social media – Azerbaijan Internet Watch

copyright complaints take down Instagram pages of exiled Azerbaijani media – eight outlets call it a coordinated attack

Posted on September 2, 2026 by aiw_admin

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.

Popular Front activist jailed over social media posts

Posted on July 31, 2026August 13, 2026 by aiw_admin

On July 31, Elmar Piriyev, an activist with the Tovuz district branch of the Azerbaijan Popular Front Party (AXCP), was placed under administrative detention for ten days. According to information the party provided to Meydan TV, the detention followed critical posts he made on social media.

Piriyev had been out of contact since July 27. The party’s organizational department head, Sagif Gurbanov, said Piriyev had reported being summoned to the Tovuz district police station that afternoon; his detention only became known afterward. He has reportedly been subjected to administrative detention in Tovuz previously for his political activity.

Why this matters for online speech

The case is a routine but instructive example of how criticism published online is punished offline. Administrative detention, imposed in a same-day hearing, without the evidentiary standards or appeal timelines of criminal proceedings, has become the low-cost instrument of choice against activists whose visibility is primarily digital. The formal charge in such cases is typically disobedience to police rather than anything speech-related, which keeps the online origin of the case out of the court record entirely. Piriyev is not an isolated instance: activist Anar Huseynov received 30 days in June, and Kanan Ismayil 30 days on July 22.

The multi-day period during which family and colleagues could not locate Piriyev is itself a recurring feature, and one that directly suppresses the online response an arrest would otherwise generate.

More than 20 AXCP members and activists are currently jailed, including party chairman Ali Karimli. The Union for the Freedom of Political Prisoners of Azerbaijan lists 328 political prisoners in its most recent count. Azerbaijani authorities reject the characterization, maintaining that those detained face liability for specific criminal acts rather than their political views.

Opposition Figure Given 25 Days Administrative Detention

Posted on March 10, 2026March 17, 2026 by aiw_admin

Jeyhun Novruzov, head of the Sabail district branch of the Popular Front Party (AXCP), has been sentenced to 25 days of administrative detention.

According to the party, he was found guilty under:

Article 510 (petty hooliganism)
Article 535.1 (failure to obey police orders)

The AXCP states that Novruzov had criticized traffic police on Facebook four days prior, accusing them of unlawfully fining pedestrians. Novruzov was previously sentenced to 10 days in detention in December 2024 under similar charges, which he denied.

Novruzov is not the first activist to receive penalties for online criticism. Recent months have seen continued cases in Azerbaijan where individuals—particularly opposition activists—have been detained after posting criticism of authorities on Facebook. According to recent reporting by independent Meydan TV, numerous individuals who liked and commented on social media posts critical of the authorities have also faced penalties and charges.

Among them is Movsum Mammadov, who was sentenced to 30 days in prison after posting criticism of local authorities on social media; civic activist Konul Ahmadova, who was sentenced to 10 days in administrative detention; and Mushfig Abbasov, who was sentenced to 15 days in administrative detention.

Analysis of anonymized court decisions published on Azerbaijan’s electronic court portal shows that social media activity—particularly Facebook posts—is frequently referenced in administrative cases. Courts typically describe such activity using generalized phrases such as “sharing content on social networks” or “publishing information online,” while avoiding full quotation of the posts themselves. The content is legally framed as violating public order, often characterized as insulting, immoral, or disruptive. Evidence commonly includes screenshots and data extracted from mobile devices. Rather than prosecuting speech directly, courts tend to apply public-order provisions such as petty hooliganism, effectively translating online expression into administrative offenses.

Blogger Arrested Under Newly Amended Information Law [updated Feb 23]

Posted on February 2, 2026February 25, 2026 by aiw_admin

On February 2, TikTok blogger Salman Mammadov — known online as “Velizar” — was administratively detained on charges of disseminating prohibited content. Mammadov had attracted widespread public attention through live fundraising streams.

The arrest followed amendments to the Law on Information, Informatization and Protection of Information, signed by President Ilham Aliyev. The amendments ban the mass dissemination of content deemed to insult public morality or show explicit disrespect for society in a manner contrary to national moral values.

Six People Fined or Jailed for Social Media Posts

The same legal framework has produced its first documented wave of enforcement actions. According to a formal statement by the Prosecutor General’s Office, six people have already been penalised for social media posts under the new provisions: four received administrative detention, and two were fined.

The Prosecutor General’s Office stated that those individuals had posted content “insulting public morality, displaying open disrespect and content contrary to ethics” on social networks. Authorities issued a public warning that “the digital space is not a lawless or uncontrolled zone,” and threatened continued enforcement against anyone publishing content that targets national moral values.

