Albania’s adoption of controversial ‘anti-defamation’ media legislation flies in the face of its commitment to European Union values and reflects the Socialist Party government’s tightening grip on freedom of expression, media experts warn.
The government of Prime Minister Edi Rama says the package of laws, approved by parliament on December 19, is designed to protect individuals from unfounded online attacks, but rights groups and media experts say it will gift authorities far-reaching powers to censor online media.
Rama was unmoved by warnings from the European Commission – the executive arm of the EU, which Albania wants to join – as well as local and international media watchdogs and protesting journalists, telling parliament:
“The anti-defamation [package] is a necessity to protect individual rights and the ability to respond legally against public attacks on personal dignity or blackmail due to public service and entrepreneurship in the market, without breaching freedom of expression and the pluralism of sources of information.”
“I have had talks with the European Union and the Council of Europe,” he said, “and have told them, ‘You have not read the law you are talking about.’”
Rama’s critics, however, say such disregard for the complaints casts fresh doubt over his government’s democratic credentials. It also stands in stark contrast to his government’s stated aim of clinching accession talks with the EU – refused by the bloc in October – and the undented popularity of the bloc among Albanians for the past two decades.
The laws create a Complaints Commission within the Albania Media Authority with the power to review the content of online media outlets and levy heavy fines in the event that online media refuse to remove content that the commission deems questionable. Its adoption follows years of increasingly bitter complaints from Rama over media coverage of his Socialists, in power since 2013.
“Nobody should be in any doubt – with the approval of a law that incorrectly claims to be against defamation, Albania will have a censorship office for the media,” Albanian philosopher and communications expert Artan Fuga wrote on Facebook immediately following the approval of the law.
“It will be an office not a court that will judge the media and this office will have the power to oblige media to remove certain news. You can call it what you like, but this is simply a censorship office.”
Power to block sites without court order
Albania Prime Minister Edi Rama speaking in the parliament on 18 December. Photo: Gent Shkullaku/LSA
Albania has been a candidate for EU membership since 2014, but EU leaders – repeatedly overriding the recommendations of the Commission – have refused to open accession talks, most recently in October when French President Emmanuel Macron led opposition to launching negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia.
Despite the long wait and frequent refusals, Albanians remain overwhelmingly in favour of pursuing EU accession.
The EU and the Council of Europe, Europe’s main human rights forum, sought to use their leverage to get Rama to rethink the media legislation, but the EU’s leverage in particular in the Balkans has been weakened by the diminishing prospect of further EU enlargement in the foreseeable future.
Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner Dunja Mijatovic expressed particular concern over the discretionary powers granted to regulatory bodies, “the possibility to impose excessive fines and to block media websites without a court order, as well as the introduction of state regulation of online media.”
Such powers, she said in a statement on December 19, “may deal a strong blow to freedom of expression and media freedom in the country.”
“It is of the utmost importance to ensure that the Internet remains an open and public forum and that self-regulation by the media, including online media, prevails.”
The European Commission said the laws did not fully reflect the recommendations of the Council of Europe and that it had “taken note” of their approval by parliament.
Will EU act?
Human rights lawyer Dorian Matlija of the Res Publica centre in Tirana said the legislation stood on shaky legal ground.
Looked at in the context of the entire European legal corpus on matters of freedom of speech, defamation and protection of dignity, he told BIRN, “this law is like a butcher with a machete readying for rough cuts.”
“Even the concept of what online media is, as defined in this law, is shaky,” Matlija said.
European parliamentarians joined the chorus of criticism. On the eve of the vote in Tirana, Swedish MEP David Lega, a member of the powerful centre-right European People’s Party bloc in the European Parliament, tweeted that the legislation “will seriously endanger the chances for opening of EU membership negotiations.”
Some local observers agreed.
“Albania has an obligation to have laws that are 100 per cent compatible with European standards and this latest piece of legislation surely deviates from that,” said Afrim Krasniqi, executive director of the Institute of Political Studies, a Tirana-based think-tank.
He warned that the move threatened to further undermine media plurality in Albania, citing the “quasi-monopoly situation that four family-owned television networks have in the market.”
But Gjergji Vurmo, a Tirana based EU expert and researcher for the US think-tank Freedom House, saw little indication that Brussels would actively confront Rama.
“The Commission doesn’t seem determined to oppose this,” he said.
Between January 2017 and June 2019, BIRN journalists submitted 854 official requests to access public documents in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. With the aid of the information gained from these requests, BIRN produced numerous investigative pieces and so exposed wrongdoing by governments, companies and powerful individuals.
On the basis of the submitted FOI requests, BIRN has also published an in-depth analysis of institutions’ openness to FOI requests across the countries of the Western Balkans. This shows that while Freedom of Information laws in the region are among the most liberal in Europe on paper, implementation of these laws is well below European standards.
Implementation also varies between the Western Balkan countries themselves. Some countries are showing an improvement, for example, by public institutions publishing large amounts of data and documents.
Others, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, lag behind. It is now the only country in the Balkans that does not even offer access to public records in electronic form. In some other countries, like Montenegro and Serbia, there has been a decline in implementation, as a result of legislative changes and political pressure.
Of the 854 official requests that BIRN submitted to access public documents, less than half of them, 408, were actually approved; 224 were partially approved, meaning the institutions provided only technical information, while 221 requests were either rejected or no answer at all was received, despite repeated follow-ups from the journalists.
Looking at the ratio between requests that were submitted and answered positively, in Albania the score was highest, at 61 per cent. It was followed by Kosovo, at 56 per cent. In Serbia, institutions provided the requested information in 40 per cent of the cases, while in North Macedonia the figure was 33 per cent. The worst response rate was in Bosnia, where institutions replied to only 25 per cent of requests sent.
For many journalists in the Western Balkans, where independent media are often under attack and pressure, Freedom of Information laws are often an important pillar of their own freedom, and are sometimes the only way to obtain information.
In recent years, however, there has been a certain tendency among institutions to close the information door and experiment with new ways to deny public information, especially to journalists, who have been traditionally the most frequent users of these laws.
To withhold information, institutions often either ignore requests or mark the requested information as classified.
