YEREVAN, JANUARY 7, ARMENPRESS. The antifake.am website, the very name of which implies its mission of fighting fake news, has itself spread disinformation about the internal financial matters of the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports, according to the ministry.

The website has spread disinformation by falsely presenting the ministry’s yearly salary budget for personnel to be the amount of awards and bonuses, the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports said.

Moreover, the ministry said it had received an inquiry from antifake.am before the holiday season requesting information about how much bonuses officials had received, and the ministry said it had responded by providing relevant information. The ministry said that its entire yearly salary budget was 1 billion 774 million 225 thousand 600 drams, and that all staffers and personnel had received from this sum only 456 million 209 in bonuses during the year. However, the website chose to mis-present the numbers and claimed in its article that the 1 billion 774 million 225 thousand 600 drams was actually the figure of awards “most likely to create a negative opinion about the ministry among readers and social media users or perhaps due to ignorant reporting”, the ministry said.

“This is inadmissible in terms of the professional mission of providing the citizens with duly journalism, and it lacks any kind of logic as well: this kind of a huge sum could not have been allocated as bonuses,” the ministry said, refuting the article as fake news.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan