Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia scored worst in the Western Balkan region with 36 and 35 points respectively, which put them in 101st and 106th place on a list of 180 countries.
Both declined from last year, when Bosnia was ranked in 89th place, with 38 points, and North Macedonia came in 93rd place, with 37 points.
Bosnia shares its 106th place with Albania, which also declined in the rankings. It came in 99th place last year.
Bosnia’s western neighbour, EU member Croatia, fell from 60th place last year to 63rd place in 2019, its score declining from 48 to 47 points.
The scores for its eastern and southern neighbours, Serbia and Montenegro, did not change.
Serbia, however, fell in the rankings from 87th to 91st place, while Montenegro slightly improved its position, moving up from 67th place in 2018 to 66th place in the 2019 list.
Moldova scored worst in the whole of Southeast and Central Europe. With 33 points, it ranked in 120th place on the list.
Greece, on the other hand, saw the biggest improvement in Southeast Europe, scoring 48 points and ranking in 60th place.
This year’s Transparency International report also compared the latest results with those from 2012. In that context, in the Balkans, Bosnia’s result again appeared concerning, revealing a consistent decline. “With a score of 36, Bosnia and Herzegovina significantly declined by six points on the CPI since 2012,” the report noted.
Turning to Bosnia’s specific problems, it noted: “The country also suffers from weak enforcement of campaign finance regulations. During the 2018 elections, political parties and civil society organizations raised concerns over voting irregularities, threats against voters, the misuse of public resources and unequal access to the media.”
Global Corruption Perception Index for 2019. Photo: Transparency International
The organisation divides all countries into six geographical groups: Americas, Western Europe and the EU, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia Pacific.
It then measures perceived levels of corruption in each state and awards points from 0 to 100. A score of 100 points means “very clean” and 0 means “highly corrupted”. Based on the score, TI then compiles a ranking list.
Lidija Prokic, from Transparency International, told BIRN that the scores were in some ways more important than the ranking. “Rank is good in the sense that it gives us a picture of where a particular country stands in the wider and regional environment,” she explained. “But when we look at what is happening at a level of the country, it is more important for us to look at the score, because then we can see if there is any notable improvement or decline,” she said.
Prokic told BIRN that, on average, the group of countries containing the Balkans scored higher only than the African countries.
Looking at these countries as a whole, she said TI detected an overall declining trend. “We see a lot of effort to weaken the regulations that require disclosure of party campaigns [expenses],” she told BIRN. Efforts could also be seen to “bring money from unknown sources to political life”, she added.
“What certainly influenced the score is governments’ efforts to limit the space for civil society, limit the possibility for independent control and silence critical voices,” she added.
EU countries in Central Europe ranked higher than countries in the Balkans. Poland was ranked in 41st place, the Czech Republic in 44th place and Slovakia in 59th place.
But some EU member countries in Central Europe and the Balkans lagged far behind.
Hungary and Romania both came in 70th place and Bulgaria was even lower down, in 74th place.
As for the winners, there were few surprises. Eight of the top ten places on the list went to EU countries in Western Europe, namely Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Netherland, Germany and Luxembourg and also Switzerland and Norway.
The only two from outside the region were New Zealand and Singapore. All of them scored 80 to 87 points.
Prokic said that in the field of regulation and institutional integrity, those countries were still in a better position than many non-EU states, but the trends were worrying.
Reuters Institute report says ownership concentration and government hostility threaten the future of independent journalism throughout Central and Eastern Europe.
Independent media developed in Central and Eastern Europe “in a dizzyingly short time frame” after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, a new Reuters Institute report says – but its future remains uncertain as a result of politicians’ hostility and ownership concentration under politically well connected moguls.
The report, Fighting Words: Journalism Under Assault in Central and Eastern Europe, issued on Wednesday by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the University of Oxford evaluates the situation of the media in the region by drawing on interviews with about a hundred journalists in 16 countries during 2019.
“In Europe, one of the safest continents in the world for press freedom, three journalists have been murdered in the last three years,” author Meera Selva of the Reuters Institute writes.
The report goes on to list the deaths of Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta, a country out of the area of study, Jan Kuciak in Slovakia and Viktoria Marinova in Bulgaria, all killed while reporting “on government corruption and organised crime”.
“They [the killings] happened in a climate where many journalists have been attacked and undermined and discredited by politicians, where the media have been captured or financially weakened, and where lawsuits have been used to systematically hamper and inhibit the pursuit of investigative, independent journalism,” the study said.