In many cases, BIRN journalists have been forced to file complaints in order to get the data they want, or a decision on their request. This process often lasts long, disrupts journalists’ daily activities and prolongs the whole investigative process, which can end up using outdated data.
In Kosovo, BIRN journalists submitted the majority of their 337 requests to municipalities, ministries, the Telecom Company, the Prosecutorial Council, Judicial Council, the President’s Office, the Prime Minister’s Office and the Procurement Review Body. Of these, 188 were approved, 27 were partially answered and 122 were rejected.
BIRN Kosovo repeatedly submitted complaints about denial of access to public documents. In all cases, the Ombudsman asked the relevant institutions to grant access. But only 45 per cent of these requests resulted in BIRN gaining access to the requested documents. Another 20 per cent of requests resulted in BIRN gaining partial access. The remaining 35 per cent is still pending.
In North Macedonia, BIRN submitted 233 information requests, of which just over a third were approved.
While most countries in the region, such as Serbia, Albania and North Macedonia, have liberal Freedom of Information laws, at least on paper, there is a worrying trend in Montenegro, where latest changes to the law allow the head of an institution to decide which information shall be marked “classified”. This change has been widely criticized, as it contains a series of exclusions that are not in line with international standards or the country’s own constitution.
In Albania, meanwhile, a new law includes a number of novel concepts, including the possibility of re-classifying secret documents, the release of partial information and the use of information technology to make information held by public institutions more available to the public.
In Serbia, BIRN submitted 95 requests. Of these, 13 were fully answered, 25 were partially answered and 20 were rejected or no answer was received. Another 37 requests were still pending by the time of publication. Although the legal deadline for institutions in Serbia to respond to such requests is 15 days, in some institutions, like the Interior Ministry, the average response timeframe is a month or longer.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, BIRN filed 12 requests and it took regular follow-ups and reminders before the authorities ever responded, even though, as in Serbia, the legal deadline to respond is 15 days. In reality, it takes a month or more.
Looking at the annual reports of regional Commissioners, Serbia’s received the highest number of complaints, 64 per cent, during 2018. Albania came next, with 13 per cent, followed by North Macedonia, on 10 per cent and Montenegro, with 7 per cent. The lowest number of complaints reported by the Ombudsperson’s Office was in Bosnia and Herzegovina – 5 per cent – and in Kosovo, only 1 per cent.
BIRN’s analysis also showed that local government institutions are more responsive to requests for information while central government institutions are more likely to postpone decisions and eventually reject journalists’ requests. Possible reasons for this could be the nature and exclusivity of the information that these institutions possess.
The lowest positive response that BIRN journalists had, in term of individual institutions in the region, was with the Civil Aviation Authority in Albania, the Ministry of Foreign Trade in Bosnia, the Post in Kosovo and the Interior Ministry in Serbia.
As part of BIRN’s drive for openness, it has established a free, user-friendly, searchable online library of public documents and scraped database, called BIRN Source. To increase access to open data for journalists, in January 2020 BIRN will also launch a new online platform, the BIRN Investigative Resource Desk, BIRD, which will provide a digital space and user-friendly tools for better and stronger investigative journalism.
BIRD will provide journalists with various types of assistance, including a set of useful tools and information in one place related to freedom of information, data access and protection, cybersecurity and open-source datasets.
Newsroom leaders from FT, CNN and Forbes reveal how they are preparing their reporters for the decade ahead and why it still matters to be able to pick up the phone.
Journalists need to learn to adapt to changing technology and the changing needs of audiences in the coming decade, a panel at Newsrewired concluded (27th November 2019).
Executive editor for the Financial Times Lyndsey Jones emphasised the need for reporters to be well equipped to report in a variety of different mediums, not just one that they are particularly strong at.
As the sun dipped over the rooftops of the
North Macedonia town of Bitola near the southern border with Greece, the
man they call “Cheese” sipped a beer on the Sirok Sokak pedestrian
strip.
As sundowns go, this one seemed fitting. It was August 12,
the day North Macedonia outlawed the use of the Vergina Sun – a Greek
national symbol – in books, on monuments and in public spaces.
For Cheese, the ban on “appropriation” of the Classical Hellenic emblem with its distinctive pointy rays was the latest act of surrender in a bitter fight over Macedonian identity.
It was part of a historic deal with Greece to end a 30-year dispute over his country’s use of the name “Macedonia” – which Athens argued implied territorial ambitions over a northern Greek province of the same name and its ancient legacy of Alexander the Great.
Under the deal signed in July 2018, the former Yugoslav republic had to change maps and textbooks, abandon all use of the Vergina Sun and – the ultimate betrayal, in Cheese’s view – rechristen itself “North Macedonia”.
Sitting in an outdoor cafe as dusk descended, he vowed never to sully his lips with the new name.
“I’m a patriot, and I just don’t want my country’s name to be changed,” he told BIRN.
Few people know Cheese’s true identity, though many are familiar with his nationalist views. He is, in fact, Goran Kostovski, a 38-year-old marketing company worker from the capital, Skopje.
With almost 10,000 Twitter followers on three continents, Kostovski led a social media campaign in 2018 urging Macedonians to boycott a referendum on implementing the name-change deal, known as the Prespa agreement after the lake near which it was signed.
While the Prespa deal promised to unblock Greek opposition to the country’s hopes of joining NATO and the EU, critics saw it as a compromise too far. They hoped a low turnout in the September 2018 referendum would invalidate the result.
“It made no sense to tell the world to vote no in the referendum because we feared the government would distort the results,” Kostovski said. “We had to boycott the referendum first.”
Prompting street protests at home and drumming up diaspora dollars abroad, the “#boycott” campaign was a runaway success.
While 95 per cent of those who voted in the referendum were in favour of the name-change deal, turnout was only 37 per cent – well short of the 50 per cent minimum threshold.
Though parliament later ratified the Prespa agreement anyway, experts say the victory for voter suppression was due in part to a new type of information warfare increasingly seen in nationalist circles.
Known as “computation propaganda”, it is what the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University calls “the interaction of algorithms, automation and politics”.
Few have mastered the art better than Kostovski, though he is cagey about the methods he uses.
