On May 23, 2017, the Facebook page ‘Tsinaagmdegoba Momavlistvis’ (“Resistance for the Future”) released a video entitled: “Jungles in Tbilisi subway. This behavior has no justification.” On May 24, another Facebook page WTF?! Photos issued the same footage under the caption: “Iranian, Iraqi and Indian migrants in the Tbilisi subway.” From this page the video with the same title was posted on websites dainteresdit.ge, foxnews.ge and Facebook page all ge. According to the pages, the video depicts an altercation in one of the Tbilisi subway carts and the aggressive passengers involved in it are Iranian, Iraqi and Indian migrants.
The title attached to the video by these websites is deceptive, because the video footage was released on 7 September 2015 and it is impossible to identify what nationalities people depicted in it represent.
Initially identical video with the headline “What’s going on in Tbilisi Metro” was released on September 7, 2015 on the YouTube channel of Gio Merabishvili. Neither the title of the video nor the description, makes mention of the passengers nationality. Moreover, the footage is blurred which makes it difficult to identify people’s nationality. For the first time passengers’ nationality in the xenophobic context was specified by the Facebook page WTF?! Photos that publishes posts with racist content and uses hate speech against other nationalities.
About the Source:
‘Tsinaagmdegoba Momavlistvis’ (“Resistance for the Future”) is a Facebook page that has published only 7 posts on their Timeline. The first post is dated 20 May 2017.
WTF?! Photos is an anti-liberal Facebook page that calls for citizens to protect their race and publishes novelties with racist and ethnocentric content. One of their last posts is devoted to the American serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin, active in the 1970s, whose targets were mainly Jews and Afro-American, considering them as a subservient race and justifying his crimes with the mission to “purify of the world.”
Web pages dainteresdit.ge and foxnews.ge have previously released photo/video fabrications. According to a story published in May 2017 on their web-pages, there is ongoing organ trading black market in Turkey with organs harvested from Syrian children. Myth detector has already fact checked these publications. The photo/video manipulations instead of showing the organ trade in Turkey represented an incident in Malaysia, a chemical attack on the outskirts of Damascus and the assistance effort to the victims after a Russian air bombing raid.
