Google Blocked 6,000 Pro-Azerbaijani Government YouTube Channels in 2025

· April 6, 2026

By Nare Petrosyan, Hetq

Google blocked more than 6,000 YouTube channels spreading Azerbaijani propaganda in 2025.

Although the number of blocked channels decreased by 2.3 times compared to 2024, Google’s Threat Analysis Group continues to focus on content criticizing Armenia and praising the Azerbaijani government.

It should be noted that the number of blocked channels refers only to the investigation of propaganda activities related to Azerbaijan and does not include YouTube channels that were blocked for violating other rules of the platform.

Since 2021, more than 22,000 Azerbaijani channels have been deleted as part of this investigation. Google worked remarkably actively in this direction in 2024, suspending the activities of 14,000 propaganda channels on YouTube. In 2025, this number decreased to 6,028 channels.

The Threat Analysis Group’s 2025 reports show that channels targeting Armenia were blocked in all months of the year – sometimes thousands, sometimes just a few channels. These channels published videos in Azerbaijani, praised the Azerbaijani government, and targeted and criticized the country’s opposition and Armenia.

Armenia is also mentioned in several Russian propaganda investigations. While in previous years only one case of the dissemination of pro-Russian content in Armenian was recorded, since July 2025, Russian influence on content related to Armenia or disseminated in Armenian has become a subject of study. 212 channels supporting Russia and in many cases criticizing Armenia have been blocked. This is only 1.5% of the channels blocked in the framework of the Russian propaganda investigation.

The study of both Azerbaijani and Russian propaganda on YouTube is one of the largest investigations of the Threat Analysis Group. In 2025, Google blocked the most channels associated with China – more than 45,000, followed by Russian channels – 14,000, and the Azerbaijani propaganda machine completes the top three with 6,000 blocked channels.

While the Russian channels worked in several directions and distributed content in several languages, in the case of the Azerbaijani channels, the target was one language – Azerbaijani.

The impact of these blocked propaganda channels is difficult to assess: the reports do not indicate how many videos were distributed on the channels, how many views they received, or where they were viewed.