“You can say we’re bots, but that doesn’t mean it’s true,” he said, referring to the new foot soldiers of the online propaganda war: bogus Twitter accounts programmed to behave like humans.
“We’ve blurred your thinking so you don’t know where our campaign is coming from, and you don’t know where to look first.”
While much has been said of Balkan troll farms and fake news factories, less is known about the impact of computational propaganda on the workings of democracy in the region.
A BIRN investigation into nationalist networks on both sides of the name dispute lifts the lid on the online tricks employed to amplify political messages and distort public opinion.
It is a journey into an underworld of computer code and conspiracy theories, where “ghost users” and “Twitterbots” meet far-right extremism in a digital hall of mirrors.
As much fake buzz as fake news, the activity is designed to create the false impression of a giant online conversation so opinion-makers such as journalists and activists sit up and take notice.
In this way, experts say a small group of geeks with laptops can exert an influence way out of whack with their actual numbers, with worrying implications for democratic discourse.
Goran Kostovski, the man behind the ‘Cheese’ account on Twitter, sits in an outdoor cafe in the North Macedonia town of Bitola. Photo: Kostas Zafeiropoulos
Disinformation ‘spin cycle’
At the government headquarters in Skopje, the country’s new official name – Republic of North Macedonia – greets visitors as they approach the Ionic columns of the building, renovated five years ago to look like the White House in Washington, DC.
It is a stone’s throw from the city’s main square, where a statue of Alexander the Great on a stallion looms over a Classical-style fountain – the result of a taxpayer-funded makeover of Skopje to give it a more antiquarian feel.
Many saw the revamp announced in 2010 as an architectural thumbing of the nose at Greece by the government of then Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski after Athens vetoed his country’s accession to NATO in 2008.
Inside government headquarters, Demijan Hadzi-Angelovski, a 28-year-old social media expert at the information ministry, recalled how 10 or so influential Twitter accounts sought to dominate the news agenda in the run-up to the Prespa referendum.
Every day, three times a day, a different user would send one or two provocative tweets, which would then be liked and retweeted by an army of automated accounts, he said.
The idea was to “trend” on Twitter and get picked up by big news aggregators like Time.mk.
“Their goal was to have the news sites view and reproduce these tweets, to make the information more credible,” he said. “They then re-posted the news in a washing machine news cycle.”
Their goal was to have the news sites view and reproduce these tweets, to make the information more credible. They then re-posted the news in a washing machine news cycle.
Demijan Hadzi-Angelovski, government social media expert
According to Information Minister Damjan Manchevski, who oversaw the government’s pro-Prespa referendum campaign, much of the recycled content was fake news designed to discredit the agreement.
“More than 10 per cent of articles in that period were pure misinformation,” Manchevski told BIRN in an interview. “The bots on Twitter were the main source of fake news.”
Fireworks light up the sky behind a statue of Alexander the Great unveiled in Skopje’s main square in September 2011. The installation of the sculpture was part of a cultural project called ‘Skopje 2014’ designed to give the city a more Classical look. EPA/NakeBatev
One story falsely stated that people living near the country’s largest army base in the central Krivolak region would be poisoned by depleted uranium brought in for military training if the government ratified the Prespa deal and then joined NATO.
An investigation by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and the Investigative Reporting Lab Macedonia (IRL) traced the story to Zlatko Kovac, a 50-year-old US-Macedonian who works as a Washington columnist for Russian news agency Sputnik.
Kovac did not reply to BIRN’s request for comment.
“Kovac collaborates with a number of websites in [North] Macedonia that are part of the propaganda mechanism against the Prespa Agreement,” said Saska Cvetkovska, the chain-smoking editor-in-chief of IRL.
“The story was started by Kovac on Facebook, the news was immediately posted on Twitter, dozens of bots reproduced it and then several conservative online media … posted it as a regular news item.”
As a result, Defence Minister Radmila Sekerinska spent a week frantically reassuring people it was not true, Cvetkovska said.
In the days before the referendum, other scare stories wormed their way into mainstream news.
Media reported that people could be prosecuted for disagreeing with Prespa, that the need to print new money would cause massive inflation and that Greece would get a blank cheque to do whatever it wanted.
None of this happened by accident.
Anti-Prespa demonstrators protest in front of the parliament building in Skopje in November 2018. Photo: EPA-EFE/GEORGI LICOVSKI
‘Cyborg bots’
In the runup to the referendum, the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity, an initiative of the Danish-based Alliance of Democracies Foundation, noticed a spike in bot activity on its social media monitoring tools.
“There is clearly a concerted effort to thwart the democratic rights of Macedonians and delegitimise the referendum vote,” it said in a statement.
There is clearly a concerted effort to thwart the democratic rights of Macedonians and delegitimise the referendum vote.
Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity
Two weeks before the referendum, the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) of the US-based Atlantic Council think tank, which monitors digital propaganda, published research showing that far-right Twitter accounts were boosting the boycott campaign.
Over a period of nine days, researchers analysed all tweets linked to the hashtags “#Бојкотирам” and “#bojkotiram” (#boycott) – around 23,800 of them.
They found that more than 80 per cent were in fact retweets, a 4:1 ratio of retweets to original content that suggested rampant automation.
“There was well-coordinated, non-authentic activity that destroyed any normal Twitter talk,” DFRLab researcher Kanishk Karan told BIRN. “Instead of discussing these accounts, they spammed others and bombarded them with thousands of mentions and retweets.”
The DFRLab identified the nine most active Twitter accounts that helped the campaign go viral – and Kostovski’s “Cheese” account was among them.
A DFR Lab visualisation shows the most influential accounts around the #boycott campaign. ‘Cheese’ is ‘C4i72’. Image courtesy of DFRLab
According to Kostovski, the campaign had three main ringleaders: himself, a blogger friend named Igor Pipovski (whose Twitter handle “@m0rban” honours populist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban) and Zarko Hristovski, a Macedonian web developer who lives in Norway and built the campaign’s website.
“#Бојкотирам belongs to the Macedonian people,” Pipovski tweeted to BIRN when asked about his role in the campaign. “Nobody should take the credit.”
