Twitter removes 35 Armenia-tied accounts created to target Azerbaijan

24 February 2021 11:44 (UTC+04:00)

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By Vafa Ismayilova

Twitter said on February 23 that 35 accounts with ties to Armenia had been taken down, adding that they had been created to target Azerbaijan, Reuters reported.

"Under our platform manipulation policy, we investigated and removed 35 accounts that had ties to the Government of Armenia. These accounts were created in order to advance narratives that were targeting Azerbaijan and were geostrategically favourable to the Armenian government. In some cases, the fake accounts purported to represent government and political figures in Azerbaijan, as well as news entities claiming to operate in Azerbaijan," the company said in a blog post.

The company added that it had removed 373 accounts which it said had ties to Russia, Armenia and Iran and had breached its platform manipulation policies.

“The 373 associated accounts across the four networks were permanently suspended from Twitter for violations of our platform manipulation policies,” the company said.

It should be noted that in early November 2020, the Azerbaijani Transport, Communications and High Technologies Ministry sent an appeal to Facebook over the blocking of Azerbaijani users’ accounts and Facebook verification problems amid the clashes in and around Nagorno-Karabakh.

In an appeal sent to the social media giant, the ministry said that there were alarming trends in Facebook and Instagram as Azerbaijani users were being silenced amid the information war between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

The war between Azerbaijan and Armenia resumed on September 27, 2020, after Armenia's firing at Azerbaijani civilians and military positions. Azerbaijan responded by launching a counter-offensive operation along the line of contact of the troops.

On November 10, Baku and Yerevan signed a Moscow-brokered deal that brought an end to six weeks of fighting. The signed agreement obliged Armenia to withdraw its troops from the Azerbaijani lands that it has occupied since the early 1990s.