‘Facebook isn’t interested in countries like ours’: Azerbaijan troll network returns months after ban Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco and Luke Harding in London Facebook has allowed a state-backed harassment campaign targeting independent news outlets and opposition politicians in Azerbaijan to return to its platform, less than six months after it banned the troll network. A Guardian investigation has revealed how Facebook allowed an arm of Azerbaijan’s ruling party, the YAP, to carry out the harassment campaign for 14 months after an employee, Sophie Zhang, first alerted managers and executives to its existence in August 2019. In October 2020, Facebook announced that it was removing more than 8,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts and Pages linked to the YAP for violating its policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior” (CIB) – the kind of deceptive influence operation used by Russia to interfere in the 2016 US election.