The report recalls that the 27-year-old Slovak journalist shot dead alongside his fiancée in February 2018 was part of a group of reporters who then prime minister Robert Fico in November 2016 called “anti-Slovak prostitutes” who “don’t inform” but just “fight with the government”.
Similarly aggressive language has been used against journalists in recent months in the Czech Republic, which two years ago dropped from 23rd place to 40th in the World Press Freedom Index, partly due to the concentration of media ownership “driven by the current Prime Minister Andrej Babis”.
In the Western Balkans, the report notes, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama “frequently refers to journalists as rubbish bins (kazan), while the leader of the opposition, Lulzim Basha, refers to the media as ‘captured and bought.’”
Rama’s government has also passed a set of so-called anti-defamation laws that allow state agencies to hear complaints about news sites, demand retractions, impose fines and even suspend their activity, the report reads.
In Montenegro, an investigative journalist, Olivera Lakic, was shot in the leg in May 2018. A month before, President Milo Djukanovic accused the publication she worked for, Vijesti, of promoting “fascist ideas”, after the newspaper revealed the business dealings of Djukanovic’s son’s when he was the ruling party leader.
Montenegrian journalist Olivera Lakic at the offices of Vijesti newspaper in Podgorica, Montenegro, 11 May 2018. Archive photo: EPA-EFE/BORIS PEJOVIC
Around 63 per cent of those who took part in the survey said politicians had criticized them in public speeches or on social media because of content they had published.
Some of the respondents said their harassers had used the same online space that has made publications known for their “fearless anti-corruption reporting”, such as Hungary’s 444.hu and Slovakia’s aktuality.sk, to troll and threaten them.
Over 64 per cent of those questioned said they had been victims of attacks because of their profession. Of that number, 83.3 per cent said they were attacked online, with over 16 per cent of them seeing sensitive personal information revealed online by their tormentors.
Media turned into government cartel
Marius Dragomir, whose own report, Media Capture in Europe, is quoted in the study, said: “The collusion between the political class and media owners has reached unprecedented levels, leading to a phenomenon known as media capture, a situation where most or all of the news media institutions are operating as part of a government-business cartel that controls and manipulates the flow of information with the aim of protecting their unrestricted and exclusive access to public resources.”
The report said the media had been exposed to this process in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Bulgaria, among others, “where several commercial media outlets were sold to businessmen who wanted to use the media to boost their political influence”.
In Bulgaria, the report notes how a parliamentarian, Delyan Peevski, “who also owns the country’s largest cigarette manufacturer, gained control of a large number of media outlets, which he uses in an openly partisan way”.
A picture made available 13 April 2014 shows Bulgarian media mogul and politician Delyan Peevski during a meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria, 17 February 2012. Archive photo: EPA/STR
Hungary was described as the “most egregious case” of “media capture”. The report said: “Between 2014 and 2018 ownership of news assets shifted to and increasingly concentrated in the hands of pro-government oligarchs.”
Governments use the partisan distribution of advertising by the state and public companies against independent media in Hungary, Poland and Serbia, the report added.
Libel lawsuits and anti-terror laws used as weapons
Independent publications in these countries are also systematically subjected to lawsuits focusing on libel and defamation, while anti-terror and national security legislation is also used to make their work difficult.
“In many countries, freedom of information and national security laws essentially cancel one another out,” the report suggested.
One such case of this was Bosnia and Herzegovina, where “the Freedom of Access to Information Act guarantees access to most public records, but the Law on Protection of Secret Data denies access to information of most interest to journalists”.
In neighbouring Croatia, it added, “laws against defaming and insulting the state and its symbols, and laws against publishing what the law refers to as ‘humiliating’ media content, can be used to go after journalists even for publishing proven facts”.
In March 2019, it noted, the Croatian Journalists’ Association, CJA, held a rally to draw attention to 1,100 ongoing lawsuits filed by politicians, public figures and corporations against journalists. “The public broadcaster alone had filed 36 lawsuits against its own employees and others,” the study pointed out.
The protection of sources is often compromised in the region by the violations of journalists’ privacy.
Professionals interviewed in the study described being subjected to phone tapping and recording, email interceptions and pressures to reveal their sources.
Journalists listed the support of media organisations in their own countries as the most important source of protection against such pressures. Help with legal costs and support from international organizations came next.
