A prominent Georgian doctor stirred a national debate in the country after repeating a fake quote on TV attributed to a Georgian activist in which the activist was allegedly pleased that the coronavirus would kill the elderly rather than young people. The false quote, originally shared on a controversial Georgian Facebook page, has led to highly divisive discussions across the country.

As the number of people infected with the new coronavirus has increased in Georgia, discussions around the topic have increased alongside it. The widespread nature of the discussion can be illustrated by a search for the word “coronavirus” in Georgian (“კორონავირუსი”) on Facebook. According to the social media monitoring tool Crowdtangle, there were 12,538 separate Facebook posts and more than one million interactions about the virus in March alone, all in a language with only four million speakers worldwide.

The mentions of the word “coronavirus” on Georgian Facebook during March 2020. (Source: CrowdTangle)

The TV interview

There are few doctors and virologists who have been reporting on COVID-19 developments in Georgia on a daily basis. Georgian society has delegated much of its trust and hope in these professionals amid the increasing threat of COVID-19. On March 24, 2020, one of these trusted experts, Dr. Tengiz Tsertsvadze, gave an interview to POSTV in which he said he was horrified that a Georgian pro-democracy activist stated he was glad the coronavirus was killing older people rather than younger ones.

Dr. Tsertsvadze’s remarks became the object of the intense debate across Georgia, and while he didn’t mention the name of the activist, the individual in question — Nodar Rukhadze of the pro-democracy “Shame Movement”— was soon referenced in media coverage. The movement was established in 2019 as a response to a Russian lawmakers’s visit to Georgia and ongoing Russian occupation of parts of the country. The DFRLab has covered how the members of the Shame Movement were targeted by inauthentic Facebook pages, some of which were removed in December 2019, when Facebook deleted up to 400 Georgian pages associated with Georgia’s ruling party.

Four days before Dr. Tsertsvadze’s TV interview, a Georgian Facebook page known as Corridor of Shame posted a photo of Rukhadze, falsely attributing a fake quote to him: “I think the coronavirus is very good in terms of generational change, given that it mainly kills people ages 70 and older.” Treating the quote as fact, Dr. Tsertsvadze repeated it on television during an interview.

Screenshot of the Georgian Facebook page Corridor of Shame posting a photo of Georgian activist Nodar Rukhadze with a fake quote about killing off the elderly. (Source: Nodar Rukhadze via Facebook)

The Facebook page Corridor of Shame has been around since 2019, deceiving Georgian society through the spread of disinformation about Georgian opposition parties, activists and media representatives with the goal of discrediting them.