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Rama Takes his War on Media to Albanians’ Phones

Posted on March 13, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

Albanian mobile phone users have unexpectedly received a recorded message from the Prime Minister, advising them on how to protect themselves from the coronavirus – and the media.

“Wash your hands, don’t move from your house for pleasure, open windows as much as you can, protect yourself from the media,” the message from Edi Rama said.

However often mobile phone users called, they had to listen to the message again, as there was no way of silencing it.

Users of Telekom Albania mobile network got a slightly different message, merely advising them to protect themselves from false information.

The media is an old target for the Socialist premier, who over the years has seen his image tarnished by reports of links with organised crime, of controversial public contracts awarded to local companies without competition and of other scandals involving misuse of public funds.

Rama has often attempted to deflect the blame by running a war against the media, and claiming all the allegations against him are manufactured lies.

He once called Voice of America the voice of “the garbage bin” and more lately, he sued the German tabloid Bild for defamation, over leaked tapes that apparently showed close collaboration between Socialist politicians and underworld figures in vote buying and pressuring public officials to vote for the party.

Last November, as the country faced another crisis caused by an earthquake – and faced with questions over government preparedness against natural calamities – Rama threatened unnamed media with closure, claiming he would use extraordinary powers against those who “spread panic”.

Albania is now facing one of the most serious crises in its recent history as the economy goes into freefall thanks to the stringent restrictions Rama has put in place to slow down the spread of the coronavirus.

The PM recently attempted to push forward law changes to create a regulatory body for online media, which has proven more difficult to control than the conventional TV networks that operate through government-awarded permits. The law has been blocked amid intense international pressure, however.

North Macedonia Web Portals Hustle for Election Ads Cash

Posted on March 10, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

The prospect of making a quick buck from budget money intended for election advertising has encouraged a staggering 235 web portals, many with obscure backgrounds and identities, to register at the State Electoral Commission, DIK, for a slice of the pie.

BIRN’s analysis of the DIK list of web portals, published in Macedonian language, reveals that many have questionable professional standards and unclear backgrounds and ownership.

Of the 235 web portals that have registered, 92 do not reveal who the journalists and editors who work there are. Of those 92, effectively hiding their staff teams, 44 publish political news; the rest cover other topics, or have no clear theme.

Most of the portals that did disclose their journalistic teams are run by just one or two persons, it was also noticed. There are also cases where one team of journalists works in several portals.

There is no data about the owners or founders of 19 of the portals that have applied for state cash. They are registered in the United States, Panama, or in other places, by companies that conceal their true owners.

Some 50 of the portals are not even registered with the web domain .mk. Some resemble blogs rather than news sites, and have domains such as .live, .info or just .com.

The April 12 general elections are the second in North Macedonia in which the state budget will cover political party adverts in the media.

North Macedonia introduced this practice for last year’s presidential elections, when 83 portals registered for the cash.

The law allows parties to apply or up to two euros for every voter who voted for them in the last elections. The state plans to reserve about 3.6 million euros for this purpose.

While it is expected that most of this sum will be spent on ads on TV and radio and in newspapers, the rules allow one party or alliance also to spend up to 15,000 euros for promotional purposes in a single portal.

The more portals a publisher registers, the bigger its potential gain.

The head of the State-Anti-Corruption Commission, Biljana Ivanovska, was among the first to warn about the problems arising from these loopholes.

In an interview for BIRN, in Macedonian language, in January, she said only web portals that are already registered with the National Council for the Media, SEMM, should be allowed to register at the DIK list as well.

At the moment, the SEMM register contains 101 web portals that have disclosed ownership and journalistic teams, as well as known price lists. They have also pledged to respect professional and ethical codes.

But when parliament last made changes to the electoral law, last month, it ignored this advice and left the situation as is, meaning that any web portal can be registered without scrutiny.

More than half of all the web portals that have registered for part of the state advertising cash are not on the SEMM list.

