November 2020

Podcasts Bring Welcome Change to Bulgaria’s Stale Media Scene

Posted on November 25, 2020January 26, 2023 by Ivana Jeremic

Not long ago, tuning into a Bulgarian podcast was rare. In just a few years, however, the situation has changed hugely both in terms of choice and listeners’ habits. Productions in different genres increasingly appear out of nowhere, and the podcast format is on the verge of obtaining serious momentum.

Although investigations are still few are far between, the trend has the potential to challenge and diversify Bulgaria’s media landscape, which is clearly problematic; the country was ranked in lowly 111th place in the 2020 World Press Freedom Index, and the overt ties between media outlets, oligarchs and politicians have long drawn unrest and protest.

However, the Bulgarian podcast scene is still in its “punk” phrase, with all its charm and imperfections.

Some of the major local productions are “Govori Internet” (The Internet Speaks), by Elenko Elenkov and Vladimir Petkov-Kaladan, now in its fourth season, which casts an eye on various modern life topics and has a focus on technology; “Ratio”, which delves into science, psychology, politics and tech progress; “Victoria”, by Peter Georgiev, devoted to nerdy bits of football history; “The Urban Detective”, which brings to life little known historical details about Sofia and other major towns; “The Superhuman”, where every episode tells an inspiring story about physical strength, sports, health, and “Falshimento”, which presents new, often under-the-radar music. The bubbling stand-up comedy scene in Sofia meanwhile fuels Comedy Club’s podcast.

Some of the productions that started this year address subjects that are rarely touched upon in great detail in the everyday news cycle and often meet ignorant remarks from the political elite: “Oh Yes”, for example, brings in one four female anchors from various backgrounds and on different locations to discuss feminism, gender issues, sex culture and education; “Girls We Are”, by Bilyana Slaveykova, also focuses on women’s experiences, and this November sees the start of PoliFemme by Katerina Vasileva, which is about women in politics: the debut episode retells the life of the current Belarusian opposition icon Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.

Others explore niche but still important subjects: Stefan Rusinov, a translator from Chinese, just started “Belejka pod linia” (Underline) which is entirely focused on the aspects and challenges of literature translation.

The increasing presence of foreigners living and working in the country in the last decade is also reflected: American Eric D Halsey is documenting local history over the centuries with his popular podcast “The Bulgarian History”, which has now been running for over 120 episodes.

Searching for a depth that’s mssing elsewhere

The Bulgarian branch of the Association of European Journalists recently hosted its first ever “podcast festival”: between November 18 and 22 local and international anchors and journalists discussed the different layers of audio journalism and compared experiences in a Zoom conference, “Power Up: The Power of Podcasting”, which offered public talks and paid workshops.

“The Bulgarian podcast scene is still very young,” Zornitsa Stoilova from Bulgaria’s major weekly newspaper, Capital, said during one of the talks, which is adapting some of its political and business analyses for audio on “The Voice of Capital”. “I hope for more human-centered stories since we’re missing that in our media landscape.”

“The long-form audio is an alternative to clickbait practices. Basically, we’re trying to search for a depth that’s missing elsewhere,” said Elenko Elenkov of “Govori Internet” during one of the panels.

Narrative journalism is also making its way – every episode of “Victoria” delves into different facets of local sport, from the little known history of Bulgaria’s women football to how early 20th century immigrants from Bulgaria created one of the most famous clubs in Uruguay.

“The Urban Detective” is exploring little-researched topics, legends and myths, mainly connected to Sofia: this includes whether The Beatles really almost played in Communist Bulgaria, how far the then regime went in creating an artificial sea near the landlocked capital, or how small-town Yambol was once a vibrant place for countercultural and visionary artists.

“The Urban Detective” has been going for more than two years and is now rounding up its third season. One of its three members, Ana Blagova, says there has been an increasing diversity of content since 2018.

“Also, bigger media outlets are embracing the format which works to make them more recognizable,” Blagova told BIRN. She finds telling stories through audio a more intimate and informal experience than regular journalism. She has substantial experience as a reporter, while her other two colleagues have separate shows on the national broadcaster, Bulgarian National Radio.

Ana finds that audio also benefits the user in a different way, since it takes the listener away from the screen.

“There’s room for a brand new audience, especially today when opening a news website and facing all the bad stories at once is downright overwhelming. I don’t think podcasts can become a full-bodied replacement of everyday journalism but they’re a wonderful companion, a way to enrich your awareness on why a certain topic is important to discuss.

“It also holds a lot of potential in terms of delving into investigating journalism since in a written form you usually present the results; in audio form, the process becomes an ally in engaging the audience,” she observed.

Quantity doesn’t equal quality – yet

Podcast producer Ilyan Ruzhin is cautious about the genre’s rise in the country, however.

“There’s definitely an audience interest, I’d say it’s pretty much an explosion. And it might lead to an implosion soon. I think there’s already more content than what the audience can take, and that’s a result of a wider mediocre content,” he told BIRN.

Ruzhin is behind the long-running music and Patreon-funded podcast “Falshimento”, and part of ProCasters team, a collective that works on recording and producing podcasts in Sofia.

