Sergiu Bozianu, president of the Association for the Protection of Privacy in Moldova, told BIRN in an interview that respect for privacy remains a problem in Moldova, especially when it comes to the so-called force institutions.
The lawyer says the authorities should follow the European pattern and create a unique register of all intercepted ways of communication, surveillance or special investigative measures.
“Special investigative measures are of a secretive nature. Nobody must know them, or we won’t catch thieves anymore. But every special investigative measure should be recorded somewhere,” he says.
He also says that, after a time, if the prosecutors do not find anything about the person who was the target of the special measures, that person should be notified about the procedures.
When it comes to the General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, Moldova, despite having adopted this European law, has implemented it in an ambiguous way, reflecting the fact that parliamentarians do not seem eager to take a strong stand on the matter.
In June 2019, in the last days of Pavel Filip’s Democratic Party government, an journalistic investigation done by media outlet RISE Moldova revealed that the Interior Minister had authorized special surveillance actions on 52 members of the pro-European opposition, civil society members and journalists.
The 52 were psychically monitored, their phones tapped and cameras and microphones were even installed in their apartments. These major violations of their private lives were justified by alleged suspicions that they were planning a coup.
“From what I know from the media – because there have been no official reactions – some criminal cases have started [on these cases of illegal surveillance],” Bozianu said.
“But given the level of public interest in this activity, the bodies concerned should come up with statements on the subject – to clearly state what was done, and what the results were,” he added.
Bozianu mentioned another big problem in Moldova on privacy, besides the questionable actions of the authorities.
“We are talking here about private security agencies and the detectives who confuse their security activity in the private sector with police interception,” he said.
Bozianu said members of private security agencies often do exactly what the police do, even though they are not allowed to, by law. “Usually, these are former police officers or secret service employees, and they do the same activities in the private sector after they leave the official system,” he explained.
Confusion about what law really says:
Moldova first adopted a law on the protection of personal data in 2007-2008, after it ratified Convention 108 of the Council of Europe’s 1981 treaty for the protection of individuals regarding the automated processing of personal data. This was replaced by the current law, Law 133, for the protection of personal data, that remains in force until now.
The Moldovan lawyer, Sergiu Bozianu, speaking at a conference about the rights to a private life in Chisinau, Moldova, September 18, 2019. Photo: Sergiu Bozianu`s Facebook account
But Bozianu said it was problematic that communication officers of state institutions in Moldova now often refuse to reply to media requests for information by misinterpreting the protection of personal data law.
“Lately, it has become fashionable to invoke the regime of personal data. But this does not mean that [information] should not be published and revealed, if the grounds are that it is of public interest or concerns public money and public offices. It must be published,” he added.
He also criticised the “selective justice” in the past years by which some TV channels seemed to have preferential access to the personal data of important politicians – usually political adversaries of the authorities, like the former jailed prime minister Vlad Filat, the archenemy of the oligarch Vlad Plahotniuc, who still owns the biggest media empire in Moldova.
The lawyer also argues that the present law has flaws, with high corruption trials mostly kept secret. “When it comes to the divorce of two spouses, everything is published, about how they cheated, with whom, if they got hit and so on,” he complained.
“Today, we have a major problem with the publication of court rulings. We publish data when it is not needed – and do not publish data when it is needed. Corruption cases are all anonymised,” he said.
For those who break the privacy law, there are five types of penalty, with a maximum fine of 15,000 lei [750 euros] applicable. Theoretically, prison is also possible, stipulated in Article 177 of the penal code on the inviolability of personal life.
However, while this article is taken from Russian legislation, the law on the protection of personal data was transposed from EU law, namely from Directive 9546.
“We have tried to make a hybrid that does not work,” he suggests. “We have introduced something with national specific [judiciary provisions], and from a predictable European act, have made an unpredictable law that is outdated and inapplicable,” he adds.
Moves to improve law stuck in parliament:
The General Data Protection Regulation came into force in Moldova on May 25, 2018. Bozianu has been fighting for amendments since then, but a bill with these amendments has now been in the parliament since 2018 – although it was won a positive vote at the first reading.
