RA Minister of Foreign Affairs Ararat Mirzoyan published an article in the British "The Telegraph" periodical. Topic: "The use and abuse of modern technologies in implementing ethnic cleansing and genocide."

Radar Armenia presents the article with partial reductions.

"When Rohingya Muslims sued Facebook last year, hate speech and inflammatory posts amplified by the social network's algorithms came under the international spotlight. Even as cyberbullying and disinformation remain critical issues in societies, new technologies and platforms are being exploited by terrorist and armed groups to broadcast propaganda and recruit supporters.

The Yerevan Global Forum discusses the role and impact of new technologies on possible genocides and ethnic cleansing in an unstable world. Armenia organizes the forum. It is the fourth since 2015, organized with the support of the UN Secretary-General's Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. It addresses the opportunities and growing challenges of using new technologies to prevent genocide.

Despite enormous security challenges and the territorial encroachment of neighboring Azerbaijan, which now occupies around 140 square kilometers of Armenia's sovereign territory, Armenia is committed to bringing together governments, technology companies, academia, and civil society to reduce the risks and harms of technology to vulnerable groups and community.

As a nation that survived the first genocide of the twentieth century, Armenia bears a huge moral responsibility to contribute to international efforts to prevent future crimes against humanity. In the UN Human Rights Council, Armenia sponsored five "Prevention of Genocide" resolutions adopted by consensus.

Those resolutions emphasize education and awareness-raising as pillars of prevention. The 2022 resolution highlights the dangers of new technologies (especially social media platforms) spreading disinformation alongside ethnic cleansing.

However, the latest technologies have always been used "effectively" to dehumanize and promote genocidal crimes. During the Armenian Genocide, the Young Turks used telegraphs to transmit coded orders for mass murder quickly. During the Holocaust, calculating machines were used to identify the whereabouts of Jews quickly. Recently in Rwanda, radio has been the main channel for inciting hatred and dehumanizing the victims.

Nowadays, Twitter, Telegram, and other social networks are used to spread hate and heinous images of the crimes committed, which happened in the case of the Azerbaijani soldiers who committed war crimes after invading Armenia in September 2022.

Today, with the rapid development of new technologies and the Internet, where hate speech spreads faster and faster, governments and societies face the most significant challenges. Hate speech can snowball into a crime. And when hate speech and demonizing other groups become state policy, it will lead to crimes against humanity and genocide.

On the other hand, we should not forget that new technologies can simultaneously become one of the most powerful tools used in the fight against genocide, as education and awareness raising are essential pillars of the genocide prevention campaign.

These are among the topics discussed at the 4th Global Forum in Yerevan to explore how new technologies can be used to prevent, not facilitate, genocide.

Ararat Mirzoyan the RA Minister of Foreign Affairs."