“What’s currently missing are more narrative podcasts; most of the local productions are people who just record their thoughts or make conversations and present them as interviews, without enough of a journalistic integrity.

He adds: “There’s a reason for that void on the scene. Making a podcast is deceptively easy; you just need a mic and a laptop. People often underestimate that you need to use that mic properly, you have to learn how to edit and articulate your speech. So here’s the elephant in the room: what we’re widely lacking are producers, editors, people with proper journalism and storytelling skills involved with the format. All of these boxes should be checked before a production seeks funding.”

However, he is also optimistic that, at some point, quantity will bring quality.

“The really decent Bulgarian podcasts are yet to be recorded. After all, good stories are something that we just naturally stumble upon in Sofia,” he concluded.

Huawei Fights Exclusion from Romania’s 5G Race

Posted on November 24, 2020January 26, 2023 by Ivana Jeremic

Between 10 and 12 August this year, the Romanian government websites hosting the draft law that establishes the conditions for eligibility to implement 5G technology in the country – which implicitly bans Huawei – were flooded with suspicious-looking messages.

Signed by users bearing mostly Romanian but also Chinese names, they all expressed the same critical view about the legislation in question: that it would be very unwise to exclude Huawei from the race and that Romania’s interests would be seriously harmed if this happened.

Although citizens had 13 days to make comments on the law, all of these messages were registered over 72 consecutive hours. Before that time, or after it, no such comment was uploaded on the websites.

Most of the messages shared another dubious trait: they were either written in broken English or equally deficient Romanian, which suggested they had been Google translated, produced by some sort of automatic mechanism or filed by people with only a superficial knowledge of either language.

The evidence of what looks like a travesty of a public participation process can still be found at the website of the Ministry of Transport and Communications.

The flood of near-identical messages gives some idea of how aggressively Huawei is fighting its ban in Romania, which responds to national security concerns first raised by the US, which has prevented the use of Huawei technology in sensitive telecommunications at home and wants its allies to follow suit.

The US considers the company “an arm of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state” and the US Department of Justice has indicted Huawei “for stealing US technology, conspiracy wire fraud, bank fraud, [and] racketeering”, among other charges.

In Romania, both the centre-right President, Klaud Iohannis, and his allied government have repeatedly voiced full alignment with the US in this matter. In July 2019, Romania became the first country in the world to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with the US, committing it to barring Huawei from developing its 5G technology.

The draft legislation to materialize this, presented by the government on August 5, effectively bans the Chinese giant from the country by excluding companies with hazy ownership structures or that are controlled by a foreign government, have a history of unethical behaviour or are not subjected to an independent justice system in their home country.

While the final draft awaits a vote in Romania’s parliament, Huawei keeps opposing its exclusion tooth and nail through all the available channels.

Its latest action started on September 11, when the company sent the European Commission an open letter claiming the legislation put forward to ban the company in Romania and Poland was based on “biased and ambiguous criteria” designed to target “certain 5G suppliers because of their geographic origin.”

Huawei called on the Commission to take measures against “these legislative proposals that are contrary to the fundamental principles of the EU”, including non-discrimination, legal certainty and fair competition.

General view of the headquarters of the Romanian branch of Huawei, the Chinese multinational technology company that provides telecommunications equipment and sells consumer electronics, Bucharest, Romania, 09 September 2019. Archive photo: EPA-EFE/ROBERT GHEMENT

In line with the arguments of the industrially produced comments on the draft law uploaded in August to Romanian government websites, Huawei said its exclusion would “harm European industry, damage European economy, and weaken Europe’s digital resilience” as well as negatively impact job creation – all of it this time in impeccable English.

Huawei is also working on the public opinion front. In recent months, the Chinese giant has published numerous paid content pieces underscoring its importance for Romania’s economy and telecommunications sector, in a bid to gain popular support in its battle to enter the 5G implementation race in the country.

The US ambassador to Romania, Adrian Zuckerman, has fought back, accusing “Huawei and the Chinese embassy” of trying “to mislead the people of Romania” through these actions. The ambassador also reproached “some Romanian press outlets” for “so easily succumbing to the power of the almighty RON [Romania’s currency] and publishing propaganda for these corrupt entities and Communists”.

With upcoming legislative election set for December 6, Romania’s centre-right minority government is running out of time to try to get the Huawei ban adopted in a highly fragmented parliament, where the opposition Social Democratic Party, PSD, has the largest number seats. Most likely, the draft legislation will be voted on during the next term.

Several other EU governments have heeded US warnings and have moved to exclude Huawei from 5G technology development in their countries. Sweden was the last to join a list that includes the UK and several Central and Eastern European states such as Kosovo, Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Slovakia, which in October signed separate agreements with th US on that matter.

Globally, Huawei seems to be relying on a softer US policy to China under a Joe Biden administration to regain access to the foreign 5G markets from which it has been barred, as the company’s vice-president, Victor Zhang, told the UK Guardian in an interview about the Chinese firm’s perspectives in the UK.

In the case of Romania, Huawei’s only hope seems to be that the Social Democrats, now in opposition, prove pollsters wrong and win a fresh majority in the December 6 parliamentary elections.

The ruling centre-right National Liberal Party, PNL, firmly opposes Huawei’s participation in 5G technology, as does the country’s third largest party, the centrist USR-Plus alliance.

“We support the memorandum signed with the US on this matter as well as the position of many EU countries; this is, ‘NO’ Huawei for the 5G network of Romania,” USR PLUS parliamentarian Catalin Drula told BIRN. If the PNL does not get a sufficient majority with the support of smaller traditional allies, it might need to form a government with the USR PLUS alliance after December 6.

Less prone to close ranks with the US and the EU, the Social Democrats do not have a clear position on the Huawei file. Contacted by BIRN by telephone, its leader, Marcel Ciolacu, declined to comment on its position on Huawei, or anticipate how will his party vote when the 5G law reaches parliament: “Let’s wait to see the body of the law and then I will give you an opinion,” he said.

Turkey Fines Google For Violating Competition Rules

Posted on November 13, 2020January 26, 2023 by Ivana Jeremic

Turkey’s Competition Board has fined the US tech giant Google 196.6 million Turkish lira, equal to 21.8 million euros, after an investigation into the company concluded that it had violated fair competition rules with its advertising strategies.

“Google violated the terms of fair competition by using aggressive competition tactics,” the competition board said.

In effect, Google made it difficult for companies to show up in searches if it did not generate advertisement revenue for Google.

The tech firm defended itself on November 4 in a case which it was accused of “abusing its dominant power in the search engine market” to quash its rivals in the market with its advertisement strategies.

The Competition Board has also given Google six months to fulfil its requirements and end its unfair advertisement strategy.

Google will also have to deliver annual reports to the board about the advertisement strategy of its search engine for five years.

This is the second time that the Turkish Competition Board has fined Google. In September 2018, it was fined 98 million Turkish lira for violating fair competition law by prioritizing certain vendors over others in terms of advertisement space.

Google’s advertisement strategy has come under EU scrutiny as well.

In 2018, the European Commission fined Google 4.34 billion euros for violating European antitrust rules on online advertising following an earlier fine of 2.4 billion in 2017.

In March 2019 it received another fine of 1.5 billion euros for abusing its dominance to stop websites using brokers other than its own advertisement platform AdSense, bringing the total in EU fines to over 8 billion euros.

Google has a right to lodge an appeal against the judgment in the next 60 days.

Turkish Government is Tightening Media Censorship, Report Says

Posted on November 12, 2020January 26, 2023 by Ivana Jeremic

A new report, “Media Monitoring Report”, published by the Journalists’ Association of Turkey on November 12, says censorship of the media has increased and that online media platforms are becoming more targeted.

The report said that 83 journalists are currently being held in prisons and that 245 journalists are being tried by the courts.

It said censorship has increased rapidly, especially of online media platforms, since parliament adopted a new law on digital rights in July last year, and added that pressures and penalties on the media had intensified in the last few months.

“Media content will be easily removed under the new law, which became effective from October 1,” the report said.

It added that “AKP and MHP representatives who they have the majority on the Supreme Board of Radio and Television, RTUK, use the existing regulations as an arbitrary punishment tool [on independent media].”

[The Justice and Development Party, AKP, and the MHP, the Nationalist Movement Party, form the ruling coalition in Turkey.]

According to the report, the RTUK, the state agency for monitoring, regulating and sanctioning radio and television broadcasts, issued 90 penalties on independent media, including stopping broadcasting and administrative fines, between July and September this year alone.

“Digital media platforms are starting to be reached [by the state] as much as the mainstream media. As a matter of fact, it was seen that a single journalist’s column is shared on social media platforms more than a mainstream newspaper’s total circulation in a three-month period,” the report wrote.

The report underlined that workers on online media institutions face many other difficulties.

“Internet journalists are classified in the office workers sector, not in the journalism sector. In other words, they are not recognised as journalists by the government,” the report noted, adding that because of this, journalists on online media are not entitled to official press cards.

“As a result, internet journalist cannot follow the news at state institutions or face the risk of arrest when they follow street protests,” it warned.

It also observed that many journalists face financial hardship as a result of the pandemic while the level of union membership among Turkish journalist is still very low, at only 7.88 per cent.

“Following the end of government’s ban on firing employees during the pandemic, it is presumed that the number of the unemployed journalists will increase,” the report said and added that many journalists are forced to take unpaid leave.

Study Underscores Link between Human Trafficking and Online Abuse

Posted on November 11, 2020January 26, 2023 by Ivana Jeremic

More than 40 per cent of female victims of human trafficking have also been subjected to some form of online abuse, according to a report by a Serbian NGO looking at the correlation between the two.

In interviews with 178 women and girls who received support from the organisation Atina over the past five years, 42 per cent reported being the target of online abuse, ranging from cyber-bullying, cyber-stalking, hacking, catfishing, revenge porn and ‘doxing’, the online publishing of private information to publicly expose and shame the victim.

For 31 per cent, the online abuse was directly linked to the process of human trafficking.

“He was posting my half-naked photographs on Facebook and I couldn’t do anything about it,” said one victim of human trafficking who was 18 years old at the time and found refuge in a shelter run by Atina.

“People were commenting on these posts, they were insulting me, he called me a slut online, but no one ever wondered what I might be going through.”

When she reported the case to authorities, the woman said they looked at the photos and “laughed.”

“Later, after I went to the gynaecologist, I gave them the medical report that confirmed I was also sexually assaulted,” she told BIRN, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“At one point I even thought about killing myself, or killing him. The photos are still online.”

Serbia failing in fight against human trafficking

Women and girls make up the vast majority of victims of human trafficking, often for the purpose of sexual exploitation.

According to the latest Trafficking in Persons Report by the US State Department, published in June, the Serbian government “does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking but is making significant efforts to do so.”

While foreign women and girls also become victims in Serbia, Serbian women and girls are frequently trafficked abroad – to neighbouring countries and across Europe, particularly Austria, Germany, Italy and Turkey.

With lives becoming more digital, the Atina report highlights the threat from cyber-trafficking in the recruitment of victims for the purpose of sexual exploitation, as well as the live streaming of forced sexual exploitation.

There are fears that the COVID-19 pandemic may fuel the growth of cyber-trafficking given the restrictions on movement imposed by states.

Society ‘blames the woman’

In July, United Nations warned of the dangers posed by the loss of jobs, growing poverty, school closures and the rise in online interactions as potential drivers of trafficking.

Women and girls already account for more than 70 per cent of detected human trafficking victims and are among the hardest hit by the pandemic, Ghada Waly, the executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said in a statement. Women often face more difficulty finding paid jobs in the aftermath of crisis, Waly said, and urged “vigilance”.

Gender-based violence is prohibited under numerous international conventions, as well as under national laws in many countries, including Serbia. But the legal framework is often hazy when it comes to online gender-based violence, despite the fact the consequences can be equally as destructive. Online perpetrators frequently go unidentified.

One victim said society “always blames the woman.”

“She is response for being mistreated, she provoked it, she asked for it…,” the woman, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, told BIRN. “I also blamed myself for a being a victim of online harassment, but I was lucky enough to have the support of my family and that my case did end up in the media. Sadly, many women are usually left without any support.”

Atina Programme Manager Jelena Hrnjak said it is vital that the victims are heard – “Not only to be heard, but to be understood and respected.”

To read the full report “Behind the screens: Analysis of human trafficking victims’ abuse in digital surroundings” click here.

Net Searches for Far-Right Keywords Soar in Bosnia

Posted on November 9, 2020January 26, 2023 by Ivana Jeremic

A company that specializes in analyzing harmful content on the internet has told BIRN that two terms favoured by hard-line Serbian nationalists – “Serbia Strong” and “Remove Kebab” – were searched for more than 4,000 times in Bosnia and Herzegovina over five months in 2020.

Research by Moonshot said these keywords were particularly searched for in May and early June 2020, which coincided with the anniversary of the May 1995 Bosnian Serb massacre in the northern city of Tuzla and Muslim festival Eid al-Fitr, and came just ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Bosnian Serb-perpetrated genocide at the eastern town of Srebrenica.

According to data collected by Moonshot, “Serbia Strong” and “Remove Kebab” were searched for 468 times in under one week from May 30 to June 4.

Its report, “Tracking Far-Right Extremist Searches in Bosnia and Herzegovina”, which it has shared with BIRN, says the rise in such searches reflects the wider rise of political and ethnic extremism in ethnically divided Bosnia.

“Karadzic, lead your Serbs” is the opening line of a song which normally appears when searches are done for “Serbia Strong” or “Remove Kebab” on the internet.

The former Bosnian Serb leader in the 1992-5 war in Bosnia was sentenced for life in 2019 for the crimes of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Significantly, the song lauding Karadzic was played on a video recording the attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019, when 51 people were killed and more than 20 injured.

It was allegedly recorded in 1995 but only published in 2006. Researchers describe the song as “an anti-Muslim hymn” that calls on the former Bosnian Serb chief to lead “his Serbs” against both “Ustashas” – referencing Croats, and “Turks” – a pejorative Serbian term for Bosniaks, or Bosnian Muslims.

Moonshot analyst Liam Monsell told BIRN that searches for “Serbia Strong” and “Remove Kebab” “significantly increased over the 25th anniversary of various crimes against Bosnian Muslims during the 1990s war”.

“Searches increased substantially just a few days after the 25th anniversary of the Tuzla massacre of May 25, 1995, which also coincides with festival Eid al-Fitr, when Muslims celebrate the end of Ramadan,” Monsell noted.

He added that the highest level of searches was recorded on June 2, but that sporadic leaps in searches also appeared during the marking of other wartime crimes in Bosnia.

Besides these two keywords, people in Bosnia also searched for the term “Za dom spremni”, or Ready for the Homeland, a World War II-era Croatian fascist slogan, “Kebab Remover”, an alternative construction to “Remove Kebab”, as well as for “antimigrant.ba”, an anti-immigrant portal. They were searched for 517 times over the course of the same five months.

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in court in The Hague in 2018. Photo: EPA-EFE/YVES HERMAN/POOL.

Monsell said the popularity of the Karadzic song and searches done in English from Bosnia indicate that a “Western discourse of ‘white nationalists’ sometimes spreads back into the region,” and that specific local extremist dialogues are increasingly drawing on international symbolism.