Moldovan deputies taking a vote in the Parliament. Photo: EPA/Doru Dumitru
“This bill is a very important one for us, because it comes with a new regulation in the field of data protection, and from a European perspective,” Bozianu said.
The lawyer said it was imperative for Moldova to better implement all European law requirements, especially from the perspective of trade with EU markets.
“We need to have a law that would give us fair competition in relation to other economic agents,” he says. “If a Moldovan company wants to enter the European market or provide services there, it must comply with European requirements regarding GDPR,” he stresses.
Bozianu says Moldova must comply with European GDPR regarding social media accounts as well. He argues that if Moldovan citizens do certain actions on Facebook, they now risk being sanctioned under European GDPR.
“European GPDR applies in many situations in Moldova … when we store in the cloud on Facebook’s server, we actually store in the EU,” he notes. “All the information about Facebook users is in the EU – and that is where the GDPR applies,” he concludes.
Executive directors of 11 international NGOs released an open letter calling on the leaders of Internet Society (ISOC) and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to stop the sale of the .ORG top-level domain to private equity firm Ethos Capital.
“.ORG is the place where civil society and NGOs reside in
the digital environment. Both the physical and virtual world have become
increasingly inhospitable and risky for civil society organizations who face
constant surveillance, online censorship, and even more physical risks and
legal restrictions on their operations and personnel. This proposed sale
presents an additional danger to civil society and undermines the safety and
stability of the digital space for countless non-governmental organizations,
their partners, and their broader communities,” the letter reads.
Signers include the directors of Greenpeace International, Human Rights Watch, International Trade Union Confederation, Amnesty International, 350.org, Transparency International, Access Now, Sierra Club, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Consumer Reports, and Color of Change. The letter is being officially released in Davos at the World Economic Forum, where global business, government, and social leaders are gathered to discuss priorities for 2020 and beyond.
“Free expression around the world is increasingly endangered by government and corporate players, which is why we are joining other civil society organizations in making public our concerns over the .ORG sale,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “The internet is crucial to the integrity of civil liberties and human rights work, and also the safety of those doing it. The security of civil society should not be entrusted to private equity.”
“Even more so than what .ORG would look like in the next five years, I’m deeply worried about its fate in 2040,” said Brett Solomon, Executive Director of Access Now. “If .ORG is transferred to the private sector, it would inevitably make its way into the hands of those who stand to gain from its control and are willing the pay the price to have it — that could be, for example, the Saudi or Chinese government, or surveillance tech investors like Novalpina Capital.”
There has been a resounding rejection of the sale from
the .ORG community and other concerned stakeholders around the world, in
particular due to the lack of transparency around the deal and the absence of
safeguards for the domain’s continued stability, security, and
accessibility. Nearly 700 organizations and
over 20,000 individuals have signed on to the SaveDotOrg petition calling to stop the sale.
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.
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.
Freedom on the Net is a comprehensive study of internet freedom in 65 countries around the globe, covering 87 percent of the world’s internet users. It tracks improvements and declines in internet freedom conditions each year. The countries included in the study have been selected to represent diverse geographical regions and regime types. In-depth reports on each country can be found at freedomonthenet.org.
More than 70
analysts contributed to this year’s edition, using a 21-question research
methodology that addresses internet access, freedom of expression, and privacy
issues. In addition to ranking countries by their internet freedom score, the
project offers a unique opportunity to identify global trends related to the
impact of information and communication technologies on democracy.
Country-specific data underpinning this year’s trends is available online. This
report, the ninth in its series, focuses on developments that occurred between
June 2018 and May 2019.
Of the 65
countries assessed, 33 have been on an overall decline since June 2018,
compared with 16 that registered net improvements. The biggest score declines took
place in Sudan and Kazakhstan followed by Brazil, Bangladesh, and Zimbabwe.