European Digital Rights, EDRi, released the new guide for ethical website development and maintenance, Ethical Web Dev.
The guide is aimed at web developers and maintainers who have a strong understanding of technical concepts, to assist them in bringing the web back to its roots – a decentralised tool that can enhance fundamental rights, democracy and freedom of expression.
The goal of the project, which started more than a year ago, was to provide guidance to developers on how to move away from third-party infected, data-leaking, unethical and unsafe practices.
The guide is a result of an extensive collective work, with inputs from experts of the EDRi network (Anders Jensen-Urstad, Walter van Holst, Maddalena Falzoni, Hanno “Rince” Wagner, Piksel), external contributions (Gordon Lennox, Achim Klabunde, Laura Kalbag, Aral Balkan), and the crucial help of Sid Rao, Public Interest Technologist and ex-Ford-Mozilla Fellow at EDRi.
The guide is distributed under a Creative Commons 4.0 Licence.
Download:
Ethical Web Dev – Guide for ethical website development and maintenance https://edri.org/files/ethical_web_dev_web.pdf
Turkey restored the access to Wikipedia after blocking its content for more than two and a half years.
This latest development follows a 26 December 2019 ruling by the Constitutional Court of Turkey that the block imposed by the Turkish government was unconstitutional. Earlier on Thursday, the Turkish Constitutional Court made the full text of that ruling available to the public, and shortly after, Wikipedia Foundation received reports that access was restored to the website.
“We are thrilled to be
reunited with the people of Turkey,” said Katherine Maher, Executive Director
of the Wikimedia Foundation. “At Wikimedia we are committed to protecting
everyone’s fundamental right to access information. We are excited to share
this important moment with our Turkish contributor community on behalf of
knowledge-seekers everywhere.”
Wikipedia filed a petition also before the European Court of Human
Rights in spring of last year, and in July, the Court granted the case priority status.
Wikipedia is a global free knowledge resource written and edited
by people around the world.
More than 85 percent of the articles on Wikipedia are in languages
other than English, which includes the Turkish Wikipedia’s more than 335,000
articles, written by Turkish-speaking volunteers for Turkish-speaking people.
Serbia and Poland are the leading countries in south and central Europe when it comes to information, government and removal requests, says Twitter’s report, which provides insights into the trends and analytics of Twitter and Periscope.
Its latest published data, which cover the period from January to June 2019, show Poland sent 56 account information requests. Based on the received inquiries, Twitter produced information in only 2 per cent of them.
Information requests include government and non-government legal requests that the social network company received for account information, including Twitter and Periscope.
The second-ranking country in the same period was Serbia, from where 27 account information requests were directed. Twitter produced some information in more cases concerning Serbia than Poland – in 7 per cent of them.
The Czech Republic and North Macedonia share third place when it comes to information requests; both sent four requests. Twitter did not produce any information based on them.
Bosnia sent three account information requests over the period. Twitter also didn’t produce any information from them.
Kosovo and Montenegro only submitted emergency disclosure requests – one each. Twitter produced zero information from them.
Case-by-case
Twitter may disclose account information to law enforcement agencies in response to a valid emergency disclosure request.
“We evaluate such requests on a case-by-case basis to determine if there is information to support a good-faith belief that there is an imminent threat, involving danger of death or serious physical injury to a person,” Twitter said in its explanation.
In these situations, it added, if there is information relevant to averting or mitigating a threat, Twitter may disclose that information to law-enforcement bodies.
When it came to emergency disclosure requests by governments between January and June 30, 2019, Poland and Serbia again led, with 21 and 13 emergency disclosure requests.
In Poland’s case, in 5 per cent of the requests, Twitter produced some information. For Serbia, the figure was 15 per cent. The Czech Republic directed three emergency disclosure requests to Twitter, but the company didn’t produce any information based on them. Kosovo and Montenegro sent one request, but no information was produced.
Legal demands
Removal requests include worldwide legal demands from governments and other authorized reporters, as well as reports based on local laws from trusted reporters and non-governmental organizations, to remove or withhold content, Twitter explained.
It added that governments and law enforcement agencies, organizations chartered to combat discrimination, and lawyers representing individuals are among the many complainants that submit such legal requests.
Poland was also the leader in this field, submitting 10 legal demands – but Twitter did not withhold any content as a result of them. Serbia made two such demands, and Albania one, but again – they did not result in content being withheld.
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.
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