Among the analysed data from the current DIK register, BIRN observed other curiosities. In few cases, for example, a single publisher has registered several versions of the same portal.

The publisher Prva Republika [First Republic], for example, has registered its site “Republika” three times, counting Macedonian, Albanian and the English versions of the same site as three separate sites. The web site of TV 21, which airs in Albanian and Macedonian, is similarly registered twice.

The DIK register shows a similar trend in several smaller towns, like Ohrid, Kriva Palanka, Delcevo, Valandovo and others, where the same local publishers have registered more than one web portal.

To maximize potential profits, some of the big national TV stations have also registered their websites separately from their TV stations. Some newspapers and many local radio and TV stations have done the same.

Apart from informative portals, the list also shows that sites that follow sports, lifestyle, and automotive industry have also been registered.

Turkey Arrests Journalists Over Reports on Turkish Intel Agent’s Funeral

Posted on March 9, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

A court in Istanbul ruled on Sunday to arrest Murat Agırel, a columnist with Yenicag Daily newspaper, and Yeni Yasam managing editor Ferhat Celik and editor-in-chief Aydın Keser over news reports on the funeral of a high-ranking intelligence officer who was killed in Libya.

Turkish prosecutors in Istanbul had previously launched an investigation against the journalists for exposing the identity of a field officer with the Turkish National Intelligence Agency (MIT) who served and died in Libya, where Turkey has been supporting the government in Tripoli against a rival eastern faction.

OdaTV news director Barıs Terkoglu and journalist Hulya Kılıc were also arrested on Friday after the outlet ran a news report and images of the funeral in Manisa province.

The court also ruled to block access to OdaTV’s website.

The prosecutor’s office said the journalists revealed information on intelligence activities and documents and that they put intelligence officers’ families and colleagues in danger.

However, the name of the MIT agent had previously been announced by Turkish lawmakers in parliament.

“You cannot escape from the responsibility of what you have done with pressuring the media,” Faik Oztrak, a spokesperson for the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), told reporters on Friday.

The CHP and other opposition parties condemned the court ruling as politically motivated and an attack on press freedom.

The arrested journalists are known to be critical of the Turkish government.

The government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has deployed troops to Libya to support the UN-recognised National Accord Government in the capital, Tripoli, against the Libyan National Army, which backs a rival interim government based in the eastern port city of Tobruk.

Critics accuse the Turkish government of hiding the real number of soldiers and other public officers killed in conflicts in Libya and Syria.

Turkish media previously reported that a high-ranking colonel in the Turkish army was killed in Libya but he was buried in Turkey without any ceremony in a bid to avoid public anger.

Eighty-four journalists are currently behind bars, making Turkey one of the biggest jailers of journalists in the world. Media watchdog Reporters without Borders ranks Turkey 157th out of 180 countries on its Press Freedom Index.

Since a failed coup in 2016, Turkish authorities have closed 70 newspapers, 20 magazines, 34 radio stations and 33 television channels as part of Erdogan’s crackdown on his critics.

Facebook Extends Political Ads Rules to Balkans Before Elections

Posted on March 7, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

Facebook has added Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Moldova and Turkey to its updated list of countries that must adhere to its strict political advertising transparency regulations.

The enforcement of the new regulations is expected in mid-March, about a month before parliamentary elections in Serbia and North Macedonia, due on April 26 and April 12 respectively. Montenegro is also due to hold the elections this year, by October at the latest.

Facebook launched the regulations in June last year. They mean that any adverts paid for by a political group or candidate must be labelled as such.

With the new 32 countries, the total count of states required to stick to the regulations, which relate to any adverts about social issues, elections or politics, rose to 89.

Apart from the five Balkan countries, the regulations will also expand to Chile, Japan, Mexico and Indonesia, to name a few. Facebook said it was working to expand enforcement to more countries later this year, including Myanmar and Brazil.

“Anyone who wants to run ads about elections or politics in these countries will need to confirm their identity with an ID issued from the country they want to run ads in and disclose who is responsible for the ad.

