Author: Eduard Nalbandian

The Guardian
‘Facebook isn’t interested in countries like ours’: Azerbaijan troll
network returns months after ban
State-backed harassment campaign targets journalists and dissidents in
authoritarian country
By Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco and Luke Harding in London
Tue 13 Apr 2021 04.00 EDT
Facebook has allowed a state-backed harassment campaign targeting
independent news outlets and opposition politicians in Azerbaijan to
return to its platform, less than six months after it banned the troll
network.
A Guardian investigation has revealed how Facebook allowed an arm of
Azerbaijan’s ruling party, the YAP, to carry out the harassment
campaign for 14 months after an employee, Sophie Zhang, first alerted
managers and executives to its existence in August 2019.
In October 2020, Facebook announced that it was removing more than
8,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts and Pages linked to the YAP for
violating its policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior” (CIB)
– the kind of deceptive influence operation used by Russia to
interfere in the 2016 US election.
But a Guardian review of the operation’s most common targets found
that the trolling operation has clearly returned. 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.
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.
“Facebook isn’t interested in countries like Azerbaijan,” said Arzu
Geybullayeva, an Azerbaijani journalist who lives in Turkey due to
threats over her reporting. “Your report shows how indifferent the
platform is to countries not in the spotlight and less known. We have
made several failed attempts before at getting Facebook to have
someone from the Azerbaijani region to explain the context. They
really can’t be bothered.”
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. 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.
A 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. 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 Abzas.net; and the political opposition,
such as the Azerbaijan Popular Front party (APFP) and its chair, Ali
Karimli. The party has been subject to what Human Rights Watch has
called a “relentless crackdown”.
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.
“We have a very repressive regime. There are no independent newspapers
or TV. The only way to express your opinion freely is via social
media,” he said. “So Facebook, Instagram and other platforms play a
big role here. Facebook is popular because we don’t have free
information space.”
Karimli said state officials had copied the idea of a troll factory
from Russia. He estimated the regime employed about 10,000 full-time
trolls. 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.
The trolls were easy to spot, he added, in a country which has around
three million Facebook users. “They have no photos, no personal life.
They open accounts just to troll me,” he said.
The YAP did not respond to queries from the Guardian.
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. The Guardian agreed not to name the researcher
because they have been the target of coordinated online harassment and
abuse over their work.
“In order to maintain their rule, [autocrats] need to give the
impression that the people do actually support them,” the researcher
said. “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.”
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. “It shows everyone else that if you do
this, you’re going to be attacked.”
At Facebook, Zhang rang the alarm bells, informing and repeatedly
following up with various managers and executives as well as
Facebook’s threat intelligence team, which is tasked with
investigating potential CIB campaigns. But it took until December 2019
for Facebook to assign an investigator to look into what was
happening, and until February 2020 for that investigator to establish
that the network was clearly connected to officials in the YAP.
Despite this evidence that an authoritarian regime was violating
Facebook’s rules in order to suppress dissent – a situation which
should have qualified the campaign for a CIB takedown – Facebook
abandoned work on the investigation in March 2020, and only resumed it
in August in response to complaints by Zhang inside the company.
A Facebook spokesperson, Liz Bourgeois, said: “We fundamentally
disagree with Ms Zhang’s characterization of our priorities and
efforts to root out abuse on our platform.
“We investigated and publicly shared our findings about the takedown
of this network in Azerbaijan last year. These investigations take
time to understand the full scope of the deceptive activity so we
don’t enforce piecemeal and have confidence in our public attribution
… Like with other CIB takedowns, we continue to monitor and block
their attempts to rebuild presence on our platform.”
On Monday, the company said it had disabled more than 300 Pages
identified by the Guardian for violating its policies against
inauthentic behavior. It did not dispute Zhang’s factual assertions
about the Azerbaijan case.
