▲Facebook ‘news pages’ identified by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab promoting Georgian Dream chair Bidzina Ivanishvili.
Facebook ‘news pages’ identified by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab promoting Georgian Dream chair Bidzina Ivanishvili.
Facebook has taken down hundreds of pages, accounts, and groups for engaging in ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ on behalf of the Georgian Government.
On Friday, Facebook announced they had removed 39 accounts, 344 pages, and 13 groups from Facebook and 22 accounts from Instagram that originated in Georgia.
Facebook said they took down inauthentic accounts due to their ‘behaviour, not the content they posted’. They said that the Georgia-related profiles and pages promoted government officials and policies while targeting opposition and activist groups.
‘These Pages posed as news organisations and impersonated political parties, public figures, activist groups and media entities’, their statement said.
‘Although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation linked this activity to Panda, an advertising agency in Georgia, and the Georgian Dream-led government.’
The company said the network ‘engaged in coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ spending almost $316,000 on advertisements on Facebook and Instagram.
They said the pages in question were followed by over 440,000 accounts.
Facebook did not publish a full list of the names of the accounts removed, however, they named ‘Fastnews.ge’, ‘Mypress.ge’, and ‘Erovnuli Media’ (national media) as examples of fake news organisations promoting the Georgian Dream-led government and painting government critics in a negative light.
Georgian watchdog organisations like the Media Development Foundation (MDF) and the International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), as well as the Washington-based Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), have recently been ringing the alarm bell against negative campaigns and online trolls targeting government critics and civil society on Facebook.
ISFED Chair Mikheil Benidze told OC Media that they had been in touch with Facebook who, according to him, used reports from ISFED and other local groups about pro-government and anti-opposition fake accounts and their activities.
He said that beyond that, Facebook had conducted their own investigation into the matter.
‘What we identified in our reports as fake media pages, almost all of them have been deleted’, Benidze said.
DRFLab, which also collaborated with Facebook, said soon after the announcement that they ‘could not directly corroborate’ suspicions that the Georgian government was behind the network of fake accounts that had been taken down.
This story is developing and will continue to be updated. OC Media has reached out to Facebook and Georgian Dream for comment.
Armenian and Georgian internet users have different perspectives on the effect of social media disinformation and its effect on their respective countries, with a CRRC analysis finding that Armenians are more likely to state that social media has a negative impact on their country.
Disinformation — information that is intended to mislead — has in recent years been a widely-discussed topic globally, particularly in relation to its presence on social media.
An analysis of Caucasus Barometer
Misinformation and disinformation have become common concerns around the world. Georgia is no exception, with the majority of the internet-using public concerned about fake news online.
Caucasus Barometer 2021, an annual household survey run by CRRC, investigated a range of attitudes and behaviours related to social media in Georgia. 27% of those surveyed felt that social media had a negative effect on the country, 18% a positive effect, and 42% a neutral or mixed effect.
Of those that th
Georgia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) has published several critical reports accusing the media of misleading the public.
The CEC’s Information Security Centre, which opened on 16 August with international funding, employs 15 people to monitor more than 200 central and regional television channels and online platforms, as well as more than 300 Facebook pages and groups.
Earlier in September, the centre published its second media monitoring report, covering the period from 1–10 Septembe
We’re stuck in a vicious circle of democracy degradation. It’s no wonder that others are trying to exploit it to their dark aims — but it’s a wonder how misunderstood the role of the media is in solving this tangle.
In late May, an Armenian website pushing conspiracy theories and lies (‘fake news’) hit the global headlines after an investigation by OpenDemocracy revealed it had mistakenly been financed by the US Government.
Although the website wasn’t funded under a countering disinformation
