A network of 71 suspicious accounts on X has been deployed ahead of the UN’s COP29 climate change conference. The accounts aim to give the impression of grassroots support for the Azerbaijan government, according to NGO Global Witness.
Azerbaijan, host of the 29th Climate Conference of Parties (COP29) from November 11 to 22, 2024, has a track record of using coordinated inauthentic accounts on Facebook to target the country’s journalists and democracy activists as well as using bots and troll farms on X to criticize Armenia.
For instance, Meta identified and took down an Azerbaijan-backed cyber espionage and coordinated inauthentic behavior campaign on its platforms in 2022.
Global Witness, an NGO exposing environmental abuse, corruption and human rights violations, investigated Azeri-linked activity on X.
The organization found that the nature of conversations about Azerbaijan on the social platform from July to September has radically changed.
“Of content posted in July, seven of the top 10 most engaged posts were critical of Azerbaijan’s role in the conflict with Armenia. The most-used hashtags (other than #COP29) were #freearmenianhostages and #stopgreenwashgenocide,” Global Witness said in a report published on October 29.
“Now, however, the conversation has changed. Of content posted in September, all of the top 10 most engaged posts were from the official COP Azerbaijan account.”
Recent, Coordinated Network of Suspicious Accounts
Global Witness investigators found 93% of the 71 accounts were set up within the last six months. The suspicious accounts display the same images of nature in their profile and banner pictures, use the same hashtags (#COP29, #COP29Azerbaijan, #KarabakhIsAzerbaijan) and promote the messaging of the Azerbaijan government. Some of these accounts are identical.
The logo of the New Azerbaijan Party, the ruling political party in the country, was also used as a banner picture by some of the accounts.
The majority of posts from these accounts are reposts rather than original posts. In September, 70% of those reposts were of official Azerbaijan political accounts, primarily the COP account.
The reason Global Witness treats these accounts as a single network is that activity coming from all these accounts seems to be coordinated:
- The accounts are connected to each other: Over half of the accounts are linked to six or more of the other accounts. 87% are connected to at least one other account in the network
- They change appearance together: Four of the accounts all posted new profile pictures within five hours of each other
- They sometimes post in a coordinated, sequential fashion: The timing of their posts suggests that some accounts could be controlled by one person who logs in to each account in turn
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