By the time Facebook announced its takedown of more than 8,000
Facebook and Instagram accounts and Pages in October, Azerbaijan was
fighting a war with Armenia over the disputed territory of
Nagorno-Karabakh, which only increased the online abuse, according to
Fatima Karimova, who runs Mikroskop Media with her husband, Javid. “We
faced insults and threats, not just from trolls but also by ordinary
people,” she said.
The couple – both journalists – set up Mikroskop Media three years ago
after fleeing Azerbaijan. They are currently based in Latvia.
“Everybody knows these comments are from trolls. I don’t know
precisely how long it’s been going on but it’s certainly been visible
for at least two years. We see it mainly on Facebook and Instagram,
not on Twitter. Sometimes we post an infographic or video and there
are 700 hostile comments.”
The trolls take up their targets’ time and energy, and they frequently
make false reports that can result in journalists or bloggers having
their social media accounts frozen, said Mehman Huseynov, an
Azerbaijani blogger who was imprisoned for two years over his work
exposing corruption.
“We can’t fight this,” Huseynov said by WhatsApp message, just two
days after he had been again detained by police who he said attempted
to hack into his phone. “[The] only thing we can do is just to block …
But it takes a lot of time.”
One of the difficulties for Huseynov and other opposition bloggers and
activists is that Facebook has not translated all of its tools and
instructions into Azeri, making the process of reporting abuse or
regaining access to frozen accounts especially onerous. Huseynov
relies on assistance from international NGOs but said that it was
difficult for less-established bloggers who don’t have connections
with such groups.
Facebook’s slow response may have been in part hampered by this
institutional blind spot. The company’s vast workforce includes
subject matter experts who specialize in understanding the political
context in nations around the world, as well as policy staff who
liaise with government officials. But Azerbaijan fell into a gap:
neither the eastern European nor the Middle Eastern policy teams
claimed responsibility for it, and no operations staff – either
full-time or contract – spoke Azeri.
Still, the existence of Azerbaijan’s state-backed troll farms was
documented in English-language scholarship dating back to 2014 and a
2018 report by the US-based Institute for the Future. Indeed, the
researcher said that they had repeatedly raised the issue with
Facebook staff at conferences since 2012.
“The relevant people at Facebook have known about this for years and
years,” they said. “They should have known better and they should have
paid more attention.”
The degree of repression in Azerbaijan makes Facebook’s failure to
rein in the regime’s rule-breaking all the more damaging, since
Facebook is one of the only means for expression accessible to
Azerbaijani internet users. “It’s the one thing where government [has]
no control,” said Huseynov.
“Facebook cuts both ways in Azerbaijan,” said Geybullayeva. “In one
way, for the political opposition in Azerbaijan, Facebook is the place
to organize and to get support for a specific issue. The dark side is,
because this is happening in the open, it’s also a way for the
government to see what is being discussed and who is saying what. This
is how people become targets. It’s double-edged.”
Geybullayeva said she had spotted Mark Zuckerberg in Budapest in 2013
or 2014 while she was attending a meeting on an internet freedom
report. At the time she was enthusiastic about the social network. She
said she tried to go up to him, to thank him for what Facebook was
doing to make freedom of speech possible in her home country. “A
bodyguard pushed me away,” she said. “I’m always reminded of that
encounter. It shows how uninterested Facebook is [in us].”
Asked what he would say to Zuckerberg, Karimli said: “First, I would
thank him. Facebook facilitates public discussion. But repressive
regimes with vast financial resources also use it to spread fake news.
Facebook should speed up the time it takes to delete troll-generated
content. They need to enact tough measures. And they should hire
someone who speaks Azeri.”
 

                                        Wednesday, March 31, 2021
Pashinian Installs New Senior Security Official
March 31, 2021
        • Sargis Harutyunyan
Armenia -- The main entrance to the National Security Service headquarters in 
Yerevan.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has installed a 31-year-old judge as a deputy 
director of Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS).
President Armen Sarkissian formalized Andranik Simonian’s appointment with a 
decree signed on Wednesday.