Data obtained by Moonshot suggest that over the period in which the targeting was deployed, just under half the searches came from the Serb-led entity in Bosnia, Republika Srpska. According to Moonshot, the highest number of searches per 100,000 inhabitants was registered in the northern Brcko District.

Sead Turcalo, Dean of the Faculty of Political Sciences in Sarajevo, said the searches focus on themes around which key far-right groups’ narratives focus.

“A continuous denial of genocide and glorification of war criminals reflect on right-wing circles throughout Europe,” he said, adding that this was evident not only in the terrorist attack on Muslims in New Zealand, but in the previous case of Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Breivik who shot dead 69 young leftists in 2011 and killed another eight in a bomb attack.

“The aspect of interconnectedness of genocide denial and influence on the growth of the radical right, not only in the region, but in Europe as well, is still insufficiently researched, but is coming into the focus of researchers more and more,” Turcalo said.

“Their narrative is based on Islamophobic and anti-migrant content, accompanied by glorification of fascist groups and puppet states from World War Two,” Turcalo said, adding that, besides that, they also try to present Bosnia as a safe haven for radical extremists.

COVID’s Toll on Digital Rights in Central and Southeastern Europe

Posted on November 6, 2020January 26, 2023 by sofija.todorovic

The report presents an overview of the main violations of digital rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania and Serbia between January 31 and September 30, 2020, and makes a series of recommendations for authorities in order to curb such infringements during future social crises.

A first report, compiled by BIRN and which contained preliminary findings, showed a rise in digital rights violations in Central and Southeastern Europe during the pandemic, with over half of cases involving propaganda, disinformation or the publication of unverified information.

The global public health crisis triggered by the coronavirus exposed a new the failure of states around the world to provide a framework that would better balance the interests of safety and privacy. Instead, the report documents incidents of censorship, fake news, security breaches and concentration of information.

More than 200 pandemic-related violations tracked

At the onset of the pandemic, numerous violations of digital rights were observed – from violations of the privacy of persons in isolation to manipulation, dissemination of false information and Internet fraud.

BIRN and Share Foundation documented 221 violations in the context of COVID-19 during the eight-month monitoring period, the largest number coming during the initial peak of the pandemic in March and April – 67 and 79 respectively – before slowly declining.

The countries with the highest number of violations to date are Serbia, with 46, and Croatia, with 44.

The most common violation – accounting for roughly half of all cases – was manipulation in the digital environment caused by news sites that published unverified and inaccurate information, and by the circulating of incomplete and false data on social media.

This can be explained in large measure by the low level of media literacy in the countries of the region, where few people actually check the news and information provided to them, while the media themselves often publish unverified information.

The most common targets of digital rights violations were citizens and journalists. However, both of these groups were frequently also among the perpetrators.

Contact tracing apps: Useful or not?

The debate about the use of contact-tracing apps as a method of combating the spread of COVID-19 was one of the most important discussions in Croatia and North Macedonia.

At the very beginning of the pandemic, the Croatian government led by the conservative Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, proposed a change to the Electronic Communications Act under which, in extraordinary situations, the health minister would request from telecommunications companies the location data of users.

Similarly, Macedonian health authorities announced they were looking to use “all tools and means” to combat the virus, with North Macedonia among the first countries in the Western Balkans to launch a contact-tracing app on April 13.

Developed and donated to the Macedonian authorities by Skopje-based software company Nextsense, the StopKorona! app is based on Bluetooth distance measuring technology and stores data locally on users’ devices, while exchanging encrypted, anonymised data relevant to the infection spread for a limited period of 14 days. According to data privacy experts, the decentralised design guaranteed that data would be stored only on devices that run the app, unless they voluntarily submit that data to health authorities.

Croatia launched its own at the end of July, but by late August media reports said the Stop COVID-19 app had been downloaded by less than two per cent of mobile phone users in the country. The threshold for it to be effective is 60 per cent, the reports said.

Key worrying trends mapped

Bosnia and Herzegovina saw a number of problems with personal data protection, free access to information and disinformation. In terms of disinformation, people were exposed to a variety of false and sometimes outlandish claims, including conspiracy theories about the origin of the coronavirus, its spread by plane and various miracle cures.

Conspiracy theories, like those blaming the spread of the virus on 5G mobile networks, flourished online in Croatia too. One person in Croatia destroyed their Wifi equipment, believing it was 5G.

In Hungary, fake news about COVID-19 arrived even before the virus itself, said journalist Akos Keller Alant, who monitored the digital environment in Hungary.

Several clickbait fake news sites published articles about COVID-19 victims a month before Hungary’s first confirmed case. The Anti-Cybercrime Unit of the Hungarian police arrested several people for spreading fake news, starting in early February when police raided the operators of a network of fake news sites.

In Kosovo, online media emerged as the biggest violators of digital rights by publishing unverified and false information as well as personal health information. Personal data rights were also violated by state institutions and public figures.

In Montenegro, the most worrying digital rights violations concerned privacy and personal data protection of those infected with the coronavirus or those forced to self-isolate.

