Georgian courts have fined at least two people for insulting Bera Ivanishvili, the son of the founder of the ruling Georgian Dream party, Bidzina Ivanishvili, on Facebook.

Social media-related fines have accelerated since 1 June, when the Interior Ministry’s controversial new department began operating with the stated aim of combating hate speech.

In one of the latest trials on 3 July, the Tbilisi City Court fined Giorgi Gogia ₾3,000 ($1,100) after accusing him of petty hooliganism for insulting Ivanishvili’s son. Information about Gogia’s social media activity was provided to the court by the Interior Ministry.

The case centred on a caption Gogia allegedly wrote when sharing a news card about Bera Ivanishvili. According to the card, Ivanishvili, who lives abroad, said that if he encountered a Georgian in the US, he would not consider that person’s political views when deciding whether or not to help them.

‘Said the son of dick who used to send Irakli Gharibashvili into schools to beat children’, the caption read. It was a reference to an audio recording leaked in 2021, in which Ivanishvili allegedly asks the now-jailed former Prime Minister Gharibashvili to punish people who had insulted him on Facebook. The recordings, dismissed by the ruling party, were never exactly dated but are believed to predate Gharibashvili’s second and last  premiership.

Gogia’s lawyer, Mikheil Zakareishvili, said during court hearings in June that his client ‘neither confirmed nor denied’ that he actually wrote the post.

Before Gogia was penalised, Georgian activist Nata Peradze, who lives in exile, was also fined under the court’s 30 June decision for a social media post about Bera Ivanishvili. A day earlier, activist Tamar Giorgadze was fined for cursing Bidzina Ivanishvili. Both were charged with petty hooliganism.

According to statistics provided by the Interior Ministry to OC Media, during its first month of operation, its ‘anti-hate speech’ department ‘identified’ 170 suspected offences, and submitted 150 cases to the courts. Final decisions have been made in 33 of these cases: 31 resulted in fines, while two ended with verbal warnings.

Highlighting the scale of the process, RFE/RL reported that courts across Georgia hold ‘several hearings daily’ on cases submitted by the department, with some sessions lasting only a few minutes.

Social media users are being fined for insulting politicians and others, including opposition figures, often even when the alleged target has not filed a complaint. The department said from the outset that it would work ‘proactively’, meaning it would not require complaints to initiate cases.

The department has been described by critics as an expansion of state censorship, with its work also being condemned by opposition politicians whose alleged insults were used as grounds for fines. One of them, Grigol Gegelia, a member of the opposition Lelo party, said the department was trying to appear impartial by including comments about opposition figures in its reports.

Georgian courts are known to use two articles from the administrative code when penalising individuals for public remarks: petty hooliganism and insulting a state or political officeholder. The second provision was only added to the code in February 2025.

Responding to questions about its working methods, the ministry said decisions to draw up administrative offence reports were based on its ‘monitoring’ of social media. Some have mocked it as the ‘department of scrolling and screenshotting’, arguing that its work amounts to little more than scrolling through social media and taking screenshots of posts and comments.

Other questions have also been raised about the department’s work. Zakareshvili asked how the ministry confirmed that the profile which wrote a post about Ivanishvili belonged to Gogia and not someone  else, given that many others share the same first and last name in Georgia. The account in question, now inaccessible, reportedly contained no pictures of its owner.

According to RFE/RL, a ministry lawyer replied that they verified the identity by reviewing the Facebook profile of Gogia’s brother, which they used to conclude that the profile indeed belonged to the person later summoned to court.

Amid criticism, state officials argued that the new department has been effective and that insulting content on social media has decreased.