Simonian has been a judge of the court of first instance of the country’s 
northern Lori province since June 2020. He previously worked as a prosecutor in 
Yerevan.
Some Armenian media outlets said the presidential decree initiated by Pashinian 
is a prelude to Simonian’s appointment as director of the NSS. The prime 
minister’s office did not comment on the media speculation.
Pashinian has replaced five heads of Armenia’s most powerful security service 
since coming to power less than three years ago. Two of them, Argishti Kyaramian 
and Mikael Hambardzumian, were fired during last fall’s war with Azerbaijan.
Kyaramian, 29, was sacked after four months in office, while Hambardzumian 
served as acting head of the NSS for only one month. The latter was replaced by 
the current NSS director, Armen Abazian, in November.
Hambardzumian and another former NSS director, Artur Vanetsian, are now 
outspoken critics of Pashinian. Vanetsian also leads a political party which is 
affiliated with an opposition alliance trying to oust Pashinian over his 
handling of the six-week war in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Areg Kochinian, a political analyst, said the frequent changes of the NSS chiefs 
as well as their deputies reflect Pashinian’s “spontaneous and emotional” 
leadership style and “the current authorities’ terrible staffing policy.” He 
said they have a negative impact on the NSS’s activities.
“That reflects [negatively] on the predictability of this agency for both its 
personnel and our partner countries,” Kochinian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. 
“It also definitely affects the effectiveness of the NSS.”
Ruling Team Names Election Campaign Managers
March 31, 2021
        • Artak Khulian
Armenia -- Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and his political allies hold a rally 
in Yerevan, March 1, 2021.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and his political team have named four senior 
government officials to run their parliamentary election campaign.
Deputy parliament speaker Alen Simonian, another leading Pashinian ally, said on 
Wednesday that Minister for Territorial Administration and Infrastructures Suren 
Papikian will be the ruling team’s chief campaign manager.
Papikian oversees Armenia’s provincial governors and elected heads of local 
communities.
Simonian said that Environment Minister Romanos Petrosian, the chief of 
Pashinian’s staff, Arsen Torosian, and a senior aide to the prime minister, 
Arayik Harutiunian, will also play a major role in the campaign for snap 
elections expected in June.
All four officials are senior members of Pashinian’s Civil Contract party, the 
dominant component of the ruling My Step bloc that won 70 percent of the vote in 
the last general elections held in December 2018.
Armenia -- Minister of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure Suren 
Papikian speaks at a news conference in Yerevan, February 26, 2020.
Simonian told reporters that Pashinian and his party have not yet decided 
whether to preserve My Step, form a new electoral alliance or participate in the 
elections on their own.
Asked whether new figures could join the ruling team ahead of the polls, he 
said: “I cannot name any names. But nor can I exclude that there will be new 
people on our list.”
Pashinian announced on March 18 plans to dissolve the current Armenian 
parliament and hold the elections on June 20 amid continuing opposition protests 
against his rule. He has since toured two Armenian provinces to hold rallies in 
about a dozen local villages.
Opposition leaders say Pashinian has effectively launched his election campaign 
in breach of Armenian law and is abusing his government levers in a bid to hold 
on to power.
“It is clear that Pashinian has used and will use all [government] resources at 
his disposal to do well in the race,” said Gevorg Gorgisian of the opposition 
Bright Armenia Party.
Simonian dismissed the opposition allegations of foul play. He insisted that 
Pashinian’s rallies in Armavir and Aragatsotn provinces did not amount to 
illegal campaigning.
“The Armenian authorities are now in the most disadvantaged position because 
they have not only moral but also legal obligations,” he claimed. “They don’t 
have the kind of financial resources that the opposition has now. The Armenian 
opposition is now much wealthier and more competitive in terms of resources than 
the current authorities.”
World Bank Expects Slow Economic Recovery In Armenia
March 31, 2021
Armenia -- Workers rebuild a road in Gegharkunik province, Juy 4, 2020.