In Sudan,
nationwide protests sparked by devastating economic hardship led to the ouster
of President Omar al-Bashir after three decades in power. Authorities blocked
social media platforms on several occasions during the crisis, including a
two-month outage, in a desperate and ultimately ineffective attempt to control
information flows. The suspension of the constitution and the declaration of a
state of emergency further undermined free expression in the country.
Harassment and violence against journalists, activists, and ordinary users
escalated, generating multiple allegations of torture and other abuse.
In
Kazakhstan, the unexpected resignation of longtime president Nursultan
Nazarbayev—and the sham vote that confirmed his chosen successor in
office—brought simmering domestic discontent to a boil. The government
temporarily disrupted internet connectivity, blocked over a dozen local and
international news websites, and restricted access to social media platforms in
a bid to silence activists and curb digital mobilization. Also contributing to
the country’s internet freedom decline were the government’s efforts to
monopolize the mobile market and implement real-time electronic surveillance.
The victory
of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s October 2018 presidential election proved a
watershed moment for digital election interference in the country. Unidentified
actors mounted cyberattacks against journalists, government entities, and
politically engaged users, even as social media manipulation reached new
heights. Supporters of Bolsonaro and his far-right “Brazil over Everything, God
above Everyone” coalition spread homophobic rumors, misleading news, and
doctored images on YouTube and WhatsApp. Once in office, Bolsonaro hired
communications consultants credited with spearheading the sophisticated
disinformation campaign.
In
Bangladesh, citizens organized mass protests calling for better road safety and
other reforms, and a general election was marred by irregularities and
violence. To maintain control over the population and limit the spread of
unfavorable information, the government resorted to blocking independent news
websites, restricting mobile networks, and arresting journalists and ordinary
users alike.
Deteriorating
economic conditions in Zimbabwe made the internet less affordable. As civil
unrest spread throughout the country, triggering a violent crackdown by
security forces, authorities restricted connectivity and blocked social media
platforms.
China confirmed its status as
the world’s worst abuser of internet freedom for the fourth consecutive year. Censorship reached unprecedented
extremes as the government enhanced its information controls in advance of the
30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and in the face of widespread
antigovernment protests in Hong Kong. In a relatively new tactic,
administrators shuttered individual accounts on the hugely popular WeChat
social media platform for any sort of “deviant” behavior, including minor
infractions such as commenting on environmental disasters, which encouraged
pervasive self-censorship. Officials have reported removing tens of thousands
of accounts for allegedly “harmful” content on a quarterly basis. The campaign
cut individuals off from a multifaceted tool that has become essential to
everyday life in China, used for purposes ranging from transportation to
banking. This blunt penalty has also narrowed avenues for digital mobilization
and further silenced online activism.
Internet
freedom declined in the United States. While the online environment remains
vibrant, diverse, and free from state censorship, this report’s coverage period
saw the third straight year of decline. Law enforcement and immigration
agencies expanded their surveillance of the public, eschewing oversight,
transparency, and accountability mechanisms that might restrain their actions.
Officials increasingly monitored social media platforms and conducted
warrantless searches of travelers’ electronic devices to glean information
about constitutionally protected activities such as peaceful protests and
critical reporting. Disinformation was again prevalent around major political
events like the November 2018 midterm elections and congressional confirmation
hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Both domestic and foreign
actors manipulated content for political purposes, undermining the democratic
process and stoking divisions in American society. In a positive development
for privacy rights, the Supreme Court ruled that warrants are required for law
enforcement agencies to access subscriber-location records from third parties.
Only 16
countries earned improvements in their internet freedom scores, and most gains
were marginal. Ethiopia recorded the
biggest improvement this year. The April 2018 appointment of Prime Minister
Abiy Ahmed led to an ambitious reform agenda that loosened restrictions on the
internet. Abiy’s government unblocked 260 websites, including many known to
report on critical political issues. Authorities also lifted a state of
emergency imposed by the previous government, which eased legal restrictions on
free expression, and reduced the number of people imprisoned for online
activity. Although the government continued to impose network shutdowns, they
were temporary and localized, unlike the nationwide shutdowns that had occurred
in the past.