The early days of the pandemic, when Montenegro was among the few countries that could claim to have kept a lid on the virus, was a rare moment of social and political consensus in the country about how to respond, said Tamara Milas of the Centre for Civic Education in Montenegro, an NGO.

The situation changed, however, when the government was accused of the gross violation of the right to privacy and the right to the protection of personal data.

Like its Western Balkan peers, North Macedonia was flooded with unverified information and claims shared online with regards the pandemic. Some of the most concerning cases included false claims about infected persons, causing a stir on social media.

In Romania, the government used state-of-emergency powers to shut down websites – including news and opinion sites – accused of spreading what authorities deemed fake news about the pandemic, according to BIRN correspondent Marcel Gascon, who monitors digital rights violations in Romania.

In Serbia, a prominent case concerned a breach of security in the country’s central COVID-19 database. For eight days, the login credentials for the database, Information System COVID-19, were publicly available on the website of a public health body.

In another incident, the initials, age, place-of-work and personal address of a person infected with the virus were posted on the official webpage of the municipality of Sid in western Serbia as well as on the town’s social media accounts.

In the report, BIRN and Share Foundation conclude that technology, especially in a time of crisis, should not be seen as the solution to complex issues, be that protection of health or upholding public order and safety. Rather, technology should be used to the benefit of citizens and in the interest of their rights and freedoms.

When intrusive technologies and regulations are put in place, it is hard to take a step back, particularly in societies with weak democratic institutions, the report states. Under such circumstances, the measures applied in one crisis for the protection of public health may one day be repurposed and used against other “social plagues”, ultimately leading to reduced human rights standards.

To read the full report click here. For individual cases, check our regional database, developed together with the SHARE Foundation.

From Bulgaria, Connecting Refugees to Remote AI Jobs around the World

Posted on November 4, 2020January 26, 2023 by ivana.nikolic

Two years into the Syrian war, in 2013, Shyar Ali fled his native Aleppo, ending up in a refugee camp in Iraq where he worked as a labourer to make ends meet. Life was hard, the 22-year-old recalled.

His luck began to change, however, in early 2019, when Ali stumbled upon ‘Humans In The Loop’, HITL, a Bulgaria-based social enterprise that links refugees, asylum seekers and others displaced by conflict with work opportunities in the growing industry of artificial intelligence, or AI.

So far, Ali has worked on four data annotation projects via HITL, earning enough money to open a mobile phone repair shop in the camp with a partner. He hopes to open a laptop repair shop one day too.

“It’s tough living in the camp,” Ali said in comments sent to BIRN via HITL, “but my job keeps me going.”

Humble beginnings

Launched without a budget or experience in 2017, HITL now works with more than 300 people across Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria and Iraq, partnering with local NGOs to provide IT and English-language training to ready refugees for remote work with start-ups across Europe and the United States.

Twenty-six-year-old founder and CEO Iva Gumnishka said HITL has found work for ‘conflict-affected people’ across the field of AI and computer vision.

“Our workers have been involved in precision agriculture projects involving segmentation of crops from drone images, insurTech projects related to car damage detection and assessment, facial detection and spoofing detection for CCTV cameras, and many others,” Gumnishka told BIRN.

HITL recently created a specialised team for medical annotation, comprised of Syrian doctors currently in Turkey but who are not eligible to work in the country. Instead, HITL will involve them remotely in medical AI projects in radiology and ultrasound.

“Our supervisor for this team is a Syrian doctor who was at the forefront of medical response teams during the civil war in Syria,” said Gumnishka. “We also have doctors who have cured people with chemical weapon poisoning, and connecting them to work opportunities is something that we are really proud of because they really deserve it.”

“In all of these projects, we involve conflict-affected communities: refugees, internally displaced people and people living in conflict zones.”

‘This job has been my saviour’

Photo: Nacho Kamenov

Registered as a refugee in Sofia since August 2018, Gaza-born Raghda Al-Samman first found out about HITL from a friend who alerted her to one of its English-language training programmes in 2019.

After completing the programme, Al-Samman became involved in a video annotation project for HITL, before Gumnishka offered her the job of supervisor at HITL’s Sofia office.

“I was hesitant initially, but Iva gave me the confidence,” said Al-Samman, who moved to Bulgaria to be with her husband, who is originally from Syria. “When I come across anyone looking for work, I tell them about HITL. It has been great. We are working to make things better every day.”

“Especially in these times of COVID-19, this job has been my saviour. Not only has it continued, but having the option to choose between online and offline work has been an advantage.”

In September, HITL’s work was recognised by the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, as one of seven winners in the Good Jobs and Inclusive Entrepreneurship category of the MIT SOLVE initiative.

Gumnishka said she hoped the support the award brings with it would help HITL reach its target of “employing 3,000 conflict-affected people over the next five years.”

HITL will also receive funding from the Bulgarian Fund for Women, which will finance two editions of the enterprise’s English and digital literacy skills course for refugee women.

And Gumnishka is already looking further afield, with a pilot project in October with Venezuelan refugees in Colombia.

“It’s also a great topic to do a deep dive in, and we are in touch with large organisations working with refugees, which are very interested in contributing to the local response to displacement,” she said.