Armenia’s economy will return to growth this year after contracting by 7.6 
percent in 2020 mainly because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the 
World Bank.
“GDP growth is projected to recover partially in 2021 (to 3.4 percent) and more 
strongly in 2022 (4.3 percent). The recovery will be slow; the economy is 
unlikely to return to pre-COVID output levels until 2023,” the bank said in its 
latest Economic Update for Europe and Central Asia released late on Tuesday.
“Private consumption and the services sector are expected to recover gradually. 
Private investment will likely remain subdued, reflecting weak investor 
confidence,” added the report.
The Armenian government has forecast a similar growth rate for 2021. However, 
the country’s Central Bank said on March 17 that the domestic economy will 
likely expand by only 1.4 percent.
Data from the government’s Statistical Committee shows that GDP continued to 
shrink in January and February 2021.
The World Bank cautioned that its growth projections are a “baseline scenario” 
which assumes that Armenia will avoid coronavirus-related lockdowns and further 
political upheavals.
“The risks to the outlook are weighted heavily to the downside,” it said, adding 
that they include a “slow pace of immunization” of the population and “elevated 
political uncertainty.”
“Although the pace of vaccinations will gradually ramp up, the authorities do 
not expect to vaccinate a significant share of the population until 2022,” read 
the report.
The bank also noted the pandemic’s “severe” impact on low-income Armenians, 
saying that poverty in the country increased considerably in 2020. “The 
unemployment rate rose by 1 percentage point year on year, reaching 18.1 percent 
at end-September 2020,” it said.
Armenian Minister Resigns After Assault
March 31, 2021
        • Narine Ghalechian
Armenia -- Minister of High-Tech Industry Hakob Arshakian speaks at a press 
conference in Yerevan, December 18, 2019.
Armenia’s Minister of High-Tech Industry Hakob Arshakian announced his 
resignation on Wednesday almost two weeks after assaulting a journalist at a 
restaurant in Yerevan.
“As a citizen of the Republic of Armenia, I find it unacceptable for an official 
to use violence against any citizen,” he wrote on his Facebook page.
Arshakian referred to a violent incident at the restaurant where he dined with 
his wife on March 18. Footage from a security camera publicized afterwards 
showed him hitting Paylak Fahradian, the editor of the Irakanum.am news website, 
in the face and damaging his laptop computer.
The assault reportedly occurred moments after Fahradian approached Arshakian and 
asked him to explain why he is not at work.
The video sparked an uproar from Armenian journalists and media associations. 
Some of them demanded the minister’s resignation.
Law-enforcement authorities pledged to investigate the assault. The Special 
Investigative Service told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Wednesday it has yet to 
decide whether to prosecute Arshakian.
In his first reaction to the incident, Arshakian implicitly accused Fahradian of 
violating his privacy but said he is ready to bear responsibility for his 
actions. He later apologized to the journalist.
Rumors about Arshakian’s resignation began circulating on Wednesday morning. A 
spokeswoman for Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian pointedly declined to refute them.
Arshakian confirmed his resignation in the afternoon. “I am thereby expressing 
my intolerance towards both physical and psychological violence,” he said. “I 
hope that the incident will serve as a lesson for our society and that we will 
love each other and respect everyone’s right to privacy a bit more.”
Arshakian is a senior member of Pashinian’s Civil Contract party. He has held 
the ministerial post since October 2018.
The 35-year-old also found himself in hot water earlier this year after it 
emerged that his ministry, which oversees the domestic defense industry, failed 
to properly organize Armenia’s participation in an international arms exhibition 
held in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Armenian government had allocated 23 
million drams ($44,000) for that purpose.
Armenian defense firms displayed no items at the Abu Dhabi exhibition for at 
least three days. Arshakian blamed that on “logistical problems.”
The Ministry of High-Tech Industry said on Tuesday that three of its officials 
have been formally reprimanded as a result of an internal inquiry conducted 
after the scandal.
Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
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