While Georgian democracy has never flourished, fact-checkers in the country say that right now tensions are particularly high. 

Recent arrests of key figures in the opposition party, including former pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili and the director of a pro-opposition news channel Mtavari TV, have chilled public discourse, according to Georgian fact-checkers. Moreover, the Georgian ruling party developed a network of pseudonymous Facebook accounts and a “fact-checking” page targeting mostly independent media outlets, civil society organizations, and more recently, foreignambassadors. 

“They even developed their own fact-checking platform called ‘In Reality’ that discredits our work, saying it’s a lie without justification,” said Tamar Kintsurashvili, executive director of Media Development Foundation and editor-in-chief of the Georgian fact-checking outlet, Myth Detector. “So right now we’re observing deterioration in terms of democracy.”

In Reality’s posts have targeted civil society groups, Myth Detector and Factcheck Georgia, a fact-checking outlet and subsidiary of Georgia’s Reform Associates, a public policy think tank. One strategy of the page, which reflects a broader strategy of the ruling party, fact-checkers said, is to label any opposition voice as a hate group. It doesn’t engage with the veracity of the content, but discredits it uniformly, dismissing it as biased or fake.

While the page has under 10,000 followers, its posts are often shared on social media by the ruling-party actors, giving them a greater reach.

“The good news is we’re not yet at the stage where they’re going to jail us too,” said Mariam Tsitsikashvili, a project manager at GRASS and editor of Factcheck Georgia. “There are still media freedoms because even though the director of this opposition media organization is in jail, that channel continues to broadcast on topics like Georgia’s harsh financial problems.”

“When we call this ‘so-called fact-checking,’ it is not just because we do not like them,” said Malkhaz Rekvishili, editor-in-chief of Factcheck Georgia. “They have no proper methodology published, no public information about who is editing or writing the posts, who is managing the page. If something is so openly politically affiliated, we do not think it is a real fact check.”

Another Facebook page, TV Sezoni — which is affiliated with Russia, not the Georgian government — published a video featuring poorly photoshopped images of leaders of CSOs, pro-opposition attorneys and media figures getting arrested, Kintsurashvili among them. While Kintsurashvili laughed off a fake photo of her handcuffed in a courtroom, the images do represent the preferences of certain political factions in the country. 

“The government is trying to create alternative institutions,” Kintsurashvili said. “It’s not about criticism based on professional standards, but the goal is to destroy media not controlled by the ruling party.”