its various Facebook pages, and all content since 2012 was deleted (Said, 2018). Their website continues to be the subject of regular Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Many attacks have been linked to important moments in domestic politics. On 19 January 2019, an opposition rally witnessed attendees being questioned by the police based on the geolocation data from their phones which had been used to determine that they had been present at the rally. As Article 39 of the Law on Communication requires mobile providers to give any government institutions this information upon request, many took to social media to blame mobile phone operators for disclosing the names and phone numbers of those customers at the rally. After a wave of protests, accounts and pages belonging to individual activists and organizations were hacked (including figures such as Gultekin Hajibeyli, Ali N Aliyev, Ruslan Izzetli—one of the founders of D18, among others), first on 21 October and then again on 9 November 2019. In some cases, such as that of Ali N Aliyev, intimate photos of fellow activists were posted using his hacked profile (Geybulla, 2019b). And most recently, Facebook groups of LGBT-related media and groups were targeted, and LGBT rights activists had their personal Facebook account and emails hacked after a “non-violent march organized to mark International Women’s Day” (Coordinated digital attacks against Feminist movement members and LGBT rights activists, 2020). Public figures have also been targeted. For instance, in January 2020, Facebook groups and pages belonging to the Musavat party were hacked whilst page admins were participating in a commemoration ceremony in honour of Mammad Amin Rasulzade, the founder of Azerbaijan Republic (Azerbaijan Internet Watch, 2020a). Also, in December 2019 there was a takedown of the Instagram profile of Ali Karimli, leader of the Popular Front party, by his impersonated fake account (Azerbaijan Internet Watch, 2019). His WhatsApp and Telegram accounts were also hacked, and since April 2020 he has no access to the internet (Azerbaijan Internet Watch, 2020c). It is also worth noting that Azerbaijan’s conflict with its neighbor Armenia and the breakaway territory of Nagorno-Karabakh has traditionally driven conflicts over information; for example, the Azerbaijani government has propagated online conspiracy theories regarding pogroms against Armenians (AZ News Staff, 2011; Kucera, 2018) and hacked accounts posted content in Armenian Facebook groups to call for protests against Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan (Artsakh official warns of Azerbaijani fake news in Armenian groups on Facebook, 2020). Moreover, trolls frequently reference atrocities committed by Armenia or the Armenian conflict to “hijack and distort” conversations regarding Azerbaijan’s human rights record (Geybulla, 2016). More recently, after the lockdown over the weekend of June 6 and 7 2020, during which riot police apprehended people violating the quarantine without an arrest warrant (Baku Police Accused Of «Revenge Operation», 2020), trolls targeted people critical to the harsh measures by accusing them of being partial and asking them to also write about the protests in the United States following the murder of George Floyd. The authorities are openly discussing methods to prevent users from relying on social media platforms for disseminating news, sharing stories and expressing concerns. Suggestions for doing so have included creating a national social network and closing access to other more popular social media platforms, in order to prevent people from slandering Azerbaijan. During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, MP Ganir Pashayeva suggested the creation of a social media monitoring unit to “identify, track, and punish those who shared ‘false’ information on social media” (Geybulla, 2020). Although it was not created, journalists, activists, and members of 30