Your trusted source

The recent spike in violence around Nagorny Karabakh has been accompanied by an information warfare, reports the article by Goar Adamyan titled “Azerbaijani-Armenian Media Wage Virtual War” published on the website of British Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR).

According to the article hackers have attacked websites in both Armenia and Azerbaijan and news outlets are recruited to spread disinformation. “From July 27, when it was already clear that there was a chance of war, the media also went to war. All other issues faded into the background, and everyone discussed what was happening on the border,” said Laura Baghdasaryan, director of the Region think tank in Yerevan.

Edgar Chraghyan of Cyber Gates, an internet security company in Armenia, told IWPR that says that hackers in Azerbaijan disabled 15 Armenian websites over a period of two weeks. Armenians took down 13 sites in Azerbaijan.

In one attack, on the Russian-language section of the news site www.tert.am, Azerbaijan hackers placed a fictitious news story of an artillery bombardment said to have killed 20 Armenian soldiers and injured 26. The website published a correction within minutes, but Azerbaijani news outlets had already picked up the fake report, and subsequently interpreted its removal as evidence of Armenian censorship.

“The key aim for a government fighting an information war was to ensure that its point of view drowned out all opposing opinions,” said David Alaverdyan, editor of the Mediamax news agency and a journalism lecturer at Yerevan State University. To illustrate the point, Alaverdyan cited the case of an Armenian national who died after crossing the border into Azerbaijan. At first, Azerbaijan described the man as a civilian, but then changed tack and followed the defence ministry’s lead, calling him a saboteur, writes the publication.

On August 12, when tensions had somewhat subsided following a meeting between Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan and his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev, chaired by President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, the Russian website www.politrus.com ran a story claiming that Azerbaijan planned to “buy” Karabakh for five billion US dollars.

According to Laura Baghdasaryan, the article did not even carry the usual byline. But Azerbaijani website www.haqqin.az then reprinted the article, and it spread, writes the article.

On August 2, the Russian news agency Regnum published a story claiming that Azerbaijani armoured vehicles were advancing along the whole front line, and carried three photographs showing dozens of tanks, whereas in fact the photographs were taken last year when Russia had delivered a shipment of armoured vehicles to Baku, notes the author of the publication.

Media expert Samvel Martirosyan noted that Armenian journalists have grown increasingly careful about sifting fact from fiction. “This time they have orientated themselves very quickly, and most of the media have been very careful about spreading information,” said Samvel Martirosyan.