Armenian Telegram channels reported that “children disappeared near the Red Bazaar. If anyone has information about this, call 097280190” and thereby spread incorrect information about Azerbaijani soldiers. The text added to this message on behalf of Azerbaijani users reads: “If anyone has extra or internet numbers, call this number. If you call, say that you are a ‘peacekeeper’ and saw how these were hanged in the forest, were killed, or something like that. It is better to say that you saw them in places where there are a lot of mines. Let those who search for them explode on mines. And these young bastards, I hope, were taken prisoner by our soldiers into slavery."

Faktyoxla Lab. (Factcheking Lab.) Has checked the accuracy of this information.

This image emerged when checking the screenshot at mever.gr/forensics.

What does it mean? In the same app, in the screenshot obtained by analytics software, the “What does this mean?” link opens this comment:

Double Quantization analysis detects the traces left by consecutive JPEG compressions on an image. When a spliced region from one image is inserted into another, if the compression histories of the two images differ, the discrepancy may be detected by this algorithm.

A typical case of forgery that is detectable by this algorithm is when an item is taken from an image of high quality (or an uncompressed image, or an image that had its past JPEG traces destroyed by scaling/filtering) and placed in an image of lower quality. If the resulting spliced image is then saved as at a high quality, this should result in a successful detection.

Thus, this information, distributed by Armenian Telegram channels is a fake prepared using editing software and has nothing to do with Azerbaijani users.