Azerbaijan Introduction Azerbaijan’s oil wealth has allowed its government to fund large international projects and rebuild its military in recent years. The government—led by Ilham Aliyev since 2003—has broad control over the media landscape. Indeed, the country is ranked 166th out of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index (Reporters Without Borders, 2020). While public assembly and access to traditional media are restricted, there has been an increasing use of social media as an alternative source for political information (International Election Observation Mission, 2020). The government has worked to block critical websites, hijack social media accounts, prosecute and intimidate journalists and activists, and use computational propaganda (Freedom of the Net—Azerbaijan, 2019) targeted against dissidents both in the country and abroad. The Ministry of Transportation, Communications and High Technologies is entitled to block websites without a prior court decision (International Election Observation Mission, 2020). It has also been linked to the DDoS attacks on independent online media sites in 2017 (Megiddo, s. f.). Consequently, independent news platforms are using Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to reach their audience, and many of the existing websites are managed from abroad (Geybulla, 2019b). Even so, content unfavourable to the government, such as evidence of police violence during protests in October 2019, have been taken down from Facebook with no further explanation (Geybulla, 2019b). Slander is a criminal offense and is punished with three to five years of imprisonment. As a result, journalists and activists have been arrested for expressing anti-government viewpoints. Not only have exiled activists been blackmailed with hacked photos, audios, and emails (World Report 2020, 2019), but hackers also published personal information on the hijacked social media accounts (Geybulla, 2019b). Moreover, their relatives have been intimidated if they did not denounce them or convince them to stop their activities (World Report 2020, 2019). As evidenced by a report by Qurium, an attacker using the subnet 85.132.24.7X and linked to the Azerbaijani Ministry of Internal Affairs has been behind several surveillance operations since 2016 (Qurium Media Foundation, 2020b). For example, it was through this IP address that Orkhan Shabanov made initial contact with Hacking Team, DDoS attacks against critical media were conducted1, non-neutral Wikipedia articles about the police and the NagornoKarabakh War were edited, and mass phishing targeting political activists and journalists was deployed (Qurium Media Foundation, 2020a, 2020b). Ali Karimli, leader of the opposition party Popular Front “reported internet outage at his apartment in Baku” and that “all of his communications/messenger applications have been either hacked or being used by a third party” (Azerbaijan Internet Watch, 2020c). Complementing the above-mentioned efforts, the government has also deployed social media manipulation. These computational propaganda efforts often focus on political events such as protests, rallies and elections (Geybulla & Muntezir, 2018), as well as suppressing opposition through the use of trolls and dissemination of disinformation, both domestically and internationally (e.g. in Armenia). 27