Was there a troll factory in Ali Hasanov's building?

Baku/02.09.21/Turan: A troll factory operated in a room belonging to the family of the former assistant to the President of Azerbaijan Ali Hasanov. This follows from the materials of the criminal case against the executive director of the State Media Support Fund Vugar Safarli. Excerpts from the criminal case were published by Radio Azadlig.

One of the charges brought against Vugar Safarli concerned an agreement on the lease of an office in an administrative building at the address: st. Metbuat, 23 L.

During interrogation during the investigation, Safarli confirmed that the rented building belongs to the presidential aide Ali Hasanov, who offered to rent an office there at inflated prices for 9 years.

This building was on the balance sheet of "Azermetbuatyayim" company, the founder of which was "Kaspi.az" LLC, owned by Hasanov's wife Sonia Veliyeva.

Since 2019, the Media State Support Fund, on behalf of Ali Hasanov, has rented another premises there, with an area of ​​421 square meters. According to Safarli, he signed a new contract with the son of Ali Hasanov, Shamkhal Hasanov, since the building had already been registered in his name.

At the direction of Ali Hasanov, a "group of bloggers" was placed there. Radio Azadlig publishes the testimony of one of them, who admitted that the "bloggers" wrote comments on materials criticizing the government and officials on social networks.

“We paid special attention to Facebook. Each of the bloggers created many fake profiles and wrote comments through them. They were agreed in advance.

In most cases, comments were sent to us in writing. Therefore, often the same proposals were written on different profiles,” said this “blogger” who worked in various pro-government media.

He also said that sometimes there were instructions to prepare materials on specific topics. “The topic of the day was determined from the presidential administration. In the morning, an assignment was given and several people prepared material on this topic. This text was published in various pro-government websites and aired on TV channels,” he said during the investigation.

The media has previously published materials about the use of the troll network by the authorities against the critics of the authorities. The British newspaper "The Guardian" wrote earlier this year that a campaign of harassment was carried out from accounts associated with the ruling New Azerbaijan Party Facebook. The party claimed that it had 760 thousand members and that there was no need to maintain an army of trolls. — 06D-