Other
countries also benefited from an opening of the online environment following
political transitions. A new coalition government in Malaysia made good on some
of its democratic promises after winning May 2018 elections and ending the
six-decade reign of the incumbent coalition. Local and international websites
that were critical of the previous government were unblocked, while
disinformation and the impact of paid commentators known as “cybertroopers”
began to abate. However, these positive developments were threatened by a rise
in harassment, notably against LGBT+ users and an independent news website, and
by the 10-year prison term imposed on a user for Facebook comments that were
deemed insulting to Islam and the prophet Muhammad.
In Armenia, positive changes
unleashed by the 2018 Velvet Revolution continued, with reformist prime
minister Nikol Pashinyan presiding over a reduction in restrictions on content
and violations of users’ rights. In particular, violence against online
journalists declined, and the digital news media enjoyed greater freedom from
economic and political pressures.
Iceland became the world’s
best protector of internet freedom, having registered no civil or criminal cases against
users for online expression during the coverage period. The country boasts
enviable conditions, including near-universal connectivity, limited
restrictions on content, and strong protections for users’ rights. However, a
sophisticated nationwide phishing scheme challenged this free environment and
its cybersecurity infrastructure in 2018.
Beyond the
tear gas and barricades, images of young demonstrators in Hong Kong
hauling down facial recognition towers have become iconic of the
resistance to what they say is the erosion of freedoms in the
semi-autonomous former British colony since its handover to Beijing in
1997.
China is at the
vanguard of facial recognition technology, a fact not lost on
pro-democracy protesters taking to the streets of Hong Kong since June
and increasingly met with tear gas and police batons.
The toppling of surveillance towers provides a disturbing snapshot of the possible future of anti-government demonstrations, as states enlist the growing power of human identification technologies to track citizens and their behaviour.
In the West, too, a growing number of artists, intellectuals and activists are pushing back and channelling their creativity against the growing use of Big Brother-type technologies.
Protesters cover a city monitoring camera as they walk to Kowloon station to take part in a protest event in Hong Kong, China, 22 September 2019. EPA-EFE/CHAN LONG HEI
Scott Urban is one of them, an American who since 2005 has been making custom wood eyewear.
“I thought that being an eyeglasses creator, I could make an impact to protect people’s privacy with something as simple as a pair of sunglasses,” Urban told BIRN in an email interview.
In 2016, Urban created the Reflectacles Ghost, a model that, according to Urban, “reflects both visible and infrared light to obscure the wearer’s face on cameras using infrared for illumination, as well as blocking the face to cameras using a flash.”
‘Surveillance capitalism’
But while Hong Kong’s rebellious youth is concerned with China’s surveillance state, artists like Urban say they are more worried by private companies selling facial recognition technologies rather than states like China imposing it on their citizens.
In her 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, American author and scholar Shoshana Zuboff writes that a substantial part of the material collected by facial recognition systems and other data gathering technologies is “fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’, and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later.”
Such products are then “traded” in a marketplace Zuboff calls behavioural future markets’ and which comprise companies “willing to lay bets on our future behaviour.”
An unidentified man wears the prostethic mask with the face of Leo Selvaggio. Photo: LEO SELVAGGIO
“After testing the Face ID system for a long time, I realised that to block 3D infrared facial mapping all we had to do was block our eyes from being seen from these technologies,” he told BIRN.
“If 3D IR mapping/scanning does not see the eyes, it is not able to understand the information as a face.”
Asked who buys his glasses, Urban, who sells via his website, said his customers come from across the political spectrum.
“In these days of polarisation and division, privacy is a unifier,” he said. “Nobody talks about it because it actually brings us closer together, but privacy advocates can be found from the far-right to the far-left and everywhere in between.”
“Surveillance capitalism,” Zuboff writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data.”
When Apple released its new iPhone X, which included a facial recognition system, in 2017, Urban responded with new models of eyeglasses that blocked infrared.
Overfeed the beast
Like Urban, most activists have focussed their efforts on hiding the facial traces that recognition systems are taught to identify.
American conceptual artist Leo Selvaggio, however, is doing the exact opposite.