BIRN was unable to contact Hristovski but Kostovski expounded on the worldview that he said motivated them all.
“We live in the middle of a digital war,” he told BIRN. “We nationalists and patriots on the one side, and internationalists, communists and former communists and social democrats on the other.”
We live in the middle of a digital war. We nationalists and patriots on the one side, and internationalists, communists and former communists and social democrats on the other.
A pinned tweet at the top of his Twitter stream says: “A place where you will find plenty of banners, gifs, memes and other propaganda material that will be useful for a successful social campaign. Network against the fatal referendum to change our identity.”
In many ways, Kostovski has as much in common with alt-right white supremacists in the United States as with Macedonian nationalists. His Twitter posts bristle with far-right symbols and conspiracy theories.
His Twitter profile picture was formerly a cartoon image of Pepe the Frog, a favourite alt-right emblem. These days, his header has a big “Q”, a reference to the popular far-right “QAnon” conspiracy theory of a “deep state” plot against US President Donald Trump.
In a rare public appearance, Kostovski addressed a rally in Skopje two days before the referendum wearing a “Q” hat and a “Make America Great Again” T-shirt.
“We all fight the deep state and globalisation,” Kostovski told BIRN. “We have the same enemies and similar ideologies.”
He listed the populists who inspire him: Trump, Orban, French far-right opposition leader Marine Le Pen and British Brexit Party founder Nigel Farage. Many of his Twitter posts also feature former Trump strategist Steve Bannon.
“We were excited about Trump’s election campaign and we tried to copy its methods and symbols,” Kostovski said. “We wanted people especially to believe that Steve Bannon was involved in the [#boycott] campaign.”
In one tweet in August 2018, he suggested that the “illegal and treasonous” government of Prime Minister Zoran Zaev was in hock to US billionaire philanthropist George Soros – a familiar figure of hate among far-right groups.
“Boycott the illegal #Referendum for the Nazi #agreement,” he added.
Kostovski insisted that he and his fellow keyboard crusaders were in no way out of the ordinary.
“In our group, we are all just normal people, with regular jobs and families, and most of us want to remain anonymous on social media.”
But BIRN’s investigation shows there is more to Kostovski’s anonymity than meets the eye.
Using a crawler application called Twitterbots, a tool created by Athens-based software engineer Dimitris Papaevangelou to assess the likelihood of bot activity, BIRN analysed Cheese’s Twitter output and found he averages almost 110 “actions” per day.
Computer scientists say any number of actions – tweets, retweets, likes and other interactions – over 70 suggests bots are on the loose.
While Kostovski said he only used automation in the early days of the #boycott campaign, BIRN’s analysis confirmed that his Cheese persona is what is known in the computational propaganda business as a “cyborg bot” – half person, half machine.
These hybrids combine algorithmic automation with human intervention to get past Twitter’s anti-bot defences, since automation is strictly no-go on the social media platform.
The Twitterbots crawler application shows Cheese’s network. Every node represents a different Twitter account. Red nodes are assumed to be bots or cyborg bots, also known as ‘retweeters’ since they combine real human interaction with automation. Image: Twitterbots screengrab
Ben Nimmo, a digital propaganda specialist at the Atlantic Council, has described the use of such bots as “a game of numbers”.
“If you create a sufficient number of false accounts and automate them, then there is a chance that they appear on the list of trending subjects,” he told this reporter in an interview for a recent investigation by the Athens-based Mediterranean Institute for Investigative Reporting (MIIR).
“Social media is therefore the place where, with the proper tactics and five persons, you can generate the impression that five million people are talking about something.”
Social media is the place where, with the proper tactics and five persons, you can generate the impression that five million people are talking about something.
Ben Nimmo, digital propaganda at the Atlantic Council
Scrutiny of Cheese’s network using Sparktoro analytical software revealed that more than 38 per cent of his followers were classified as “fake” – likely to be bots or other tools of computational propaganda.
Asked what it was doing to counter such activity, Twitter referred BIRN to its recently updated policy against what it calls “platform manipulation”, which includes spam, “malicious automation” and the use of fake accounts.
The company noted that in May 2018, it identified and challenged more than 9.9 million potentially “spammy” or automated accounts. In September, however, it reported “a nearly 50 per cent drop in challenges issued to suspected spam accounts compared to the previous reporting period”.
The website of the ‘#boycott’ campaign. The headline reads: ‘Macedonia has its own name.’ Photo: Kostas Zafeiropoulos
Diaspora dollars
According to Kostovski, nationalist politicians were quick to jump on the #boycott bandwagon in opposing the Prespa deal.
Among them was Filip Petrovski, a former lawmaker with the right-wing opposition VMRO DPMNE party who was involved in “Macedonia Boycotts”, a coalition of almost 30 small right-wing parties, political factions and civic associations.
Kostovski said the two met in the summer of 2018 to discuss working together. Contacted by BIRN, Petrovski confirmed that he was actively involved in the boycott campaign.
As the main opposition party, VMRO DPMNE’s official position towards the referendum was that people should vote with their conscience, though critics say the nationalist wing of the party was firmly against the Prespa deal.
“We have strong evidence that the centres of these online attacks are linked to the VMRO opposition, but they were not the strongest,” Information Minister Manchevski told BIRN.
Rather, he said the most strident opposition to Prespa came from Macedonians living abroad. He cited the example of a Toronto-based businessman named Bill Nikolov, president of Macedonian Human Rights Movement International in Canada.
“The most extreme of the diaspora, like him, are second-generation immigrants who have come to the country only a few times for vacations,” Manchevski said.
Kostovski said Nikolov funded an anti-Prespa billboard campaign in Skopje after getting fired up online.
“Many rich diaspora people with connections saw what we were doing on social media and multiplied our influence,” he said. “Bill Nikolov was one of them.”
Many rich diaspora people with connections saw what we were doing on social media and multiplied our influence.
Kostovski
Asked to comment, Nikolov told BIRN in a Tweet: “No Macedonian politician (from any political party) has the right to negotiate or change our name, identity and history. They attack and lie about those who defend our basic human rights but won’t defend themselves against those who admit to wanting to erase our identity.”
Meto Koloski, president of United Macedonian Diaspora, tweets his support for boycotting the Prespa referendum in July 2018. Experts say diaspora groups became active in drumming up support for the boycott campaign after getting fired up on social media.
Kostovski told BIRN the #boycott movement received several thousand euros from Todor Petrov, leader of the World Macedonian Congress, a Skopje-based non-governmental organisation that boasts diaspora members in the United States, Canada, Australia, Italy and Germany.
In 1991, Petrov had advocated putting the Vergina Sun on the new country’s flag. His World Macedonian Congress is widely seen as an ultranationalist movement.
“The World Macedonian Congress has connections with many Macedonians around the world and it is true that they helped campaign for last year’s referendum boycott,” Petrov to BIRN.
Meanwhile, Kostovski said other politicians “tried to ride the wave we created. And they all demanded – and got – a lot of money from the Macedonian diaspora.”
One such beneficiary was Janko Bacev, president of the pro-Russian United Macedonia party, he said — though BIRN was unable to confirm the claim.
Asked to comment, Bacev told BIRN: “I won’t comment on provocateurs working for the puppet government in Macedonia.”
Bacev was seen at a violent anti-Prespa protest in front of parliament in June 2018 that police quelled with teargas and stun grenades.
People from all over Greece protest against the Prespa agreement at a rally in Syntagma Square, Athens, on 20 January 2019. Photo: EPA-EFE/ORESTIS PANAGIOTOU
‘We want our name back’
BIRN’s investigation showed that Greek nationalists on the other side of the border also used computational propaganda to whip up a backlash against the Prespa deal.
Again, diaspora activists played a role in turning online propaganda into action on the street, with anti-Prespa anger fuelling the biggest protests in Athens and Thessaloniki since Greece’s debt crisis.
“This is a geographical area where large populations were forced in the 20th Century to migrate for economic and political reasons, first to the US, Canada and then to Australia,” said Tasos Kostopoulos, a historian and investigative journalist at the Efimerida ton Sintakton daily paper in Athens.
“It is precisely these people, especially the second and third generation, who are involved in a raging fight online, exchanging insults on Twitter with hundreds of trolls and bots.”
Like Cheese, one of the loudest Greek voices in the digital cacophony is a human-machine hybrid, according to BIRN’s investigation.
“I AM A GREEK MACEDONIAN!” says the Twitter profile of “Pallas Athena” under an image of the Vergina Sun. “We 3.5 million Greek Macedonians are tired of being robbed of our IDENTITY, HISTORY, NAME AND SYMBOLS! We want our name Macedonia back!”
The TweetBotorNot application rates the chance of ‘Pallas Athena’ being a bot at almost 70 per cent. Since the account clearly uses automation in addition to real human intervention, it is what is known in the online propaganda business as a ‘cyborg bot’. Image courtesy of Michael W. Kearney
The sheer number of tweets from Pallas Athena’s account – around 478,000 in five years – is a clear indication of automation, though plenty of the content is clearly human-generated too.
According to analysis by TweetBotOrNot, a software application that uses machine learning to classify Twitter accounts as bots or human, there is an almost 70 per cent chance that Pallas Athena is a cyborg bot.
Using advanced metrics and monitoring tools, BIRN extracted and analysed a week’s worth of output from the account – more than 2,500 tweets and retweets.
The number-crunching revealed that Pallas Athena’s online actions – human or otherwise – potentially reached no fewer than 9.7 million other Twitter users in seven days.
Geolocation analysis showed these users were in 106 spots across the globe including Athens, Toronto, Caracas, Miami and Melbourne.
Experts say such numbers show the power of computational propaganda to create an ever-expanding echo chamber from a single account.
The Twitterbots crawler application shows ‘Pallas Athena’ at the centre of a network of bots and real Twitter users — the ultimate digital echo chamber. Image: Twitterbots screengrab
Contacted by BIRN, the owner of the Pallas Athena account messaged: “Dear, I am not a bot.”
Dear, I am not a bot.
‘Pallas Athena’
She identified herself as a Macedonian woman living permanently in Sweden who took to Twitter in 2014 after she “saw the people from Skopje claiming that they have suffered genocide from the Greeks”.
“Unthinkable,” she wrote. “I come from Alexander the Great’s [ancient city of] Pella and always my grandmother, Helen, used to talk to me about the crimes of Bulgarians and Turks in the area.
“I started looking into old newspaper records and understood that they [people living in what is now North Macedonians] were committing the real crimes. So I started actively working on Twitter with the Macedonian issue.”
In April 2018, she locked horns with Cheese in a public Twitter spat.
I AM A GREEK MACEDONIAN FROM EDESSA PELLA IN REAL ANCIENT GREEK MACEDONIA , THE AREA WERE ALEXANDER THE GREAT WAS BORN ! Your country has bever been part of Ancient Greek Macedonia , it is in the 7 Region of Ancient Paeonia and you are not Macedonians ! pic.twitter.com/siXENjcijp
“Good night, fellow Greek,” Cheese taunted her. “Good night from a Macedonian from Macedonia.”
Pallas Athena replied: “I AM A GREEK MACEDONIAN FROM EDESSA PELLA IN REAL ANCIENT GREEK MACEDONIA, THE AREA WHERE ALEXANDER THE GREAT WAS BORN! Your country has never been part of Ancient Greek Macedonia.”
After more exchanges like that, the two cyborg bots blocked each other on Twitter and got on with other business.
For Nikos Smyrnaios, a professor of political economy and the sociology of media and the internet at the University of Toulouse, blaming such animus on technology is only part of the story.
“It was not the technology that shaped this deep polarisation in the two countries but the very societies that for decades kept creating the conditions for this computational nationalist propaganda to grow and take root,” he said.
Kostas Zafeiropoulos is an investigative reporter for Efimerida ton Sintakton in Athens. This article was produced as part of the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, supported by the ERSTE Foundation, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. Editing by Timothy Large.
Amnesty International has launched an updated version of its Citizen Evidence Lab website, bringing together cutting-edge open-source and other digital investigation tools which have revolutionized how evidence of serious human rights violations and other crimes are gathered and preserved.
Investigations facilitated by the pioneering Citizen Evidence Lab website have already helped expose human rights violations Cameroon, war crimes in Syria and chemical weapons attacks in Sudan.
The upgraded site provides a space for human rights researchers, investigators, students and journalists to explore and share investigative techniques in human rights. It enables them to take better advantage of the digital data-streams critical for modern fact-finding, while also leading the fight against mis- and disinformation campaigns.
“Human rights investigations in the digital age are constantly evolving, and the Citizen Evidence Lab was originally created as a space to keep on top of innovations by sharing tips, tools and best practices on disciplines such as video verification, remote sensing and weapons analysis,” said Sam Dubberley, acting head of the Crisis Response Programme’s Evidence Lab at Amnesty International.
The
Evidence Lab brings together investigators, engineers, developers and others to
pilot new and expanding tools such as artificial intelligence, remote sensing,
weapons identification and big-data analytics.
Evidence Lab initiatives feed into dozens of Amnesty International research
reports, press releases and other outputs each year. It also creates
large-scale, standalone collaborative projects involving volunteers around the
world, including:
Amnesty Decoders: a crowd-source
network of tens of thousands of activists to process large volumes of data
such as satellite imagery, documents, pictures or social media messages.
Decoders projects aim to go beyond “clicktivism,” enabling volunteers to
generate meaningful data for Amnesty International’s human rights
investigations.
The Digital Verification Corps (DVC),
a network of more than 100 multidisciplinary students at six partner
universities who authenticate videos and images found on social media to
support human rights research in a more complicated world of mis- and
dis-information. The programme recently won the prestigious 2019 Times Higher Education award for International Collaboration.
The
Evidence Lab has contributed to high-profile, impactful human rights
investigations, building on Amnesty International’s legacy of pioneering
citizen evidence and remote sensing, dating back to the ground-breaking Eyes on Darfur project in 2007. Just a
few examples include:
building the world’s largest
crowdsourced dataset of online abuse against women in the Troll Patrol study;
Compiling a list of the best investigative podcasts of 2019 may well be an impossible task. In the five years since Serial became a break-out hit, an avalanche of investigative podcasts has followed — and no, not all of them about true crime — with more coming out every year.
With that in mind, here are just some of the most interesting investigative podcasts that aired in 2019. This non-exhaustive list includes quite a few podcasts that get into the nitty-gritty of how reporters do their digging, which can be just as riveting as the stories themselves. Happy listening — and please share your own picks in the comments!
The Tip Off
In each episode of The Tip Off, host Maeve McClenaghan goes behind the scenes of a major investigation from recent years — many from the UK, where she’s based, but lots of international stories, as well. The journalists who uncovered these cases take listeners through their process step-by-step, starting with the eponymous tip-off — which ranges from chatter at a party to an anonymous fax — through pitching and reporting and all the way to publication. This year’s roster is wide-ranging, with a music critic who spent years looking into abuse allegations against the singer R. Kelly, an open-source investigator who analyzed a video of a killing by soldiers in Cameroon, a reporter who traveled across the world to report on the rise of antibiotic resistance, and many more.
The Bellingcat Podcast
For its first foray into podcasting, the Netherlands-based investigative collective Bellingcat chose to delve deep into the case of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, which was shot down in eastern Ukraine in 2014, killing 298 people. Hosted by founder Eliot Higgins, The Bellingcat Podcast features the voices of dozens of journalists and analysts, including direct eyewitnesses and, of course, Bellingcat’s own investigators. This six-episode series offers an intricate look at how they used open-source investigative techniques — scouring social media posts, geolocating images, and much more — to find the weapon and track down those responsible. It’s a masterful case study for anyone interested in open source investigation.
In the Dark
Okay, we’re cheating a bit with this one: Most of In the Dark’s second season came out in 2018, but its last two episodes aired this year. This season of the award-winning podcast looks at the ongoing case of Curtis Flowers, who has been tried six times for the same crime: the shooting deaths of four people in Mississippi in 1996. Though Flowers has won appeal after appeal, the prosecutor keeps trying the case anew. As the season progresses, it becomes clear that the In the Dark team is not just investigating one man’s case, but systemic failings in the US judicial system.
Bundyville: The Remnant
Last year, season one of Bundyville took a close look at the notorious Bundy family: Cliven Bundy, an anti-government US rancher who led an armed standoff in Nevada in 2014, and his sons, who led an armed occupation at an Oregon wildlife refuge in 2016. Season two, Bundyville: The Remnant, begins with a bombing. What might at first seem like an isolated incident — in rural Nevada, a man blows up a house — is the eerie starting point for untangling a web of extremist violence. The podcast investigates how this violence is linked to conspiracy theories that are popular with the anti-government movement in the American West, and looks at who is fanning the flames.
White Lies
In NPR’s White Lies, the hosts dig into a US Civil Rights Era case: the 1965 murder of Reverend James Reeb, a pastor who had travelled south to Selma, Alabama, to join protests against police violence. The case riveted the nation because both the victim and the alleged attackers were white. The three men who were put on trial were acquitted, and the case had remained unsolved ever since. When the White Lies hosts set out to tell the definitive story of what happened on that night half a century ago, they found strong resistance from residents of a city still grappling with its past. But after an investigation that took them several years, they finally get some answers. Along the way, they tackle difficult questions about how to investigate a story after so much time has gone by.
The Catch and Kill Podcast
Ronan Farrow’s brand-new podcast is based on his bestselling book “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,” which told the story of his years of investigating Harvey Weinstein. The podcast features interviews with the book’s protagonists, starting with a private investigator who was contracted to follow Farrow — but who ended up as one of his sources. It also includes audio that Farrow recorded throughout the course of his investigation.
Running from COPS
If you live in the United States, you’ve probably seen at least one episode of COPS. It’s the longest-running reality TV show in the country, and it’s spawned a slew of similar shows. The COPS formula is simple: Cameras follow police officers as they patrol the streets and make arrests. But how real is it? And how has it impacted policing in the US? The podcast Running from COPS takes a look under the hood by crunching data on the types of crimes and the demographics represented on COPS; tracking down people who were filmed during arrests to find out whether they actually consented to being on television; and obtaining raw, unedited footage and comparing it to what aired on TV.
