This entry draws on reporting by Meydan TV and a joint statement issued by eight Azerbaijani media outlets on August 28.
In the last week of August, Meta blocked access to the Instagram pages of Abzas Media and Toplum TV, two independent outlets now operating in exile, after a series of copyright-infringement complaints. Days earlier, Facebook and Instagram blocked the opposition newspaper Azadlıq’s pages and the Instagram page of Azərbaycan Saatı on the same grounds. Meydan TV and HamamTimes have faced similar complaints at various points over the past year.
On August 28, eight outlets – Abzas Media, Meydan TV, Toplum TV, Azadlıq, HamamTimes, Azərbaycan Saatı, Qəzetçi and Mikroskop Media – issued a joint statement describing the complaints as part of a wider campaign to silence independent journalism, rather than a series of unrelated technical disputes.
What happened
Abzas Media’s acting director Gunel Safarova told Meydan TV that the outlet received four copyright complaints between August 22 and 25. The flagged posts were:
- a video originally produced by the Azadlıq newspaper;
- a video built on an interview first published by Musavat.com;
- a video distributed by HamamTimes;
- a short clip of the 2022 Göyçay flooding taken from social media.
In each case, Safarova said Abzas Media credited the original source. None of the complaints came from those sources. HamamTimes – which describes Abzas Media as a close partner – told Meydan TV it filed no complaint with Meta and condemned the takedown.
Toplum TV’s editor Parvana Gurbanli described a similar pattern: the outlet was reported over a video of the August 3 landslide in Baku’s Xətai district that buried several cars. The footage came from the official YouTube channel of the state-funded public broadcaster İctimai TV, with attribution. The complainant claimed it came from his personal profile.
The signature of a coordinated campaign
What distinguishes this episode from the routine misuse of takedown tools is the paper trail. According to Abzas Media, although the complaints were submitted under different names, several used the same email address registered to one individual, “Farid Guliyev.” The “original content” links supplied by the complainants did not point to their own accounts but to the actual publishers – Azadlıq, Musavat.com and HamamTimes – none of which had complained. The joint statement adds that other complaints filed under different names repeated the same details, wording and structure.
The outlets have not been able to establish independently who organized the complaints. But the reuse of a single email address across multiple identities, complaints against unrelated content published at different times, and the near-simultaneous targeting of at least six outlets point to a single origin rather than a series of coincidences. Meta’s automated systems accepted the complaints, removed the posts, and – once enough strikes accumulated – deactivated entire accounts. The outlets say Meta requested no evidence of ownership at any stage.
Why this matters more for exiled media
For outlets that can no longer operate inside Azerbaijan, Meta’s platforms are not a supplementary distribution channel; they are the primary way to reach an audience at home. Their websites have been blocked in the country for years – Meydan TV, Azadlıq, Azərbaycan Saatı and Turan TV since 2017, Abzas Media and Toplum TV since the crackdown that began in November 2023. Their Baku-based staff are in prison: Abzas Media’s team received seven- to nine-year sentences in June 2025, upheld on appeal in April; the Toplum TV defendants received 11 to 15 years on July 27; and the Meydan TV case has ensnared eleven journalists. More than 25 journalists are currently behind bars.
As Safarova told Meydan TV, with no staff left in the country and the websites blocked, the only remaining lever against these outlets is to get their social media accounts shut down.
Not a new tactic – a refined one
Azerbaijan Internet Watch has documented the abuse of platform takedown mechanisms against critics for years. The pattern that emerged in August is a more industrialized version of what we have seen before:
- 2020 – opposition Musavat party accounts in January; arqument.az’s Facebook page in June (11,000 likes, 12,000 followers and months of posts deleted); bastainfo.com in September (5,000 followers and content back to 2017 wiped). In June 2020, someone holding activist Rustam Ismayilbeyli’s national ID card requested a password reset on his Facebook account – a reminder that the state, not the user, holds the documents platforms use to verify identity.
- March 2021 – Sancaq TV. Unable to hack Mehman Huseynov’s Facebook page, perpetrators created several fake “Sancaq TV” pages and used them to report the genuine page as the impostor. His Instagram account had already been taken via spoofed Instagram SMS messages.