Selvaggio has made available online an unlimited number of prosthetic masks reproducing his own features to help the public hide their real identity from facial recognition systems.
In a telephone interview with BIRN, Selvaggio describe his work as an “attempt to disrupt surveillance and facial recognition systems” by “creating disinformation” about the individuals who unwillingly feed them.
Instead of starving the beast, Selvaggio overfeeds it with fake information.
The artist has personally tested its results with photos of friends wearing his masks posted on Facebook and that were identified by the system and tagged as Selvaggio.
Asked about the legal risks, Selvaggio said that if he was mistakenly arrested for a crime committed by someone wearing his mask it would provide an opportunity to prove his point and expose the perils of relying on automated facial recognition in court.
Well aware of the limited scope of his initiative, Selvaggio nevertheless said such “guerrilla warfare” had the power to inspire others.
“If one person with almost no money can activate this type of resistance, imagine what would happen if we all did something similar,” he said.
Serbia: Activists Demand Face Recognition Information
Belgrade-based NGO CRTA organised a street action called ‘We Have the Right to Know: Where are They Monitoring Us?’ on Wednesday, urging people to demand the authorities provide information about a project to introduce surveillance camera with facial recognition capabilities in the Serbian capital.
It called on locals to write requests to the Interior Ministry, asking about the impact of the surveillance on personal data collection and protection, which the NGO will then pass on.
“This is a story about our privacy. It is not a problem if we know where we are being monitored or for what purpose, the problem is when we do not know that,” said CRTA activist Ivana Markovic.
In January, the Interior Ministry said that over next two years, police in Belgrade will install almost 1,000 stationary video surveillance cameras at 800 locations, some of which will have software for face and licence plate recognition.
Meanwhile Share Foundation, an NGO that deals with digital security and privacy, said that Chinese tech company Huawei has published a case study about cameras already installed in Belgrade on its website.
The Huawei case study says that 100 of these cameras have been installed and that “many criminal cases were solved” as a result and “police are now able to find suspects based on the stored video materials thanks to Huawei intelligent technology”.
Gordan Duhacek, a journalist from Croatian website Index.hr, was fined around 100 euros at Zagreb’s Misdemeanour Court on Monday for posted a Twitter message in July last year, which discussed police treatment of arrested people and contained the anti-police acronym ‘ACAB’ (‘All Coppers are Bastards’).
Duhacek was arrested at Zagreb airport when he was about to leave Croatia on Monday morning and spent the day in custody before the hearing.
He also faces a court judgment this week for another Twitter message he posted, a satirical rewrite of the lyrics of a Croatian patriotic song.
“They charged me for one tweet that said ‘ACAB’. And another thing, I am charged because I satirically published a version of [Croatian patriotic song] ‘Vila Velebita’ which refers to faeces spilling into the Adriatic,” Duhacek said on Monday evening outside the Misdemeanour Court building when he was released.
“I am accused [in the case of the second tweet] of offending citizens’ moral feelings of citizens – they are offended by the rewriting of an old song that nobody sings,” he added.
He said that the verdict on the ‘Vila Velebita’ tweet will be issued in three days.
According to a Croatian law dating back to the 1970s, which was quoted by police while giving their explanation for the ‘ACAB’ arrest, “whoever discredits or insults public authorities or officials while carrying out, or in connection with carrying out their duties or their lawful orders, shall be punished by a fine equivalent in the national currency of 50 to 200 Deutschmarks or imprisonment for up to 30 days”.
Incredible. Croatian police arrested @indexhr journalist Gordan Duhaček (@Prajdizan) over two tweets. One featured the acronym “ACAB” and the other one is a satirical poem. @VladaRH#mediafreedom hello??
Croatian police and Interior Minister Davor Bozinovic insisted that Duhacek was not detained for his Twitter posts but for not responding to a police summons.
As Duhacek was returning from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Croatia last weekend, he was told on the border that the police were looking for him.