Turkey Slaps €1m Fines on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube

Posted on November 4, 2020January 26, 2023 by Ivana Jeremic

Turkey on Wednesday imposed ten million Turkish lira (one million euro) fines on digital media giants including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Periscope and TikTok because they did not appoint official representatives in the country as required by a new digital media law adopted in July this year.

If appointed, the company’s representatives would have to remove any piece of content that the Turkish authorities consider illegal within 48 hours of an official request.

“As the deadline for social media companies… for informing the government about their representatives is over, ten million lira fines are imposed,” Deputy Transport Minister Omer Fatih Sayan said on Twitter.

Sayan called on the companies to appoint their representatives in Turkey immediately.

“Otherwise, other steps will be taken,” he warned.

According to the new digital media law, the online media giants now have 30 days to appoint their representatives. If they do not, 30 million lira (three million euro) fines will be imposed.

If they still do not comply within three months, they will face an advertisement ban for three months.

As final sanctions, their bandwidth will be halved and then cut by 90 per cent.

The government is also asking the online media giants to transfer their servers to Turkey.

So far, none of the major companies have complied.

Opposition parties and human rights groups see the new law as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s attempt to control media platforms and silence his critics.

The new regulations might result in these companies quitting the Turkish market, experts have warned.

PayPal quit the Turkish market in 2016 because of similar requests and Wikipedia was blocked in Turkey for more than two-and-a-half years.

Turkey has submitted the highest number of requests to Twitter to delete content and close accounts, the company has said.

According to Twitter, Turkey asked it to close nearly 9,000 accounts, but it only shut down 264 of them.

Fake News Rivals Real News for Albanians Reading about COVID-19

Posted on November 4, 2020January 26, 2023 by Ivana Jeremic

In late March, with Albania in full lockdown to slow the spread of COVID-19, an Italian pharmacist and self-proclaimed ‘doctor of nanopathology’ called Stefano Montanari gave an interview to a YouTube channel in which he likened the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 to the common flu.

The virus, said Montanari, “in most cases can be cured by the body so there is no need for the extreme measures imposed by governments across the world.”

Seventy-one year-old Montanari does not represent any scientific body. Nor is he a doctor. Newsguard, which rates website credibility, says his personal site has published “false and unsubstantiated claims” about health, including the coronavirus pandemic, while the YouTube channel he spoke to, Byoblu, has also been accused of peddling fake information.

Yet the March interview was an instant hit among Albanian-language media, his comments among the most widely distributed at the time, according to a BIRN analysis of article impact via social media, particularly Facebook.

But his were not the only debunked theories to go viral and which, coupled with the media’s own obsession with ‘clicks’ and the shortcomings of the government’s communications strategy, have fuelled the spread of conspiracy theories in Albania, experts say.

“People that believe that Covid-19 doesn’t exist or other conspiracy theories trust Montanari,” said Camilla Vagnozzi, editor-in-chief of Facta, an Italian fact-checking project established in March this year.

“Looking at the spread that his opinion had during the past months, I sadly say that the majority of people believed that he was saying something true and giving information that others want to give,” Vagnozzi told BIRN.

Montanari denial

Illustration. Photo: Unsplash/Markus Winkler

Using UK-based BuzzSumo, an analytical search tool, BIRN identified news articles concerning COVID-19 that triggered the most social media engagement and published by the 20 biggest media outlets in Albania between January and October this year.

During the period monitored, Albanian media outlets distributed some 149,543 articles on COVID-19 on Facebook, triggering some 4.89 million engagements, including clicks, likes and other reactions.

The top 20 articles generated 93,711 reactions or shares. By comparison, the top 20 ‘fake’ or misleading articles, identified as such by fact-checking organisations or international institutions such as the European Union, generated 68,267 reactions or shares, so just 28 per cent fewer.

Yet a single news item published by the website GazetaKorrekte.com, and which references Montanari’s statements, alone elicited some 8,602 reactions.

Of the top 20 fake or misleading articles, five cited comments made by Montanari to Byoblu between March 14 and 17, eliciting a total of 27,365 reactions.

Neither Facebook nor Byoblu responded to requests for comment for this story. While Facebook has taken steps to identify false news through third-party fact-checking organisations, it is unclear whether such efforts include Albanian-language output.

Montanari, a pharmacist who runs a private diagnostics laboratory in Bologna, northern Italy, denied being the source of fake news.

“Can you identify any interest on me to distribute ‘fake news’?” he said in an emailed response in English to BIRN questions. Asked about YouTube’s removal of his statements to Byoblu, he replied, “They are obviously scared.”

People ‘don’t know what to believe’

Hospital workers transport face masks to the infection section at the main hospital in Tirana, Albania, 2020. Photo: EPA-EFE/Malton Dibra

Byoblu.com is a video-blogging site published by Claudio Messora, a former communications consultant for Italy’s anti-establishment 5Star Movement, currently part of the Italian government.

According to NewsGuard, Byoblu “repeatedly publishes false content, does not gather and present information responsibly, and does not avoid the use of deceptive headlines.” It cites the March 2020 interviews with Montanari in which he describes COVID-19 mortality as so low it is “probably even nonexistent” and says the concept of herd immunity is “a scam”.

