Censorship under guise of tackling misinformation: Soros’ NGOs saving Armenia’s PM reputation
08/03/2021
Big Techs continue to help governments stifling freedom of speech. In early June, Facebook announced that “it would expand the partnership with GRASS’s FactCheck Georgia as an independent fact-checker” to censor crack down on misinformation on Facebook and Instagram in Armenia. Well, it’s a classic move of the American social media giant to enforce a narrative. Facebook and Twitter as well just remove “undesirable” content from its social media platforms and ban users spreading it. That’s what they did to Trump and his supporters. But what’s the deal with Armenia? There’s a curious explanation to that. You’ll be thrilled.
FactCheck “independent” platform is based in Tbilisi, Georgia, and tied to Arsen Kharatyan, founder and editor-in-chief at AliQ Media. He also served as an adviser on foreign relations to Armenia’s acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan during the first 100 days of post-revolution. Prior to this, he worked with Voice of America’s Armenian service in Washington, D.C. Kharatyan is known to be the U.S. Democratic Party’s lobbyist in South Caucasian region – besides, he is married to an American with links to the U.S. State Department. As it’s mentioned on the website, FactCheck key partners and donors are the U.S. Embassy in Georgia, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID. Thus, it’s perfectly clear who is behind Facebook recent initiative and what this fact-checking project actually means.
Here’s the icing on the cake: in his effort to realize its program in Armenia, FactCheck will cooperate with a local NGO Media Initiative Center, funded by USAID and Soros’ Open Society Foundations, both of which have contributed to the acting Armenian government’s climb to power on the wave of 2018 protests. Despite his party’s win in early parliamentary election this June, Pashinyan and other Soros’ stooges face mounting criticism over Armenia’s political failure in Nagorny Karabakh and inadequate preparedness for COVID-19 pandemic. As usual, negative comments are mostly spreading on social medial platforms that significantly engaged in inciting unrest. So, Pashinyan western partners felt concerned and launched the fact-checking program in Armenia pursuing two objectives: undermine the critics of American NGOs and legitimize the censorship of Pashinyan’s opponents and conservative users on social media. What a master plan indeed.
It seems as we urgently need truly unbiased platforms that will fact-check Soros’ fact checkers.