Trump, Inc.
In this joint project from ProPublica and WNYC Studios, reporters follow the money — of the President of the United States. They dig into the Trump Organization to figure out how it operates, what business is being conducted during his presidency, and how one affects the other. And nearly two years after this podcast started airing, there is still plenty to look into. One recent episode compared tax documents obtained by ProPublica through FOIA requests to financial documents that Trump filed with his lender, and showed that key numbers didn’t match. Another took listeners into a conference held at a Trump resort that attracted prominent conspiracy theorists.
1000 Degrés
This podcast is in French. GIJN’s French Editor Marthe Rubio says:
“In 2003, Frenchman Daniel Massé was sentenced to 25 years in jail. He was accused of having put a parcel bomb in the letterbox of his former friends, Joseph and Dominique Hernandez, who were injured in the attack. Ever since, Massé has claimed his innocence. The Hernandez couple, on the contrary, is convinced that Massé is guilty. Twenty-five years after the bomb exploded, French journalists Adèle Humbert and Emilie Denètrese plunge back into this case, interview all the actors, dissect the court records, and return to the scene of the crime in Toulouse. As the episodes of this gripping podcast unfold, the listener discovers a story of friendship gone sour and an aggressive police investigation that raises doubts about Massé’s guilt. Throughout the podcast, the journalists discuss their ethical dilemmas, their difficulties accessing sources, and their own uncertainties as to the truth.”
The Missing Cryptoqueen
This eight-episode podcast from the BBC delves into the strange story of Dr. Ruja Ignatova, a Bulgarian businesswoman who got rich selling a cryptocurrency called OneCoin. In front of stadiums full of adoring fans, she described it as the “Bitcoin killer.” It was supposed to bring blockchain to the masses. But two years ago, Ignatova vanished into thin air. She left behind many angry and disappointed investors, who had believed in what host Jamie Bartlett called “a new and hugely successful take on the old pyramid scheme.” He goes searching for Ignatova, who he believes is hiding somewhere in Europe — and tries to untangle the far-flung effects of the OneCoin business, which still operates today.
Reveal
Reveal is a weekly radio show and podcast from the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), a nonprofit news organization based in California. It features investigative reporting both from CIR and from other media partners, for the most part focused on the United States. This year, topics included the spread of hate groups, the exploitation of elder care workers, the use of genetic genealogy to catch criminals, and plenty more.
IRE Radio Podcast
In this podcast from the US nonprofit Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), journalists take listeners behind the scenes of some of their biggest stories, like Christine Kenneally’s years-long investigation into the violent deaths of children at Catholic orphanages. The podcast also includes highlights from IRE conferences, like audio from a session in which reporters T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong explain how they wrote their Pulitzer-winning investigation “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” which was turned into the Netflix series Unbelievable.
Caixin’s Most Important Investigations of the Decade
This one is for Mandarin speakers. GIJN’s Chinese Editor Joey Qi says:
“Caixin is one of China’s leading investigative media outlets. Over the past 10 years, it has reported on lots of important stories that had a significant impact nationwide, from former senior politician Zhou Yongkang’s abuse of power and corruption case to the 2015 Tianjin port explosions; from the former Anbang Insurance chief Wu Xiaohui’s fraud and embezzlement to the children abandoned due to the one-child policy. In 2019, Caixin started a podcast to tell the stories behind all these headlines. In recent years, China’s investigative journalism has been dying out very fast, and there is no doubt that this podcast is an ode to the golden age of China’s investigative journalism.”
BBC’s The Documentary (select episodes)
While this program is not investigative per se, with topics ranging from the legacy of Woodstock to an interview with the Dalai Lama, it regularly features stellar BBC investigations. For example, it recently revealed how professors were sexually harassing and blackmailing students at top West African universities. Also, you won’t want to miss the incredible story of how one young man from Ghana used spy glasses to go undercover on the migrant trail.
Radio Ambulante (select episodes)
This podcast is in Spanish. GIJN Spanish Editor Catalina Lobo-Guerrero says:
“NPR’s Radio Ambulante started out in 2011, with the aim of bringing what in Spanish is known as ‘crónicas’ (narrative longform journalism) to the radio. There was nothing like that in traditional stations across Latin America, nor was there a Spanish podcast in the US that focused on this type of storytelling. Soon they started recruiting a team of talented journalists and producers from many different countries and airing fantastic stories, showcasing the diversity of accents and sounds across Latin America, but also in the United States. Many of the episodes are great investigations: the business behind bail bonds in the US for undocumented migrants; the uncounted deaths in Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria; the lost children of Armero in Colombia after the 1985 volcano eruption; and how a spiritual guru sexually abused his followers for years. There are plenty of episodes to choose from, and all of them have English transcripts. Most recently, Radio Ambulante launched an app (Lupa) for listeners who want to learn Spanish through their shows.”
Longform Podcast (select episodes)
The Longform Podcast features interviews with nonfiction storytellers of all stripes, who discuss their craft over the course of an hour-long conversation. Frequently, these are journalists who do investigative work. This year’s batch, for example, featured interviews with two hosts of investigative podcasts: Julie Snyder of Serial and Madeleine Baran of In the Dark. Several reporters covering Silicon Valley, like Casey Newton and Mike Isaac, also shared fascinating details about how they investigate tech giants like Facebook and Uber. Spoiler alert: It’s no easy feat to cultivate sources at tech companies that go to great lengths to prevent leaks.
Popular Front
Another podcast that regularly features interviews with investigative journalists is Popular Front, which looks at modern warfare and conflicts through the eyes of all sorts of researchers. Recent topics include: looking at war crimes via open-source tools like Google Earth, with The New York Times’ Christiaan Triebart; how the EU turns a blind eye to the abuse of refugees in Libya, with freelance journalist Sally Hayden; and the weaponizing of commercial drones, with Bellingcat’s Nick Waters.
