New research by the International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), a Georgian watchdog, has found that the Georgian government's strategic communications departments mainly target Government critics, and very rarely deal with Russian disinformation.
The study was commissioned by the Coalition for Information Integrity, an alliance of civil society organizations working to counter Russian disinformation and information warfare.
Speaking at a conference on hybrid threats and disinformation in Tbilisi yesterday, Nino Dolidze, chair of ISFED, cited a recent report by META, Facebook's parent company, which directly pointed to the Georgian government's StratCom as being linked to a network spreading disinformation and attempting to manipulate public debate in Georgia. As a result, Meta deleted 80 accounts, 26 Pages, and 9 Groups linked to the unit, which was set up with the EU and the US help to supposedly counter Russian disinformation.
While Facebook had taken down pages and profiles linked to the ruling party for 'coordinated inauthentic behavior', this was the first time that a government institution responsible for countering disinformation itself had been directly exposed for actually spreading it.
The Georgian government has in no way denied the findings of Meta's report.
Noting the generally inactive role of the ministries, the ISFED report said that as of 30 April 2023, the Ministry of Defense devoted about 60% of its published posts to information disseminated in Georgian critical media, which it assessed as "disinformation".
"Posts published on Stratcom's pages do not contain information on how Georgia should directly confront these threats," ISFED said.
In addition, the StratComs use excessively hostile language when targeting critical media, Ms Dolidze said. Some of the posts accused Georgian media of being "enemies of the state and the church" and so on.
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