“We require that the advertiser provide additional information, like a local business address, local phone number, email and website, if they choose to use their organization or Page name in the disclaimer. These requirements hold advertisers accountable for the ads they run on Facebook and Instagram,” the social media giant wrote on its Facebook for Business website.

While political ads will be more transparent, the requirements are also designed to ensure that Facebook can list political advertisers in its Ad Library. Political ads from all of these new regions will now be added to the Ad Library API.

“We will introduce the Ad Library Report for each of these countries by the end of April. The report provides aggregated insights for ads about elections and politics, such as total number of ads and spends in the Ad Library. The report is also available as a downloadable file,” Facebook explained.

Political parties in the Balkans have often used social media in ways that are far from transparent during elections.

At the beginning of 2020, SHARE Foundation, a Serbia-based digital rights NGO, asked Facebook to put Serbia and North Macedonia on the list, citing the upcoming elections as the main reason. In its letter, SHARE said that if these two countries were on the list “the campaign will be more transparent.”

“This is especially important, since it is expected that Facebook pages which are not openly political might engage in supporting a certain political party or candidate with ads,” the letter adds.

Russian Court Rules Facial Recognition Doesn’t Violate Privacy

Posted on March 4, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

Moscow’s Tverskoy District Court ruled on Tuesday that the facial recognition system launched on January 1 does not violate the privacy of citizens, paving the way for a 105,000-strong camera network to stay.

The decision was a blow to activists and opposition politicians who argued that the surveillance operation was illegal, Reuters reports.

The case against Moscow’s Department of Technology, DIT, was filed by lawyer and activist Alena Popova and opposition politician Vladimir Milov of the Solidarnost party in January.

They sought to ban use of the technology at mass events and protests and to delete all stored personal data previously collected.

“This ruling shows there are no legal defences for facial recognition complaints,” Popova’s lawyer, Kirill Koroteev, told the media.

The DIT is in charge of managing the surveillance network in Moscow. According to reports, it has spent 3.3 billion roubles, about $53.3 million, installing cameras and licensing facial recognition software to bring the network online.

During the court proceedings the system was on, with the Russian authorities using it to ensure that people who were ordered to remain at home or at hotels under the coronavirus quarantine are doing so.

Meanwhile, the DIT website says it uses the video surveillance system in crowded areas to “ensure safety”. It says that video footage is deleted within five days of an incident, unless a request by the public or law enforcement is made.

Following the first court hearing on January 31, rights watchdog Amnesty International said facial recognition systems posed a threat to Russian citizens’ privacy and human rights.

“In the hands of Russia’s already very abusive authorities, and in the total absence of transparency and accountability for such systems, it is a tool which is likely to take reprisals against peaceful protest to an entirely new level.

“It is telling that the Russian government has provided no explanation as to how it will ensure the right to privacy and other human rights, nor has it addressed the need for public oversight of such powerful technologies,” Natalia Zviagina, Amnesty’s Russia Director, said.

This is the second time that Popova has filed a lawsuit against the DIT concerning the video surveillance system.

She was previously fined for participating in a protest in Moscow in 2018, and claims that she was only identified with the use of facial recognition.

Last November, the Savelovsky District Court of Moscow refused to examine her claims that her right to privacy was undermined by the establishment of Moscow’s video surveillance system and the lawsuit was dismissed.

The face recognition system covering the whole Moscow underground transportation network is set to be fully operative by September 1.

Hungarian Editors Need Permission to Report on ‘Sensitive’ Topics

Posted on March 2, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

The Brussels-based website Politico has obtained several internal emails that confirm the long-suspected growth of censorship in Hungary’s state media.

State-owned outlets have a big role in the Hungarian media, as they include several TV and radio stations and MTI, the only Hungarian news agency.

According to the leaked emails, state media bosses need special permission from “higher above” to report on topics like Greta Thunberg, the teenage Swedish climate activist.

Reports on several other “sensitive” topics, such as migration, European terrorism, Brussels, church issues and on parliamentary, presidential and local elections in the “EU+” (member states and neighboring countries) also need to be sent for final approval.

Journalists in the state media don’t know who makes the final decisions on the articles whose subject matter is on the list, Politico says.

The emails obtained by the outlet date from the second half of October 2019 and are signed by senior editors of the state media. One of them is Sándor Végh.

The emails appear to focus on news coverage. Emails also confirm that several topics were banned explicitly from mention in the Hungarian state media – as it was reported previously by Népszava, a Hungarian daily.

Journalists are not allowed to report on Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, NGOs that are critical of the Hungarian government’s politics, especially its hostile policies on refugees and migrants.

It also turned out that reporting on Thunberg is not always allowed. An email that ordered staffers to ask permission to report on her was sent on August 14, when the activist started her trip to New York to speak at the United Nations. Hungarian state media did not publish anything about Thunberg’s trip.

The World Press Freedom Index compiled by the media watchdog Reporters Without Borders classifies Hungary’s media as only “partly free”. The country is now ranked in 87th place, and the pressure on the free press is clearly getting stronger. Last year Hungary was 73rd on the list, while in 2010, when the current government gained power, it ranked in 23rd place.

French Court Rules against Facial Recognition in High Schools

Posted on February 28, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

A court in Marseille ruled on Thursday that authorities in France’s southeastern Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region had no power to authorise the use of facial recognition systems in two high schools in Nice and Marseille.

The city’s Administrative Court overturned the decision of regional authorities, ruling that only schools had the power to authorise such technology.

The court ruled that the decision breached the General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, as such systems are based on consent but students cannot give consent freely given the relationship of authority that binds them to the school’s administration.

“To my knowledge, this is the first judgment in France concerning the use of facial recognition technologies in public space,” said Alexis Fitzjohn O Cobhthaigh, a lawyer representing several associations that brought the case to court.

Disproportionate measure

The case stems from an experiment launched at the end of 2018 to equip the Ampère high school in Marseille and Les Eucalyptus in Nice with virtual access control devices, by which cameras would recognise high school students and grant them access and be able to follow the trajectory of people.

A number of digital and human rights organisations said the plan violated individual freedoms. France’s National Data Protection Commission, CNIL, also came out against it in October 2019, calling the experiment disproportionate and illegal.

“This installation cannot be implemented legally,” the head of the CNIL wrote to the regional authority in charge of approving the trials, according to a letter cited by the investigative website Mediapart.

According to French media, parents and teachers’ unions also opposed the experiment.

The Administrative Court ruled that using facial recognition to control access to high schools was a disproportionate measure.

Nevertheless, some French media reports said regional authorities were pressing ahead with the plan regardless of the court’s ruling.

Call for total ban

The case was brought in February 2019 by French advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, which works to promote and defend fundamental freedoms in the digital world.

“In France, this is the first court decision about facial recognition and the first success against it! We hope it will be followed by a series of other successes leading to the total ban of facial recognition,” the group wrote on their website on February 27.

La Quadrature du Net and 80 other civil society groups signed a joint letter on December 19 calling on French authorities to ban facial recognition for any purposes of security and surveillance, citing similar bans in San Francisco and other US cities.

“Facial recognition is a uniquely invasive and dehumanising technology, which makes possible, sooner or later, constant surveillance of the public space,” they wrote.

“It creates a society in which we are all suspects. It turns our face into a tracking device, rather than a signifier of personality, eventually reducing it to a technical object. It enables invisible control. It establishes a permanent and inescapable identification regime.”

Senator Sees China’s Hand in Central Europe TV Sale

Posted on February 28, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

US Republican Senator Marco Rubio has asked the US Secretary of the Treasury and the Attorney General to launch “a full review of the national security implication of AT&T’s upcoming sale of the Central European Media Group Enterprises, CME, to the Czech-owned conglomerate PPF Group”.

AT&T is a US multinational telecommunications conglomerate and the largest shareholder at the CME. The owner of the PPF Group is Czech tycoon Peter Kellner, whom the Florida Senator accused of being a “China proxy”.

In 2018, Petr Kellner was set to buy Bulgaria’s largest media company, Nova Broadcasting, which owns some of the most popular commercial TV channels in the country, but the Bulgarian competition commission blocked the deal.

If PPF buys the CME, it will take control of popular TV channels in several Central European countries, such as the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Slovenia. It channels, including rating market leaders ProTV in Romania and bTV in Bulgaria, reach an audience of 97 million people, according to Rubio’s letter.

Rubio said this was potentially worrying. “The administration needs to conduct closer reviews of corporate deals like … [the] sale of CME, and understand how the Chinese government and Communist Party work through proxies like PPF,” he said.

Rubio, who co-chairs the Congressional Executive Commission on China, CECC, and is a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, warned of the threat that “the Chinese Communist Party’s political interference in foreign governments and societies” could pose to the countries where CME operates.

He argued that the sale would affect US national security, as Washington’s priorities include “preserving a free and open media environment overseas as well as preventing the Chinese Communist Party from subverting these platforms”.

US legislation authorises investigations of mergers, acquisitions and takeovers when “the acquirer is controlled by or acting on behalf of a foreign government” and when “the acquisition results in control of a person .. that could affect the national security of the United States.”

In Rubio’s view, the PPF Group already has “a record of acting as China’s proxies inside the Czech Republic” and its financial ties to China were clear.

“Approximately one-third of the PPF Group’s profits come from subsidiary Home Credit’s individual lending businesses in China,” the letter stated, adding that this “politically precarious business relies” on Beijing’s non-banking loans license.

The Senator claimed that Beijing uses the company to support “China’s malign activities abroad”. One example he cited involves Serbia, where he said that “PPF-owned telecommunications firms are working with Huawei to develop 5G networks”.

He also claimed that PPF subsidiary Home Credit “hired a public relations firm for 2,000 hours work devoted to manipulating Czech public opinion favorably toward China”.

This included “spying on Czech politicians, pressuring media to withdraw news articles critical of China and creating a new think-tank, Sinoskop, to employ biased analysts to influence public debate”.

Social Media a Help and Hindrance in Balkan Coronavirus Fight

Posted on February 27, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

Serbia has no confirmed cases of coronavirus yet, but on Tuesday a WhatsApp voice message began doing the rounds on social media claiming several people had already died from the virus in the capital, Belgrade.

“Doctors are strictly forbidden to talk about the virus,” the woman is heard saying on the message, which was published on several Serbian news portals.

A similar thing happened in neighbouring Croatia, where another WhatsApp message contained the claim that the first case had been recorded in the coastal city of Split, before authorities actually confirmed the first case in the capital, Zagreb, on February 25.

With its epicentre in Italy, Europe is grappling to contain the spread of Covid-19. In the Balkans, cases have been confirmed in Croatia, North Macedonia and Romania.

Governments and concerned experts and citizens in the region and elsewhere are taking to the Internet, social media and mobile phone messages to spread information.

But likewise they face what Italy’s foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio, has called an “infodemic” of false information and scaremongering in the media and online.

In Serbia, the interior ministry said on Wednesday that its Department of High-Tech Crime was trying to identify the women who made the WhatsApp recording claiming that coronavirus had already claimed its first victims in the country.

In Albania, prosecutors on February 24 announced investigations into what they called the “diffusion of fake information or announcements in any form aimed at creating a state of insecurity and panic among the people.”

Scientist: Behaviour ‘not in line with magnitude of danger’

Serbia’s Health Ministry has launched a website dedicated to the coronavirus outbreak, regularly posting updates, news, advice, contacts and warnings for those coming to Serbia from affected areas.

On Wednesday in Moldova, the government began sending mobile phone text messages telling Moldovans what symptoms to look out for and what steps they should take if they suspect they may have contracted the respiratory virus.

“Take care of your health. Call your family doctor immediately if you have a fever or cough. If you have returned from areas with Coronavirus and feel ill, call 112,” the SMS reads.

Croatian scientist Igor Rudan of the Centre for Global Health Research at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, said on Wednesday the state of panic in Europe did not reflect the level of threat posed by Covid-19.

Even if the virus were to spread throughout Croatia, he wrote on Facebook, “the casualties should be at least roughly comparable with the number of cases of death from the flu or with the number of road traffic fatalities during the same period.”

“This panic is triggered by the persistent media coverage… rather than by generally accepted and scientifically-based knowledge about the coronavirus,” Rudan wrote.

“If you started behaving differently than you did during the winter months, during the flu epidemic, for example, collecting food supplies or wearing masks on the streets, this is not the kind of behaviour that reflects the actual magnitude of the danger.”

The post has been shared 2,500 times.

The Covid-19 outbreak originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late December.

According to the World Health Organisation, there are now more than 82,000 confirmed cases in 45 countries.

In the Balkans, there are three confirmed cases in Croatia, one in North Macedonia and one in Romania. More than 180 people are under supervision in Montenegro. In Serbia, 20 people have tested negative for the virus, while several Serbian citizens who recently travelled to affected areas are in quarantine in Belgrade and the nearby town of Sabac, the public broadcaster reported.

INSI: Decline in 2019 Media Workers’ Deaths as They Pull Back from Deadly Conflicts

Posted on February 25, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

According to the annual report “Killing the Messenger,” published last Friday by London-based International News Safety Institute, INSI, a total of 48 journalists died in 2019 in incidents and accidents directly related to their work, the lowest number in 16 years.

That does not, however, mean journalists are now safer while doing their jobs, said INSI director Elena Cosentino.

“The decline in casualties was simply because fewer journalists reported from conflict zones in the first place,” Cosentino said.

“Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan were deemed simply too dangerous for either local or international media to cover and were dropped from many outlets’ news agenda.”

The deadliest country for media workers in 2019 was Mexico, with 12 reporters killed, followed by Tanzania (5), Afghanistan (4), Syria (4), Honduras (3) and Somalia (3).

Last year also marked the first time in 21 years that no journalist was killed in a foreign country, which comes as a result of media organisations pulling back their staff from the most dangerous places.

All 48 causalities in 2019 were local journalists reporting from their home countries, and the majority of them died while reporting on crime, politics and corruption by unknown perpetrators.

The past year proved partially successful in terms of investigations into the murders of some prominent journalists, including “significant legal developments in the killings of Ján Kuciak from Slovakia; Saudi Arabia’s Jamal Kashoggi; and Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta,” the report said.

Slovak investigative reporter Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova, were shot dead in their home in February 2018. The trial of four people accused of the brutal killing started in mid-January, while in December another accused was sentenced to 15 years in jail in a separate trial.

Jamal Kashoggi, a Saudi dissident and journalist, entered the Consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul in October 2018 and never came out. At first, Saudi Arabia denied having anything to do with the reporter’s disappearance, but then the authorities finally acknowledged that their own officials were behind the murder. The whereabouts of his body is still unknown.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese journalist, writer, and anti-corruption activist who was killed in a car bombing near her home in 2017. Last November, the case saw an important development when the main suspect and alleged sponsor of the crime was arrested. He then accused Keith Schembri, the chief of staff of former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, of ordering the assassination.

The murder, like that of Kuciak in Slovakia, sparked mass protests that forced the prime ministers of both countries to resign.

However, INSI said that the legal developments happened thanks to the enormous pressure brought by Caruana Galizia’s family and international media coverage.

“Daphne’s case proves that with enough time and pressure even the most powerful could one day be held to account,” Cosentino said.

“As happened in Malta, raising the cost of killing a journalist is the ultimate aim for everyone in the news industry. Despite the progress made in 2019, that still feels like a long way off.”

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