Human Rights Defender of Armenia Arman Tatoyan has issued the following statement:

"Yesterday, on 27 September Azerbaijan launched aggressive military air and artillery shelling against Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh), including its peaceful population which are accompanied with massive hate speech towards ethnic Armenians.

Monitoring of mass media and especially social networks has revealed hatred and incitement to hatred and calls for violence, including calls for killings spread from Turkish and Azerbaijani sources. At the same time, extensive number of social network individual and group pages spread videos and texts containing hatred towards Armenians; scenes of violence and calls for killing and destruction. Significant number of fake profiles is with Armenian names and surnames, which also send messages to real Armenian accounts with threats and intimidations.

The mentioned materials are disseminated through Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and other social media networks. These materials target Armenian social media users, including minors. At the same time, more aggressive materials are spread through TikTok with purpose to spread fear and alarms in the peaceful population. Yesterday’s consultations of the Human Rights Defender with experts show that this specific social network is more dangerous than others, since in many cases it is impossible to have control over them.

Therefore, I call on parents and children to be extremely cautious when using social media networks in general, and to specifically exclude the use of TikTok during these days.

The Human Rights Defender will send evidence based findings of this monitoring to international organizations."