Freedom on the Net is a comprehensive study of internet freedom in 65 countries around the globe, covering 87 percent of the world’s internet users. It tracks improvements and declines in internet freedom conditions each year. The countries included in the study have been selected to represent diverse geographical regions and regime types. In-depth reports on each country can be found at freedomonthenet.org.
More than 70
analysts contributed to this year’s edition, using a 21-question research
methodology that addresses internet access, freedom of expression, and privacy
issues. In addition to ranking countries by their internet freedom score, the
project offers a unique opportunity to identify global trends related to the
impact of information and communication technologies on democracy.
Country-specific data underpinning this year’s trends is available online. This
report, the ninth in its series, focuses on developments that occurred between
June 2018 and May 2019.
Of the 65
countries assessed, 33 have been on an overall decline since June 2018,
compared with 16 that registered net improvements. The biggest score declines took
place in Sudan and Kazakhstan followed by Brazil, Bangladesh, and Zimbabwe.
In Sudan,
nationwide protests sparked by devastating economic hardship led to the ouster
of President Omar al-Bashir after three decades in power. Authorities blocked
social media platforms on several occasions during the crisis, including a
two-month outage, in a desperate and ultimately ineffective attempt to control
information flows. The suspension of the constitution and the declaration of a
state of emergency further undermined free expression in the country.
Harassment and violence against journalists, activists, and ordinary users
escalated, generating multiple allegations of torture and other abuse.
In
Kazakhstan, the unexpected resignation of longtime president Nursultan
Nazarbayev—and the sham vote that confirmed his chosen successor in
office—brought simmering domestic discontent to a boil. The government
temporarily disrupted internet connectivity, blocked over a dozen local and
international news websites, and restricted access to social media platforms in
a bid to silence activists and curb digital mobilization. Also contributing to
the country’s internet freedom decline were the government’s efforts to
monopolize the mobile market and implement real-time electronic surveillance.
The victory
of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s October 2018 presidential election proved a
watershed moment for digital election interference in the country. Unidentified
actors mounted cyberattacks against journalists, government entities, and
politically engaged users, even as social media manipulation reached new
heights. Supporters of Bolsonaro and his far-right “Brazil over Everything, God
above Everyone” coalition spread homophobic rumors, misleading news, and
doctored images on YouTube and WhatsApp. Once in office, Bolsonaro hired
communications consultants credited with spearheading the sophisticated
disinformation campaign.
In
Bangladesh, citizens organized mass protests calling for better road safety and
other reforms, and a general election was marred by irregularities and
violence. To maintain control over the population and limit the spread of
unfavorable information, the government resorted to blocking independent news
websites, restricting mobile networks, and arresting journalists and ordinary
users alike.
Deteriorating
economic conditions in Zimbabwe made the internet less affordable. As civil
unrest spread throughout the country, triggering a violent crackdown by
security forces, authorities restricted connectivity and blocked social media
platforms.
China confirmed its status as
the world’s worst abuser of internet freedom for the fourth consecutive year. Censorship reached unprecedented
extremes as the government enhanced its information controls in advance of the
30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and in the face of widespread
antigovernment protests in Hong Kong. In a relatively new tactic,
administrators shuttered individual accounts on the hugely popular WeChat
social media platform for any sort of “deviant” behavior, including minor
infractions such as commenting on environmental disasters, which encouraged
pervasive self-censorship. Officials have reported removing tens of thousands
of accounts for allegedly “harmful” content on a quarterly basis. The campaign
cut individuals off from a multifaceted tool that has become essential to
everyday life in China, used for purposes ranging from transportation to
banking. This blunt penalty has also narrowed avenues for digital mobilization
and further silenced online activism.
Internet
freedom declined in the United States. While the online environment remains
vibrant, diverse, and free from state censorship, this report’s coverage period
saw the third straight year of decline. Law enforcement and immigration
agencies expanded their surveillance of the public, eschewing oversight,
transparency, and accountability mechanisms that might restrain their actions.
Officials increasingly monitored social media platforms and conducted
warrantless searches of travelers’ electronic devices to glean information
about constitutionally protected activities such as peaceful protests and
critical reporting. Disinformation was again prevalent around major political
events like the November 2018 midterm elections and congressional confirmation
hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Both domestic and foreign
actors manipulated content for political purposes, undermining the democratic
process and stoking divisions in American society. In a positive development
for privacy rights, the Supreme Court ruled that warrants are required for law
enforcement agencies to access subscriber-location records from third parties.
Only 16
countries earned improvements in their internet freedom scores, and most gains
were marginal. Ethiopia recorded the
biggest improvement this year. The April 2018 appointment of Prime Minister
Abiy Ahmed led to an ambitious reform agenda that loosened restrictions on the
internet. Abiy’s government unblocked 260 websites, including many known to
report on critical political issues. Authorities also lifted a state of
emergency imposed by the previous government, which eased legal restrictions on
free expression, and reduced the number of people imprisoned for online
activity. Although the government continued to impose network shutdowns, they
were temporary and localized, unlike the nationwide shutdowns that had occurred
in the past.
Other
countries also benefited from an opening of the online environment following
political transitions. A new coalition government in Malaysia made good on some
of its democratic promises after winning May 2018 elections and ending the
six-decade reign of the incumbent coalition. Local and international websites
that were critical of the previous government were unblocked, while
disinformation and the impact of paid commentators known as “cybertroopers”
began to abate. However, these positive developments were threatened by a rise
in harassment, notably against LGBT+ users and an independent news website, and
by the 10-year prison term imposed on a user for Facebook comments that were
deemed insulting to Islam and the prophet Muhammad.
In Armenia, positive changes
unleashed by the 2018 Velvet Revolution continued, with reformist prime
minister Nikol Pashinyan presiding over a reduction in restrictions on content
and violations of users’ rights. In particular, violence against online
journalists declined, and the digital news media enjoyed greater freedom from
economic and political pressures.
Iceland became the world’s
best protector of internet freedom, having registered no civil or criminal cases against
users for online expression during the coverage period. The country boasts
enviable conditions, including near-universal connectivity, limited
restrictions on content, and strong protections for users’ rights. However, a
sophisticated nationwide phishing scheme challenged this free environment and
its cybersecurity infrastructure in 2018.
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