- April 2022 – Humans of Azerbaijan. After Huseynov recovered the hijacked “Humans of Azerbaijan” page, the perpetrators submitted his own ID to Facebook to prove they were the “real” owner, then filed identical complaints against every page he administered. Facebook responded by blocking all of Huseynov’s accounts, including his personal profile.
- 2021–2022 – Toplum TV, three times over. Its Facebook page was hijacked in September 2021 (16,000 followers lost), November 2021 (via SMS interception of a founder’s 2FA code – a technique that requires a mobile operator’s cooperation), and September 2022 (26,000 followers and two weeks of content deleted). In the same period, HamamTimes’ website was hacked and its archive wiped.
- 2022 – Azad Söz. Videos investigating the state oil company and a relative of its former president were removed from YouTube on the basis of NetzDG complaints and restored only after third-party intervention; the outlet then reported trolls combing its archive for old images to mass-report as community-standards violations, and its TikTok account was shut down in May. During the September 2022 border clashes, mass fake reporting got the Facebook profiles of activist Giyas Ibrahim (six days) and Azad Söz founder Tural Sadiqli suspended.
- March 2023 – RLC. The Facebook page of the online outlet RLC was hijacked and a year’s content deleted. As AIW noted then, Facebook has never – in any Azerbaijani case we know of – helped recover deleted content.
- September 2023 – Hürriyyət. A Baku court ordered the YouTube channel of the online outlet blocked at the Prosecutor General’s request, after a guest criticized the Defense Ministry – the overt, legal route to the same end.
- March 2024 – Toplum TV. Hours after police raided the outlet’s Baku office and detained its staff, its social media accounts were compromised and all 3,600 videos on its YouTube channel deleted.
- 2025 As AIW documented in December, HamamTimes’ Instagram account was suspended for 16 days in April 2025 over an unsubstantiated “breach of intellectual property rights” after it covered a data breach at Kapital Bank; Azad Söz lost YouTube videos to bogus court orders; Mukhtarli’s TikTok was closed by the platform, then blocked inside the country; and on December 16 Meydan TV’s Instagram page, with close to a million followers, was suspended over a copyright complaint filed by a sitting member of parliament, Ülvi Quliyev. Meta rejected the counter-notice.
The 2019- 2020 attacks targeted one activist at a time with amateurish, traceable complainants, largely hacks and hijacks. From there onwards, the emphasis shifted to weaponizing the platforms’ own trust-and-safety tools: impersonation reports, identity-verification disputes, community-standards mass reporting, NetzDG complaints, and finally, copyright strikes, which carry the heaviest automatic penalties and the weakest verification. Read together, what is happening in Azerbaijan is a sign of a deliberate campaign targeting exiled media at once.
The bigger picture
The account takedowns land in the middle of a legislative and institutional overhaul that has made the state’s own censorship tools far more powerful:
- In June 2026, authorities set up the National Cybersecurity Agency, which concentrates website blocking, traffic filtering, and personal data oversight in one presidentially supervised body. OC Media’s website was blocked the same month.
- In July 2026, parliament expanded extrajudicial blocking to cover “defamation,” “insult,” and undefined “false information.”
- Also, as of July 2026, new rules require Meta, TikTok, and other platforms to register locally, open offices in Baku, and respond to government data requests, with fines and blocking as penalties for non-compliance.
Domestically, the state no longer needs a court to block a website. What it cannot do unilaterally is remove content hosted on foreign platforms – and that is precisely the gap that mass copyright complaints fill. The complaints outsource censorship to Meta’s automated enforcement, bypassing the platform’s human review and the need for any legal process.
What the outlets are asking for
The joint statement asks Meta and other platforms to treat the complaints as a possible coordinated attack rather than a stack of individual notices: to investigate the source of the complaints, the reuse of identities and email addresses, whether complainants actually own the material they claim, and whether the reporting mechanism is being deliberately abused. It asks Meta to urgently review and restore the deactivated accounts and build safeguards so automated moderation cannot be turned into a censorship tool through coordinated reporting. It also urges platforms to consider reports from international press-freedom and human rights organizations on Azerbaijan when weighing complaints that originate there.
From the Azerbaijani government, the outlets demand an end to the campaign against independent media – the arrests, prosecutions, website blocks and now the digital attacks – and the release of imprisoned journalists.
