Month: March 2019

A Facebook page whose incendiary comments against independent journalists, disseminated to its 87,000 followers, have drawn criminal complaints is linked to a recently established Serbian website called Breitbart.rs.

The Facebook page, “Serbia Our Country” (Srbija naša zemlja), sports the orange square logo of Breitbart with the letter “B” substituted with “S”.

The section providing more details about the page has a link to Breitbart.rs, which was registered in February but has no content.

Breitbart News Network is a far-right syndicated American news, opinion and commentary website founded in mid-2007 by conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart.

“Serbia Our Country” has launched ferocious attacks on independent journalists, among others. It labelled Nedim Sejdinovic, former president of the Independent Journalists’ Association of Vojvodina, NDNV, a “Muslim extremist” and “Serb-hater”, for example, after which Sejdinovic filed a criminal complaint against the anonymous individuals running the page.

“I gave a statement to the Special Prosecution for High-Tech Crime and submitted all the necessary material related to the death threats and other felonies committed in this case,” Sejdinovic told BIRN.

The regional TV station N1 has also filed a criminal complaint for “endangering safety, threats, slanders and insults” against N1 employees over the Facebook page “Serbia Our Country”.

The Facebook page, among other things, accuses the independent media of receiving cash from “the criminal Clinton clan” in the US and from liberal hate figure billionaire George Soros. It accuses them of working to “destabilize Serbia”.

[Serbian nationalists bitterly resent former US president Bill Clinton for his role in the NATO-led air war that forced Serbia out of Kosovo in the late 1990s.]

The page has also called opposition politicians “mercenaries“ and accused them of “setting fire to our only home, Serbia”.

The identity of the individual that registered the related website, Breitbart.rs, is undisclosed. However, on March 28, Serbian businessman Bogoljub Pjescic said on Twitter that he was temporarily at the helm.

“Everything I do is transparent. I am only temporarily leading the future Breitbart Serbia,“ Pjescic tweeted.

Contacted by BIRN one day later, Pjescic said that he was no longer the chief of Breitbart.rs but refused to say who was now in charge.

“I cannot give any contacts without consent … I signed a non-disclosure agreement,” Pjescic told BIRN.

Pjescic claims to be a US citizen with good connections and a journalist. In recent days he has been involved in arguments with prominent Serbian journalists and editors on social networks.

Despite claiming to no longer be involved with Breitbart.rs, he has claimed that the page had 3.2 million views over the last seven days.

BIRN could not independently verify Pjescic’s claims.

The page “Serbia Our Country and the Breitbart.rs website do not list any contacts. The page administrators did not reply to BIRN’s questions sent over Facebook.

Breitbart News Network did not reply to BIRN’s request for comment by the time of publication.

Since President Aleksandar Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party came to power in 2012, Serbia has seen a surge of internet trolls and pages on social networks praising the government and attacking its critics, free media and the opposition in general.

Facebook has vowed to clamp down hard on pages spreading hate speech and racist views and has closed a number of pages in the Balkans suspected of misbehaving.

Facebook’s widely trumpeted clampdown on far-right and racist pages has affected several hundred accounts from Kosovo and North Macedonia that have been closed for engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”.

In a press release issued on Wednesday, Facebook said it had removed 2,632 pages, groups and accounts for misbehaving on Facebook and Instagram.

The move comes two weeks after a white racist livestreamed his terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand on Facebook.

In the Balkan region, Facebook said it closed 212 pages in Kosovo and North Macedonia for sharing unacceptable material on politics and religion, for example.

“Some of the profiles that were removed might belong to radical or far-right groups that may be rooted in the Balkans or come from outside, and whose hidden goal is to radicalize people,” Andrej Petkovski, from the Belgrade-based think tank Share, told BIRN.

Facebook said some of these online operations were found to be connected with Iran and Russia. It stressed that the profiles were not removed just for their content but also for falsely claiming to represent political communities in Australia, Britain and the United States.

Petkovski said these online radicals were often good at concealing their agendas and luring readers.

“At first glance, these profiles might not seem radical at all, and not contain explicit content and hate speech. They usually focus on posting texts on life style, healthcare, diets and exercises. Sports news is used frequently to lure predominantly male readers,” he explained.

“Once they lure followers, they gradually target them specifically and start feeding them with more explicit content,” he added.

Facebook said it had informed the local authorities about its actions, though neither North Macedonian nor Kosovo police confirmed this to BIRN on Thursday.

A Skopje-based new media expert, Bojan Kordalov, told BIRN this was not the first time Facebook had clamped down on alleged extremists, but it was welcome that it was being more open about it.

“It is a good thing that they have become much more transparent about it, issuing regular press releases, to show that they are making efforts to curb fake news and other misconduct online,” he said.

“Whether some radical groups were discovered or not is up to the authorities to determine, but it is a fact that in the past we have had many cases [of extremist sites] that in the beginning concealed their true intent by posting neutral and popular content,” Kordalov explained.

He suggested that many of the people implicated in these bad practices “do not know the big picture” and are in it purely for the promise of quick profit.

Petkovski and Kardalov both said the countries in the Balkans are generally unprepared to tackle the dangers stemming from the online distribution of fake news, radical ideologies and hate speech.

“All the regulations from the penal code that are applicable to the traditional media should also apply for the online sphere, while making all efforts to preserve the freedom of speech,” Kordalov advised.

Kosovo and North Macedonia have in recent years been named as hubs of spamming and trolling activities.

Western media reports said North Macedonian spammers were deeply involved in spreading fake news during the last presidential election campaign in the US, which Donald Trump won.

In March 2018, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg even mentioned North Macedonia by name as a source of fake news.

A BIRN and BBC investigation published last year said that militant Christian campaigner Jim Dowson was tied to a web of sites that were training Serbian far-right activists on how to win the information war regarding Kosovo. Dawson has denied any association to such activities, however.