The post shared on June 12th, 2020, by Facebook user Otar Matcharashvili is still widely circulated on social media. The post claims that the former President of the United States, Donald Trump, has declared Georgia a prominent example of fighting the Coronavirus in one of his addresses. Furthermore, Trump supposedly claimed that Georgians are protected by God itself, as they refused to shut down churches during the pandemic. An identical quote has also been published by Facebook user Eka Terine on June 16th, 2021.
As of July 7th, the post of Otar Matcharashvili has accumulated more than 3800 shares, while the post of Eka Terine was shared 2400 times.
The quote shared by the Facebook users is fabricated, as it does not belong to Donald Trump. No open source includes any statement or public address in which Donald Trump mentions Georgia in the same or even similar fashion. The source of the quote was also not indicated by the authors of the posts.
Disinformation as if Donald Trump was astonished by the Georgian model of Pandemic-management – asking Georgia to share its experience-was circulated during April 2020 as well. Such misleading information was shared by the clickbait web page Abcnews.com.ge. For detailed information, see the article by the Myth Detector:
Is Trump impressed by Georgia’s outcome in the fight against Coronavirus
The article has been written in the framework of Facebook’s fact-checking program. You can read more about the restrictions that Facebook may impose based on this article via this link. You can find information about appealing or editing our assessment via this link.
Read detailed instructions for editing the article.
Read detailed appeal instructions.