“On that occasion, an invitation was given to him, instructing him to report to the official premises of the Zagreb Police Department in Heinzelova Street on September 16, which he did not do,” the Zagreb Police Department said in a statement.
It is deeply worrying to see that a journalist has been arrested in Croatia for his tweets. In an EU member-state, whose EU Commissioner-nominated, Dubravka Šuica should soon be in charge of Democracy promotion. Solidarity with @Prajdizan.
But Duhacek insisted that he went to the police station in Heinzelova Street on Sunday to see what the summons was about as he planned to leave Zagreb for a business trip to Germany.
He said that a police officer told him that he could travel but and that he should contact the police when he returned. However, police officers then arrested him at Zagreb airport on Monday morning.
The Croatian Journalists’ Association, HND, said in a statement that it strongly condemned the treatment of a journalist who was “arrested like a hardened criminal at Zagreb airport for two satirical postings on his Twitter profile”.
“The Croatian Journalists’ Association warns that the police treatment of Duhacek is unprecedented and cannot be interpreted as anything other than intimidation,” the HND added.
Meanwhile reporters from neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina have signed a petition in support of Duhacek.
Anonymous hackers have got hold of 11-Gigabytes of the private information of millions of Bulgarian taxpayers, Bulgarian mediaannounced on Monday.
The files, sorted into 57 folders, include personal details such as Personal Identification Numbers, names, addresses and even the declared income of Bulgarians.
The leak, which is likely to be named the biggest hacker attack in Bulgarian e-history, targeted the National Revenue Agency, NRA.
The authenticity of the hacked data is being checked by the NRA, while the National Security Agency, DANS, and the Interior Ministry are investigating the case, all three institutions announced on their respective websites.
“Your government is retarded. The state of your cyber security is a parody,” the email which sent the link said.
It added that this was only part of the total information that the hackers had accessed, which includes 10 more Gigabytes of information and a total of 110 compromised folders of data.
The personal information includes input from the employment agency, pension fund contributions and address registrations. Some of it is as old as 2007, but other information is dated June 2019.
The hackers also praised WikiLeaks creator Julian Assange and called for his immediate release.
As a female journalist in Serbia, Tatjana Vojtehovski had faced online intimidation before.
But the attacks grew worse in 2015 after
she hosted a talk show on Serbian television on paedophilia in the
Serbian Orthodox Church, a taboo subject for many socially conservative
Serbs.
“I admire people who claim they’re not
afraid. I am afraid,” said 49-year-old Vojtehovski. “People say, ‘it’s
only online, it’s the virtual world’. I say that’s not true because
those people exist. They exist and they are on the streets.”
Last month, the appeals court in the
Serbian capital, Belgrade, sentenced a Serbian man named Branko Tomic to
eight months of home confinement after he pleaded guilty to making
death threats against Vojtehovski and her 28-year-old daughter via
Twitter.
Tomic’s crime was just one in a growing global epidemic of online attacks against women journalists.
The Balkan region is no exception, and while Vojtehovski received a measure of justice, others say they see little point in complaining to employers or the police given what critics say is a systematic failure to punish the perpetrators, according to the findings of a BIRN analysis.
“What struck me the most was how people looked away, letting it happen,” said Milena Perovic Korac, a journalist at the Montenegrin weekly magazine Monitor, who has been the target of such abuse since 2011. “There was no reaction, and right then that was the most terrifying thing.”
Global trend
In a 2018 survey by the Washington-based International Women’s Media Foundation, IWMF, nearly two thirds of women journalists who responded said they had been threatened or harassed online at least once.
Also in 2018, the International Federation of Journalists, IFJ, reported that 66 per cent of women journalists who were victims of online harassment had been attacked based on their gender.
And for the assailants, access has never been easier.
Social media has become an indispensible tool for journalists, but simultaneously exposes them to instant praise and persecution, 24 hours a day.
According to the IWMF survey, 90 per cent of respondents reported a rise in online threats over the past five years and 82 per cent said digital attacks had increased too, “including such activities as having social accounts hacked or data stolen or compromised.”
