By Arshaluys Barseghyan

OC Media

On 2 May, Vazgen Saghatelyan and Narek Samsonyan, the hosts of the anti-government Imnemnimi podcast, were acquitted of charges of hooliganism. In March 2024, the hosts were detained after insulting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and other ruling party figures.

Saghatelyan and Samsonyan were given two-months pretrial detention, following which they were placed under administrative supervision.

The news of their acquittal was announced by their lawyer, Ruben Melikyan, who wrote on Facebook that his clients’ case was addressed by ‘a number of reputable international organizations, including Amnesty International’.

Their arrest was also addressed in a recent Freedom House report, with the human rights group noting that AntiFake, the media outlet that releases Imnemnimi podcast, ‘has previously been accused by the Atlantic Council of spreading “biased narratives and inauthentic online”’.

Freedom House called the footage of Samsonyan’s arrest, published by AntiFake, ‘brutal’.

The video shows a group of police officers, including those who appear to be plainclothes officers, tackling a man and pushing his face to the ground.

In March 2024, in its statement about their arrest, Armenia’s Investigative Committee stated that Saghatelyan and Samsonyan committed hooliganism by ‘showing an openly contemptuous attitude towards moral norms’ and swearing at Pashinyan and his cabinet.

Both Samsonyan and Saghatelyan have ties to political parties or civil society organizations; Samsonyan works with Civic Consciousness, an organization that runs AntiFake, while Saghatelyan is the brother of Arman Saghatelyan, a former Republican party MP.

The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, a platform documenting disinformation and fake news campaigns, concluded in 2019 that AntiFake may be ‘affiliated with individuals or entities based in Russia’, and that AntiFake’s domain was registered in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

‘A foreign IP location is often a hallmark of an inauthentic influence operation, though it is not conclusive proof of one on its own’, the Atlantic Council wrote.