CRAP29 - Azerbaijan - Like UAE Last Year - Creates Fake Social Media Accounts To Pimp Its Environmental "Policies"

Scores of apparently fake social media accounts are boosting Azerbaijan’s hosting of the Cop29 climate summit, an investigation has revealed. The accounts were mostly set up after July, at which time seven of the top 10 most engaged posts using the hashtags #COP29 and #COP29Azerbaijan were critical of Azerbaijan’s role in the conflict with Armenia, using hashtags such as #stopgreenwashgenocide. By September this had changed, with all of the top 10 most engaged posts coming from the official Cop29 Azerbaijan account.

Global Witness, which conducted the analysis, said artificially inflating the reach of government posts was drowning out independent criticism of the country’s record on the climate crisis and repression of human rights. Azerbaijan’s government will oversee the UN climate summit, which starts on 11 November, and where nations will attempt to deliver the urgent cuts in fossil fuel burning that scientists say are imperative to avoid the most destructive impacts of climate breakdown.

Azerbaijan has significant fossil fuel reserves and intends to increase gas production by 50% in the next decade. The last climate summit, Cop28, was also held in a petrostate, the United Arab Emirates. In the runup to that conference, an army of fake social media accounts promoted and defended the UAE. Countries failed to agree to “phase out” fossil fuels at Cop28, as many wanted, instead choosing the weaker ambition of “transitioning away from fossil fuels”.

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The Global Witness analysis uncovered 71 suspicious accounts on X. All but six were set up since May, often in bursts. All share nature-related banner and profile images, often flowers or trees, and some accounts used exactly the same images. More than half of their posts in September used the #COP29 or #COP29Azerbaijan tags and 70% of their retweets were of the official Azerbaijan Cop29 posts or other official Azerbaijan government, party or politician posts. The accounts were also part of a network, with most connected to at least six other suspicious accounts. An analysis of posts from the first 16 accounts identified showed that on 1 October, 12 of the accounts posted one after the other in a sequence, suggesting the accounts were controlled by one person who logged on to each account in turn. All of this evidence suggests the accounts are fake, though it remains possible that a few are authentic.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/29/apparently-fake-social-media-accounts-boost-azerbaijan-before-cop29