Online abuse of women journalists target not only their work but their gender, frequently referencing their appearance, family life and personal relationships.
‘Whore’, ‘slut’ and ‘prostitute’ are just some of the insults women journalists report receiving online every day.
Experts say such attacks are sexist in nature and used to intimidate, discredit and frighten, often affecting how the journalist does her work and how she behaves in her private life.
Tracking such threats in the Balkans is not easy. Authorities and journalist associations rarely differentiate online threats from other forms of intimidation, such as verbal or physical abuse.
Serbia’s climate of intimidation
In its latest report, U.S.-based democracy watchdog Freedom House characterised Serbia as ‘partially free’, and cited an “environment of intimidation and harassment that inhibits journalists’ day-to-day work”.
“Smears and verbal harassment from politicians and online accounts are omnipresent, and attacks by government-friendly tabloids are a regular occurrence. Media workers are frequently called “traitors” and “foreign mercenaries,” it wrote.
Statistics gathered by the SHARE Foundation, a Serbian-based non-governmental organisation dealing with digital rights, support the report’s findings.
In 2018, SHARE registered four cases of online threats against female journalists. One person was arrested in May of that year.
SHARE registered another four just in the first five months of this year, including two against the prominent female investigative journalist Brankica Stankovic, who received police protection in 2009 due to death threats made against her.
SHARE said the deputy mayor of the southern Serbian city of Nis had also insulted female journalist Sena Todorovic via Twitter and the editor of the website Kolubarske, Darija Rankovic, had also been subjected to pressure.
In 2017, SHARE registered two such cases, six in 2016 and seven in 2015.
In Bosnia, for example, the local association of journalists said it had registered 52 attacks against female journalists, online and otherwise, between 2016 and April 2019.
While a number of cases resulted in convictions, “a significant number of cases have been closed due to the non-existence of grounded suspicion that they represented criminal acts,” said Una Telegrafcic, a lawyer at the Free Media Helpline of the Association of BH Journalists.
Safejournalist.net, a regional platform partly funded by the European Union and which advocates for media freedom and the safety of journalists, has documented 34 attacks in general against women journalists in Bosnia since 2015, 32 in Serbia, 13 in Kosovo, 10 in North Macedonia and eight in Montenegro.
Each country was once part of the socialist Yugoslav federation, which unraveled in the war in the 1990s.
Over the same period, the Council of Europe, Europe’s chief rights body, has received reports of seven such cases in Serbia, six in North Macedonia, six in Bosnia and four in Montenegro.
In Montenegro, Perovic Korac and others at the weekly Monitor were the target of an orchestrated campaign by Montenegrin media supportive of the ruling Democratic Party of Socialists, DPS.
Neither the government nor the prosecutor’s office responded to her complaints about a litany of online threats, so Perovic Korac and another journalist launched a private lawsuit in 2011.
A verdict was issued in the first instance in June last year, ordering Montenegrin government spokesman Srdjan Kusovac and the state to pay them 2,000 euros for insults and hate speech published in the state daily Pobjeda, where Kusovac was formerly editor-in-chief.
“In that first moment, you are on your own,” Perovic Korac told BIRN.
Psychological impact
The IWMF, in its 2018 survey, reported that a majority of abused women, 63 per cent, said the attacks against them had left psychological scars in terms of anxiety, fear or stress.
Another “alarming conclusion” of the IFJ report was that a huge majority of the cases go unpunished, with only 53 per cent of victims of online abuse reporting the attacks to their media management, union or police. In two thirds of those cases, nothing happened, it said.
Of those who chose not to report the abuse, 75 per cent said they did not believe doing so would make any difference, while 23 per cent were concerned about the effect on their work.
“It is worrying that women journalists are getting used to dealing with online harassment by themselves and assuming these situations as “common”,” the IFJ said.
Ivana Stoimenovska, a psychologist in Skopje, capital of North Macedonia, said trauma experienced by women who are the targets of sexual harassment often goes unnoticed by society, “because of the culture of concealment and silence that does not provide women with a proper venue to share their experiences and overcome fears.”
