citizens who have received vaccination so far in Azerbaijan as well as the total number of vaccines on March 23. This post received over 1.6k comments. AIW looked at 550 comments and almost all of these comments were posted by owners of pages that posed as users on the platform.
Another post investigated by AIW was one posted on March 11, indicating the total number of businesses who have applied to the authorities to launch their businesses in Karabakh. The post receives over 400 comments. Having analyzed 200 of them, AIW was again, discovered that all of them were pages.
On April 5, Mikroskop Media shared a link to a story they published about this investigation that was first originally published by VICE on March 29, exposing how little known Berlin-based television channel was part of a “lobbying strategy to polish Azerbaijan’s image in Germany” thanks to large sums of money paid through bribery of certain politicians. The story shared by Mikroskop Media on its Facebook page received almost 400 comments. AIW analyzed these comments, and once again, with an exception of a few profiles (although these too were suspicious given the lack of any recent activity on their profiles) that almost all of the comments were posted by inauthentic Facebook pages.
At other times, Mikroskop Media’s Facebook page was targeted by troll accounts. This was especially the case in this example – on November 12, 2020, Mikroskop Media shared an infographic, about the number of times, Azerbaijan’s national constitution was amended. Among the 385 comments that were analyzed, a relatively high number of these comments were posted by Facebook profiles. A closer look at these profiles showed while some of the owners were employees at the state universities and government institutions, some were not authentic accounts at all. The majority of the comments once again were in favor of these changes, expressed pride in the country and the president’s decisions as well as accused the media platform of bias and unfair reporting.
AIW would be happy to assist Facebook’s threat intelligence team in investigating the “coordinated inauthentic behavior” that AIW has observed and has shared in its reporting so far, but the main question still lingers, will it take notice?