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Aliyev Criticism Provokes Angry Emails From Azerbaijan

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  • Aliyev Criticism Provokes Angry Emails From Azerbaijan

    ALIYEV CRITICISM PROVOKES ANGRY EMAILS FROM AZERBAIJAN

    http://asbarez.com/107851/aliyev-criticism-provokes-angry-emails-from-azerbaijan/
    Thursday, January 24th, 2013

    Azerbaijan's president Ilham Aliyev

    BY ROBERT COALSON
    >From Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

    The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) publishes
    dozens of juicy stories every year.

    But very few of them generate the kind of response the group has
    received this month after naming Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev
    corruption's "person of the year" for 2012.

    "There has been a coordinated attempt to spam us with a significant
    amount of e-mails," says Drew Sullivan, the editor at OCCRP, an
    investigative-journalism NGO based in Sarajevo and Bucharest. "Most
    of them are very similar [and] seem to follow a format or a couple
    different formats. I have received approximately 4,000 of them."

    RFE/RL, which covered the original story on January 2, has also been
    targeted by the spam attack, receiving a similar amount of mail.

    The spam assault seems to be part of a stepped-up effort by Aliyev
    supporters - possibly prompted by the Azeribaijan government -
    to take control of the narrative about Azerbaijan on the Internet,
    analysts and activists say.

    Most of the messages received by OCCRP and RFE/RL are signed and appear
    to come from real individuals. However, for the most part they contain
    very similar messages in English, Azeri, or Russian. OCCRP computer
    specialist Dan O'Huiginn estimates that 5-10 percent of the messages
    are from automated servers (bots), while the rest seem to be cut and
    pasted or forwarded by actual people.

    The messages do not address the specifics of the corruption charges
    against Aliyev and his family but rather state that Azerbaijani
    citizens love their president and are impressed with the progress
    the country has made since gaining independence.

    'Upclassing Of Our Country' Azerbaijani blogger Hebib Muntezir reported
    on January 15 that the Education Ministry had issued a directive to
    teachers and students urging them to send complaining e-mails to OCCRP
    and RFE/RL. The ministry's message, which Muntezir also posted online,
    included sample complaints in Azeri, Russian, and broken English,
    as well as the e-mail addresses to which the messages should be sent.

    The addresses provided in the alleged instruction from the Education
    Ministry that Muntezir posted were the ones that received the spam,
    and many of the received messages contained one or more of the proposed
    sample letters.

    The suggested English message says:

    "It was very upset, having read information on our president on a
    site http://occrp.org. Because, all of us are happy with works on
    development and an upclassing of our country."

    The spam campaign may be part of a broader effort by pro-government
    forces in Azerbaijan to bolster their presence online.

    "In Azerbaijan, essentially most of political life now takes place
    on Facebook," says Katy Pearce, assistant professor of communication
    at the University of Washington who studies the use of Internet
    technologies in the former Soviet Union. "Because, as most people know,
    there is very little room for freedom of expression in real life,
    so to speak. So the Azerbaijani political Facebook world is very,
    very active."

    Until recently, Pearce says, the Azerbaijani opposition had the virtual
    realm almost to itself, but over the last year or 18 months she has
    seen an increasingly organized phalanx of pro-government youths posting
    on Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media sites. She notes that
    they have been using very aggressive tactics, including spamming the
    walls of opposition-minded Azerbaijanis and flagging their posts as
    "offensive" and asking Facebook to remove them.

    Suspicious Tweets One of the people targeted by such online campaigns
    was RFE/RL Azerbaijani Service correspondent Khadija Ismayilova,
    who also cooperates with OCCRP.

    Ismayilova has written many of the investigative reports into
    corruption by Aliyev and his family that were the basis of OCCRP's
    decision to name Aliyev corruption's "person of the year."

    Pearce has been studying the patterns of pro-government posts on
    Twitter regarding a recent protest in Baku and how those posts
    intersected with the campaigns against Ismayilova. She found that
    many of the tweets came from recently created accounts that had very
    few contacts on Twitter and had posted very few tweets in the past.

    In her analyses of these patterns on Twitter, Pearce said she believes
    it is likely the messages were either sent by one person logging
    into multiple accounts or that an automated program was connected to
    multiple accounts.

    "Most of the evidence points to some sort of organized campaign to
    use Twitter accounts to post the same message over and over again,"
    she says. "And if there are actual real people behind those accounts,
    I can't tell."

    OCCRP editor Sullivan agrees that the latest spam campaign out
    of Azerbaijan is something new. He says the organization's many
    previous reports on corruption in the country were soundly ignored
    by the authorities.

    However, he adds that the current spam campaign is a mere "annoyance"
    that will not affect the OCCRP's work.

    "We get lots of much more negative responses to our work," Sullivan
    says. "It is a slight annoyance, but we can set filters to move most
    of this out. It is too bad. We would love to hear from the people of
    Azerbaijan if it was real. We just suspect from the way that this is
    written that these are not real people with real concerns. This seems
    to be somewhat of a bullying tactic. And that's not going to work."



    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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