Case study 4: General shots in which it is impossible to identify persons or the event described in the caption

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. In 2018 the video was also used by presidential candidate Kakha Kukava of Free Georgia in his xenophobic campaign ad.


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. Thus the caption added by the above mentioned web-sites is manipulative.