There have been more than 38,800 COVID-related deaths in Italy since the coronavirus swept through northern Italy as its first foothold in Europe, including some 900 per day at the height of the spring outbreak. More than 1.2 million people have died worldwide.

Vagnozzi of Facta criticised the role of social networks in providing a platform not just for Montanari but for others in Italy such as Roberto Petrella. Petrella, a doctor, posted a video to Facebook in August in which he claims that COVID-19 is in fact manmade and part of a plot to reduce the world’s population. The video had been viewed more than 1.3 million times as of September 10, according to Facta.

“It doesn’t happen only with medical issues, is a phenomena that we already know also for other topics such as 5G technology or [US Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist] Bill Gates conspiracy theories,” said Vagnozzi.

“With Covid-19 pandemic the difference is that people are scared and panicked because they understand that we are living in a strange and out of our control situation and people often have no idea on what to believe.”

Social media giants like Facebook are trying to fight disinformation, she said, but some things are beyond their control.

“In my opinion, social media platforms are doing an honest work in fighting disinformation,”,” Vagnozzi said. “The spread of Montanari fake news is not only related to Facebook and Youtube efforts to fight disinformation, it is related with the ability of people to understand what can be true and what is false.”

Storm over Irish professor’s YouTube claims

Illustration. Photo: Unsplash/dole777

It’s not only Montanari’s views that have made a splash in Albanian-language media.

In an article published in April on the Albanian news portal Opinion.al, a man named Rashid Buttar, described as a graduate in biology and theology from Washington University and a practitioner of alternative medicine, claimed that the novel coronavirus was in fact created by US immunologist Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a combination of the HIV virus that causes Aids and the respiratory virus MERS.

The article had a total of 3,378 Facebook engagements, including 602 shares and 567 comments.

What the article failed to mention was the fact Buttar is a known conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccination campaigner.

Another article, published on May 11 by Standard.al cites statements made on YouTube by Professor Dolores Cahill of University College Dublin, leader of the right-wing eurosceptic Irish Freedom Party and who accused politicians and the media of using the pandemic as a “propaganda tool to try and take away rights from people and to make them more sick and to force vaccinations on us.”

The headline of the article reads: “British doctor makes surprising statement: In Italy are dying those who received flu vaccine. COVID-19 is not that dangerous.” The article had a total of 4,381 Facebook engagements, including 756 shares and 300 comments.

The fact-checking service Health Feedback classified Cahill’s statements as “based on inaccurate and misleading information”. Facebook and Youtube deleted the video as fake news.

After 133 medical students urged Cahill’s employer, University College Dublin, to take action, the university issued a statement in June saying the views she expressed “do not reflect the position of the school, college, institute or university.”

Trust in conspiracy theories

A protest in Tirana against compulsory COVID-19 vaccinations, June 2, 2020. Photo: Nensi Bogdani

Research suggests Albania represents fertile ground for conspiracy theories.

According to a survey published on October 10 by the Institute for Development Research and Alternatives, IDRA, 70 per cent of respondents said they believed COVID-19 was created in a laboratory in China.

Some 65 per cent expressed the belief that the virus had been created by people in power or by pharmaceutical companies for money and power.

A third of respondents said they believed in the theory that 5G mobile networks had a role in the rapid spread of the virus while 29 per cent said vaccines against it would be used to install microchips to track people.

Lamenting the influence of disinformation, Denisa Canameti, editor in chief of the Albanian newspaper Shëndet+, told BIRN:

“Due to this, we are in a position where a part of the population doesn’t believe that COVID exists and another part refuses healthcare offered by Albanian hospitals while others believe that the vaccine will be used to install chips. There are others who doesn’t believe statistical reports about the disease or do not trust WHO [World Health Organisation] policies.”

While most of the fake news published in Albanian media since the start of the pandemic has been translated from foreign sources, some have been homegrown.

One that made a commotion on Facebook concerned a claim made by a Tirana engineer called Sazan Guri that during the lockdown period a funeral company was providing its services for free, and even offering cash payments, to families who agreed to register the deaths of their loved ones as caused by COVID-19. An article published on the online portal of Fax TV on Guri’s claims alone received 2,300 engagements on Facebook, including 242 shares and 400 comments.

Contacted by BIRN, Guri stood by his statement.

“The whole COVID is fake news,” he said. “One or two per cent it exists, 98 per cent is faked by doctors and by the media reporting on it, forcing man to die from the fear of the fear.”

Klodiana Kapo, executive director of Albanian fact-checker Faktoje, state bodies in Albania share part of the blame for the poor quality of information reaching the public.

“What we have seen during this period is a total lack of transparency by the Ministry of Health and all these healthcare institutions, creating a situation in which news is only what is produced by the Ministry which in the meantime made it impossible to verify anything,” Kapo said.

“The pandemic has been accompanied by an increase in pressure by the Ministry of Health and the government to control even further the flow of information.”

Canameti of Shëndet+ agreed that health authorities had failed “to clearly articulate” information concerning the pandemic, but said media too remained hooked on social media impact.

“Even in this grave situation, we were not spared the mania of seeking attention and clicks,” she said.