On December 6, an anonymous Facebook account, “Wise Sayings,” published a video claiming to show an elderly woman insulting journalists from the Formula TV channel. In the footage, the irritated citizen can be heard saying, “I am not afraid of you; stop glaring at me; I do not care about life. Morons.” The video also shows a microphone pointed at the woman, displaying the Formula TV logo. The post’s description included the phrase: “Such a bold grandma putting Formula in its place.”
The post is no longer available.
The Facebook account is spreading video manipulation about the Formula TV channel. In reality, the woman shown in the video is addressing police officers in the Freedom Square metro station, while the journalists from Formula are covering the event.
The circulated video is cropped from a live broadcast by Formula TV, which started at 8:00 PM on December 5, covering the ongoing protest near the Georgian Parliament. Specifically, the portion of the video where the woman appears begins at 1:32:50 of the broadcast published on Facebook and lasts for about two minutes. At this moment, the journalists were covering events in the Freedom Square metro station, where numerous police officers were conducting searches on the public. During this, the elderly woman appeared in the frame, and a journalist approached her with a microphone to record her words.
In the video, it is clearly shown that the citizen is addressing the police officers, telling them that she feels sorry for them and urging them to “at least have compassion for their own children,” which is followed by the phrase heard in the video spread on Facebook. A few seconds later, the woman turns around again and emphasizes the fact that the police officers should be ashamed of having their faces covered with masks.
Since the October 26 parliamentary elections, protest rallies have been regularly held in Georgia, mostly in Tbilisi, while since November 28, after Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced that the government would not put the issue of opening negotiations with the European Union on the agenda until the end of 2028, protests have continued daily across the country. This process has been accompanied by a campaign to discredit the participants, with both Facebook accounts and government media actively involved. During this period, Myth Detector has uncovered a number of similar pieces of disinformation and manipulative content of this nature.
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