The relevant article carries penalties of between 500 and 1,000 manat or up to 30 days’ administrative detention for a first offence. Repeat offenders face fines of 1,000–2,000 manat or detention of one to two months.

Former Investigator Arrested for Facebook Post Contradicting President

On February 23, Mushfig Abbasov — a former investigator at the Baku City Chief Prosecutor’s Office — was sentenced to 15 days of administrative detention by the Yasamal District Court following a request from the prosecution.

He was found in violation of Article 388-1.1.1 of the Administrative Offences Code, which prohibits posting content on information networks or telecommunications networks that is prohibited by law.

The post in question was a brief Facebook status update that directly contradicted a remark by President Ilham Aliyev at the Munich Security Conference. After Aliyev declared that “there are no independent media anywhere in the world,” Abbasov wrote: “There are no independent media in the world, but we have some.” That sentence was sufficient grounds for his detention. Abbasov had previously been imprisoned for bribery.

activist receives conditional sentence

Posted on February 6, 2025February 11, 2025 by aiw_admin

Civic activist Famil Khalilov has been handed a conditional sentence of 3 years with a 2-year probation period. Khalilov was arrested on May 2, 2024, on spurious drug charges. He was transferred under house arrest in December 2024. The activist was accused of drug charges – possession of a large amount of drugs with the intent to sell. Police claimed they confiscated 13 grams of methamphetamine in his pocket during his arrest. The activist refuted the allegations at the time, saying drugs were planted on him during his arrest. On February 6, 2025, when the verdict was being read, the activist was found guilty under drug possession charges, except “without the intent to sell.”

Khalilov was deported from Sweden in 2023 after unsuccessfully seeking asylum there.

Paralyzed in both arms, Khalilov lived with his wife and three children. The activist was vocal on social media platforms, often criticizing the authorities and calling for protests.

Drug possession charges are commonly used to target political and civic activists in Azerbaijan. Authorities in Azerbaijan have also been closely monitoring social media platforms, taking various measures against citizens using the platforms to express their criticism against the state. While administrative detentions, fines, or prophylactic “conversations” at police stations are standard measures, long-term arrests are also common.

While it is difficult to estimate an exact number of politically motivated drug-related charges handed down for online criticism, some of the well-known cases include that of Jabbar Savalan (2011) – a political activist who was arrested on drug charges after calling for protests on Facebook; Hilal Mammadov (2012) – journalist and editor-in-chief of the newspaper Tolishi Sado (charges against the journalist were later expanded to include treason and inciting ethnic hatred); Rashad Ramazanov (2013) – a blogger. There are many others. According to documentation by Azerbaijan Internet Watch, government critics targeted with drug charges include Elshan Teymurov (2020), Elmir Abbasov (2021), Sardar Asgarov (2021), Shahin Haciyev (2021), Razi Humbatov (2022), Mahir Azimov (2023), Ruslan Vahabov (2023), Zeka Miragayev (2023), Elvin Sadigov, Movsum Mammadov (2023).

bogus charges land one man in jail

Posted on January 7, 2025February 11, 2025 by aiw_admin

Hamza Mammadli, 33, was sentenced to six years on January 7, 2025, on spurious terrorism and calls against the state charges, the charges Mammadli denies.

Mammadli, a German citizen of Azerbaijani origin, received asylum in Germany in 2015 and German citizenship in 2022. He traveled to Azerbaijan in 2023 for his wedding and was arrested at the airport.

Mammadli’s charges were linked to a botched assassination attempt against then-mayor of Ganja Elmar Valiyev in 2018 and what the prosecutor’s office alleged Mammadli wrote about the events on social media, specifically a comment Mammadli has written under a post by satirical online platform Hamam Times. During his defense, Mammadli said he had nothing to do with the person who was later arrested for assassinating the then-mayor.

Upon arriving in Azerbaijan in 2023, Mammadli was arrested at the airport, where he was informed there was an arrest warrant issued in 2018.

The Azerbaijani government actively monitors social media platforms to track dissent and control the narrative surrounding its policies. This surveillance includes scrutinizing posts by activists, journalists, and ordinary citizens. Authorities have been known to arrest individuals based on their online activities, especially when content is deemed critical of the government.

The government’s concern over criticisms shared on social media stems from the platform’s ability to rapidly disseminate information and mobilize public opinion. In a country where traditional media is often state-controlled, social media serves as a crucial space for free expression and opposition discourse. Criticism on these platforms can challenge the government’s image, expose corruption, and inspire collective action, which the authorities perceive as threats to their control and stability.

In recent years, there has been a noticeable increase in the arrest of activists and journalists in Azerbaijan on charges such as smuggling or incitement, which many international observers view as attempts to suppress free speech and political opposition.

Older posts