Armenian News Network / Groong
Armenian News Network /
Groong
June 17, 2021
By Hovik Manucharyan, co-host of the Groong podcast.
A number of anonymous fake news channels capture nearly 45% of all views for Armenian news/political content on YouTube.
See also:
● Can Perfect TV help sway Armenian election results?
● The “Vardan Ghukasyan Party” Or How Social Media May Affect Armenian Elections
Since August 2020 Groong has been monitoring more than a 100 news/political YouTube channels relevant to Armenia and have documented the alarming rise of a number of anonymous content creators, feeding fake news to unsuspecting audiences. To understand how we categorize channels, please see this.
Monthly viewership of Armenian YouTube
content by category.
According to our monthly update for May 2021 such
channels (categorized as “Suspicious” in the chart above) now have more than
45% of the share of all view traffic. An average video from a “suspicious”
channel can receive orders of magnitude more views than content on more
legitimate channels, such as news broadcasts.
A video, less than a day old, on
“Perfect TV” with more than 35K
views (average for Perfect TV).
News broadcast from “Armenian Public TV”,
one of the most popular legitimate channels
in Armenia with 12K views.
By and large, the “suspicious” channels seem to feature a common political message, largely supporting acting Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Perfect TV is one example, but there are dozens of similar channels featuring similar design elements and, in some cases, even reusing content from each other. In fact, Pashinyan has at least on one occasion shared Perfect TV content on his Facebook page.
Pashinyan’s Facebook post on September 1,
2019 sharing Perfect TV content. Image Credit: Gegham
Vardanyan (media.am)
The content on
“suspicious” channels is low quality, frequently featuring an anonymous
narrator reading the content while images related to the content float in the
background. In a few cases, the content seems to be original, however, in many
cases the narrators simply read Facebook posts of pro-Pashinyan activists and
frequently we’ve observed reuse of content among channels.
In one example of
content re-use and the type of propaganda that can be “enjoyed” on these
channels is a video whose thumbnail seems to indicate that it is a recording of
a phone conversation between Kocharyan and Aliyev, a common baseless narrative
of vilifying Kocharyan as being in cahoots with Azerbaijan’s leader. Two
different “suspicious” channels (“ArmNkr News” and “8rd news”) used the same audio content and the same
thumbnail image, but ultimately produced two different videos with differing
background video. In reality, the audio content itself has no mention of any
conversation between Aliyev and Kocharyan at all. Incidentally, according to reporting by Antifake.am, at least one of these channels is owned
by Shavarsh Sarukhanyan,
who along with Nikol Pashinyan was involved in the
well-known break-in of the Public Radio building in Yerevan during April 2018.
Anti-Kocharyan video on ArmNkr News: https://www (dot) youtube
(dot) com/watch?v=X7dI9mONX5M
Content is reused on “8rd news”:
https://www (dot) youtube (dot) com/watch?v=eThT_G3rxOw
While the Perfect TV
phenomenon is generally known in Armenia and frequently cited by analysts as a
form of pro-government propaganda, there is little investigative journalism
from credible sources on the topic.
When in early 2020 a
fake Facebook page going by the name of “Diana Harutyunyan” spread a fake news
item about Iran, Pashinyan’s government immediately arrested the
individual believed to be responsible, under the auspices of national security
threat. Yet with regard to the “suspicious” channels
above, spreading fake news such as alleging that the US is giving nuclear
weapons to Armenia (https://youtu (dot) be/1ecM5hLkhd0) or that “Iran will take Syunik” (https://youtu
(dot) be/EN7zvYRd8To), the government has not
reacted consistently. Each of the videos linked above has an order of magnitude
more views than a traditional Armenian news program on YouTube.
Indeed, there is
embarrassingly little or absolutely no coverage of the phenomenon by media
monitors or investigative journalists. One well-known Western-funded
fact-checking outfit “Facts Investigation Platform (fip.am)”, which is
frequently criticized by opposition for supporting the Armenian government, has
no mention of “Perfect TV” in Google search results. Similarly
we weren’t able to find any mention of “Perfect TV” on azatutyun.am or
armtimes.am (a newspaper owned by the Pashinyan family).
Most of what has been
published in the press is from opposition sources and a few local and
international NGOs:
● Nikol Pashinyan's supporters spread lies, slander and hatred through YouTube Channels (Antifake)
● «Perfect TV»-ն ամսական 25 հազար դոլար է վաստակում (Hraparak)
● You Are What You Share (media.am)
● Armenia's YouTube political content boom (Jam News)
The most comprehensive
investigation of this phenomenon was done by antifake.am,
criticized as a
pro-opposition outlet. Despite the critique, the Antifake
has discovered credible links between the fake news channels and supporters of
Pashinyan.
The Armenian
Government’s response to such allegations has been denial. The government-run
fact-checking outlet, infocheck.am, responded to allegations that Perfect TV is
linked to Pashinyan by stating “Perfect TV
is not fake and it is not run by Nikol
Pashinyan”. In order
to prove that the channel is not fake, and to clear Pashinyan’s
reputation, infocheck.am did an interview with the Vigen
Sukiasyan who claimed that the channel belongs to him
and shared a screenshot of the channel’s About page from 2018 where Sukiasyan’s name is visible.
About page of Perfect TV from 2018
as distributed by infocheck.am
However, at the time of
this writing the About page (https://www (dot) youtube
(dot) com/channel/UC8kOchMgfcXZTDtgQ67LM9Q/about) does not contain any
information about the content producer. An average Armenian YouTube user cannot
easily determine who owns this channel. Furthermore, we have not found similar
articles on infocheck.am about dozens of similar “suspicious” YouTube channels
that we track.
Screenshot of
Perfect TV’s About Page on June 15, 2021.
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