On April 1, the Article 3 club organized a discussion on “Information War: Targets and goals of spreading false news in crisis situations.” Misinformation about Armenia is already being spread in the international arena; at the level of the head of state they deny these rumors, invite people through the Ministry of Defense to show that the SUs are in Armenia, terrorists have not moved here, and so on. In this regard, to the question of whether it is possible to prevent such news, the editor of media.am website Gegham Vardanyan answered, “As the country is, so is this sphere. In what sphere do we anticipate and control the situation so well that in this sphere we can create an agenda in the whirlpool of international media and advance that agenda?
The world is in such a state that Armenia as a country has perceptions of the world, whether it wants to or not. Our state institutions try to manage the situation as much as possible by making a statement, expressing a position. Our situation in the field of media is not good, because one way or another, Armenia is perceived by the world as an ally of Russia. We should try to find more ways to have a voice in the international media and work harder on social media. We showed the SUs, but we do not know if those SUs were used or returned… if we diminish that issue, we don’t know where we will end up. The fact is that the plane flew from Syria to Armenia and from Armenia to Russia, but we do not know what happened inside. We can tell the BBC that you have used a Turkish source that is not reliable and is not an impartial source for Armenia.”
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Hakob Karapetyan, the editor-in-chief of the Fact Investigation Platform, also said, “One of the main principles is that journalists living in Armenia are faced with a dilemma: to be a good citizen or to be a good journalist. No matter how much we try to protect Armenia from misinformation, we must use the tools of fact-checking in any case. The BBC manipulative material is a topic that our team also wanted to address, but the reason for our delay was that we did not have concrete facts to refute what was being said. Our borders are very small, our field of work is very small, ethical norms are constrained. Disinformation must be separated from propaganda. Sometimes high-quality propagandists are able to construct their misinformation in such a way that the work of fact-checkers becomes more difficult. For example, the BBC is much harder to disprove than a Telegram channel that is easy to catch, but instead of quality, it works on quantity and can spread the lie to a wider audience.”
Hripsime JEBEJYAN
