FACTOMETER
en
ру
հյ
The Turkish website OdaTV has shared another piece of disinformation about Armenia. With reference to “its anonymous sources,” the website claims that the images of Mount Ararat and Gregory the Illuminator are to be removed from the Armenian 50,000 banknote.
According to the website, the Armenian government is removing the images from the banknote in the light of normalizing Armenian-Turkish relations.
The Turkish source claims that the symbols will allegedly be replaced with an image of the Republic of Armenia Square.
With the help of Photoshop Detector, FIP.am detected traces of image editing on the alleged new 50,000 banknote image posted on the website.
The Public Relations Department of the Central Bank of Armenia refuted this information to the Fact Investigation Platform, specifically noting that there are no plans to print new banknotes in the upcoming years.
The Department also reported that the Central Bank has not received an inquiry from any media outlet, including OdaTV, to obtain or verify such information.
What do we know about the Turkish media outlet?
Let us recall that FIP.am had previously revealed that the Turkish yellow-press outlet OdaTV is involved in Russian propaganda and disinformation campaigns, and that the journalist who authored the fake news about Armenia is Okay Deprem, a Kremlin propagandist who holds citizenship of the occupied Luհansk.
The French VIGINUM Center for the Fight Against Foreign Information Manipulation (French: Service de vigilance et de protection contre les ingérences numériques étrangères) published a report on the Russian disinformation campaign known as Storm 1516. The latter is an Information Manipulation Set or a network focused on exerting information and propaganda influence.
*VIGINUM was established in 2021 with the aim of detecting and preventing foreign digital interference—particularly disinformation campaigns, networks of bots and trolls, and manipulative propaganda operations against France and European countries.
The VIGINUM report identifies 77 informational operations, the analysis of which shows that they primarily disseminated pro-Russian, anti-Western, and anti-Ukrainian narratives and fake publications. Storm-1516 employs both short-term, rapid-action operations—for example, reacting very quickly when a certain event occurs—and long-term influence strategies, such as discrediting of political figures during upcoming elections, etc. To achieve all this, they use fake news websites, social media accounts, AI-generated deepfake videos, and more.”
What role does OdaTv — the outlet that published the false information — play in all this? According to VIGINUM’s report, the Turkish OdaTv has been involved in Russian disinformation operations.
What false claims has it shared about Armenia?
The Turkish-language website has been in the spotlight of the Fact Investigation Platform for months, as it regularly shares false information about the Government of Armenia.
One of the most recent fake news items was the claim that the Prime Minister of Armenia had undertaken to build several dozen mosques in the country. Earlier, the Turkish-language source had also alleged that the Prime Minister was going to hand over all of Syunik and part of Vayots Dzor to Azerbaijan.
Nane Manasyan
