Table 3: Cyber Troop Capacity in Georgia Team Size Resources Spent Activity Levels (USD) Coordination Capacity Measure 316,000 on Facebook Medium Ads Source: Authors’ evaluations based on data collected. Blank spaces indicate no evidence was found. Other Examples of Mis-and-Disinformation Misinformation has actively targeted foreigners. On 22 September, the online news outlets alia.ge, geotimes.ge and dainteresdit.ge shared a Facebook status that alleged that the Vashlijvari Exaltation Church had ceased to ring its bells upon the request of Iranian residents in Tbilisi. The news articles were reportedly shared thousands of times and led to heated discussions and hateful comments in the websites’ comment sections and on social media. Dean Giorgi Sakhvadze of the Vashlijvari Exaltation Church denied the allegations and stated the church had not been involved in any confrontation on grounds of ethnicity or religion (Chimakadze, 2018). Once the netgazeti online newspaper reported the news was false, the Facebook user who had initially posted the story subsequently deleted her post but reportedly the online news outlets that shared the story did not correct the false claims in their stories (Chimakadze, 2018). Similarly, a doctored image of a street sign was shared by Facebook pages in March 2018 claiming Ivane Machabli Street in Tbilisi had been renamed to Iran Street (Kokoshvili, 2018). The online news sites alie.ge, infonews.ge and guriismoambe.ge shared this story, with none of the stories providing links or evidence to support the report (Gugulashvili, 2019). Armenians, who are a minority group in Georgia, have also been targeted by online news outlets and Facebook pages. For instance, this story was posted by the Iberian Unity Facebook page in August 2017, which was shared over 3,900 times and reposted by Info9 and Rezonansi in March 2019 (Pertaia, 2019). Another example of xenophobic fake news was a story published by the website intermedia.ge that alleged that, according to a United Nations report, the Georgian ethnos was disappearing quicker than any other in the world, stating that the combination of slowing birth rates and more foreigners was responsible for this development. One fake site called theguarian.com, whose design was identical to British newspaper theguardian.com, shared a story with a fabricated interview with a British foreign service agent who allegedly stated that after the former president Mikheil Saakashvili was brought to power, the British foreign office launched a three stage plan to dissolve Russian military influence in Georgia (mediachecker.ge, 2017). Members of the LGBTQ community are also frequent targets of online misinformation, largely peddled by online news websites and the Facebook pages of ultra-nationalist activists. For instance, on 3 September 2018, the leader of the ultra-nationalist group Georgian March, Sandro Bregadze, made a misleading statement that a gay pride event would take place at the national football stadium, Dinamo Stadium, on 9 September, which online news outlets Alia, Metronome and Kartuli Azri shared without verifying its truth. Actually, on 9 September, Georgia and Latvia were scheduled to play each other at football and in support of the Georgian footballer, Guram Kashia, who had been a public target of ultra-nationalist and homophobic groups for wearing LGBTQ armbands during matches, LGBTQ groups announced that they would attend the match with armbands and display banners saying “#guramshentanvart”, Georgian for “Guram we are with you” (Mythdetector, 2018). Only a few days later, on 7 143