Meri Jordanovska, a Macedonian journalist at the Makfax news agency who has herself been targeted by such abuse, said that speaking out was vital for emotional healing and preventing more such attacks.
“By sharing, by opening up, you realise that you are not alone with this problem and that many other women journalists are facing the same forms of harassment, be it online or offline”, Jordanovska told BIRN.
For Jovana Gligorijevic, a journalist at the liberal Serbian weekly Vreme, such abuse has become a part of everyday life.
“Someone calling himself Damian Ky messaged me just to tell me I’m an Albanian whore, that he wants to bash my head in and that journalists are the worst kind of people who constantly disparage Serbia,” Gligorijevic told BIRN.
In his next message, ‘Ky’ asked why Gligorijevic did not kill herself.
For this story, Gligorijevic recorded all the online threats she received over a period of one week.
They ranged from calls on her to take her own life to messages describing her as “a sack of crap that lives in a shop window in the Red Light district,” a “vaginal entrepreneur”, a “frustrated childless whore” and a “low-paid journalist who occasionally goes to Amsterdam to work as a prostitute to make ends meet”.
Perfect storm
Telegrafcic, the lawyer at the Free Media Helpline in Bosnia, said those who abused female journalists often assumed they would not resist or report the attacks and that comments regarding a journalist’s physical appearance or marital status reflected entrenched chauvinistic attitudes in the Balkans.
Female journalists are also the victims of chauvinistic comments by politicians, interviewees and their own editors or directors, Telegrafcic said.
Media expert Mehmed Halilovic said female journalists in the Balkans faced a perfect storm of widespread misogyny and disdain for journalists in general.
“There is an assumption when it comes to these macho men – they think it is easier to deal with female journalists, be it through direct threats or disparagement,” Halilovic told BIRN.
“Violence is the basic tool used by the public, which has a negative attitude towards male and female journalists, but unfortunately the authorities are also using it.”
In Kosovo, the head of the Kosovo Association of Journalists, Gentiana Begolli, said management and editorial positions in media outlets were dominated by men.
“Women journalists themselves hesitate to report the threats against them, taking into consideration thegeneral approach towards women in our society,” Begolli told BIRN.
In North Macedonia, Kristina Ozimec, chief editor of the Platform for Investigative Journalism and Analysis, said threats and harassment directed against female journalists “have been left largely unaddressed for so long that they have unfortunately become commonplace, sort of an accepted form of professional risk for women engaged in this profession.”
“The harassment, often on a sexual basis, does not only come from individuals outside the workplace but also often in various forms from male colleagues in a position of power,” Ozimec told BIRN.
In Serbia, Vojtehovski said she was still dealing with the psychological impact of the online abuse she receives.
“I don’t know what they look like and whether they will cross the boundaries of written communication,” she said of her tormentors. “You live with it and you are supposed to get used to it. I never did.”
SHARE Foundation said on Tuesday that it has sent letters to 20 companies, including Facebook, Twitter and Google, asking them to appoint a representative in Serbia to whom all questions related to personal data processing can be addressed.
The NGO said that Serbia’s new Law on Personal Data Protection, which will come into force on August 21 this year, says that almost all major IT companies must appoint representatives in the country.
“Bearing in mind that Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and other IT giants process citizens’ data in Serbia in order to provide services, they have the obligation to appoint a local representative,” it said.
It added that the policy of most of these companies is to not see Serbia as a country in which EU legislation is applicable, which leads to a situation in which Serbians’ rights in relation to personal data are hardly guaranteed at all.
“On the other hand, if Facebook or Google had representatives in Serbia, the assurance that citizens could exercise their rights or even have the option of initiating a dispute before the relevant [legal] authorities would be considerably enhanced,” SHARE concluded.
The Serbian NGO also sent its letter to Amazon, Snap Inc – Snapchat, AliExpress, Viber, Yandex, Booking, Airbnb, Ryanair, Wizzair, eSky, Yahoo, Netflix, Twitch, Kupujem prodajem (Buying Selling), Toptal, GoDaddy and Upwork.
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