BIRN Launches Online Community to Connect Journalists

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network launched a new cross-border journalism platform on Wednesday, aiming to connect more than 1,000 journalists who took part in BIRN’s programmes as fellows, trainees and grantees, as well as other journalists reporting on South-East and Central Europe.

BIRD Community offers a unique secure online environment in which to exchange information, as well as a comprehensive database and a rich contacts directory of experts across the Western Balkans.

The idea was the result of more than 15 years of experience in connecting journalists across the Balkans and beyond to produce complex regional analyses and cross-border investigations, as well as BIRN’s experience in providing comprehensive training in investigative reporting. 

The aim of BIRD Community is to make journalistic work much easier and take journalistic networking to the next level. By joining BIRD Community, journalists will get:

  • A secure environment in which they can easily reach out to BIRN’s team members and other colleagues from our alumni network across South-East and Central Europe.
  • Free access to BIRD Source, an easily searchable and comprehensive database with thousands of documents collected by BIRN over the years and exclusive data scraped from public registries and state institutions’ websites as well as information obtained through Freedom of Information requests. BIRD Source also offers journalists the opportunity to share their own documents and leaks, and has a tool that allows them to sketch a diagram online to summarise investigative findings with other journalists.
  • Access to BIRD Directory, with around 1,400 names and contacts of experts from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia.
  • Access to Forum in which journalists can easily communicate with other members, privately or publicly.
  • The opportunity to send requests for help, information and advice from other journalists by posting them in the Bulletin Board section. The responses from other members can be made visible to all users or can be kept private.
  • Updates on grants and training opportunities. 

Members can create public or private topics in the Forum section – the former will be visible to all members, allowing any of them to join the discussion, while with the latter, the creator can choose which members will be able to participate. 

The Bulletin Board section is a place to share opportunities with others, ask for help, swap contacts or find a journalist who specialises in a particular topic. In the Bulletin Board section, members can leave posts which can either be private or be seen by all other members. 

Once members subscribe to the posts and topics they want to follow on the Forum and Bulletin Board, they will receive an email each time there is an updates. 

BIRD Community is part of a broader platform that BIRN introduced last year, BIRN Investigative Resource Desk (BIRD) – an innovative interactive platform created for professional and citizen journalists who want to keep up-to-date with the fast-changing world of technology without sacrificing their ethics or the standards of professional journalism.

Poland Pushes Law to Limit ‘Censorship’ by Internet Giants

Polish Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro announced on December 17 the government has prepared a draft law on the protection of freedom of speech online, arguing that, “There cannot be any censorship of the freedom of speech – freedom of speech and debate is the essence of democracy.”

The issue of online censorship has gained traction over the last few days after the biggest global social media platforms removed or suspended the accounts of US President Donald Trump as a consequence of his using those platforms to mobilise supporters to challenge the legitimate result of the presidential election and march on the Capitol on January 6, which ended with five fatalities. The restrictions have caused controversy around the world, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel describing Trump’s ban from Twitter as “problematic”.

On Tuesday, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki appeared to jump on the bandwagon by condemning the unbridled power of the internet giants. “The censorship of freedom of speech, the domain of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, is returning today in the form of a new, commercial mechanism fighting against those who think differently,” Morawiecki wrote in a Facebook post on January 12.

The Polish government’s condemnation of the events in Washington has been softer than that of other EU states, with President Andrzej Duda calling them “an internal matter for the United States”.

According to Poland’s Ministry of Justice, the draft law will state that social media companies cannot remove posts or block accounts unless the content is in breach of Polish law. If that happens, the new law states that users will have the right to file a complaint with the social media company, which will then have 48 hours to deal with the request.

The possibility to then appeal the decision of the social media companies before a newly created special court – the Court Defending the Freedom of Speech – will also be introduced.

Digital rights groups active in Poland stress that it is premature to comment on the contents of the Polish draft law before it is made public.

“Media accounts speak about some solutions to address the problem of the so-called private censorship – the redundant, arbitrary removal of content by social media platforms – and about facilitating access to the justice system in case of conflicts with global internet companies,” Dorota Glowacka, from the digital rights group Panoptykon, told BIRN. “The EU draft regulation Digital Services Act announced in December is going in the same direction and generally we consider this direction to be correct.”

The Polish draft law was introduced to the public just two days after the European Commission presented its proposals for two continent-wide regulation packages: the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, both of which introduce new rules for internet giants operating in the EU.

The proposed Digital Services Act – if approved – would require platforms to do more to limit the spread of illegal content, while at the same time regulate the manner in which internet platforms can block users or remove content. A decision to ban or block content or a user would have to be made in a more transparent manner, thereby reducing arbitrariness. The platforms will also have to inform users about the reasons for the ban and users will have the ability to present counter-arguments. An independent system of supervision over the final decisions of the platforms will also be introduced.

Report: Turkey Remains World Beater in Twitter Censorship

Social media giant Twitter’s transparency report for the first six months of 2020 said Turkey continued to lead the world in terms of Twitter censorship in many categories, including the highest number of third-party takedown requests, court orders and accounts and tweets withheld.

Turkey had the highest number of combined requests including court orders and other legal demands, with 45,776 requests. It was followed by Japan and Russia, which made 45,776 and 30,436 requests respectively.

Turkey also at the top of the list when it comes to the number of court orders it sent to Twitter. It sent 6,513 such requests in the first half of 2020. Russia followed far behind with 2,972.

In other legal demands categories, meaning non-court order requests, Turkey again topped the list with 39,263 requests made in the first half of 2020, followed by Japan, which made 38,814 requests, followed in third place by Russia, which submitted 27,464 such requests.

Turkey also sent 347 information requests to Twitter, which did not comply any of them.

Turkey remains in number one place for the total number of accounts specified for closure/action under court orders and other legal demands. It specified 99,840 accounts for closure or other actions, followed by Indonesia, which sought action on 74,660 accounts. Japan came third, with 47,472 accounts.

In terms of accounts withheld by Twitter, Turkey again had the highest number globally with 2,501 withheld accounts, followed by Russia with 340 and India with 238.

In terms of tweets withheld by Twitter, Turkey was also number one globally, responsible for 12,135 of the total of 28,542 tweets withheld in that period. Some 42 per cent of all tweets withheld globally were from Turkey.

According to the Twitter report, 58 accounts of verified journalists and news outlets from around the world were subject to 333 legal demands in the period in consideration. Most of these legal demands originated either from India, 149, or from Turkey, 142 – together making them responsible for 291 of the 333 legal demands.

While Turkey leads in terms of Twitter censorship, and made the highest number of requests in several categories, it now aims to expand its control over social media companies with a new digital law.

Social media companies were already fined twice by Turkey for defying a new law on appointing official representatives to the country.

Experts fear that if it does appoint an official representative to Turkey, as demanded, Twitter will have to respond more often to official demands.

“The removal of content rate [based on Turkey’s requests] was [only] 0.33 per cent for the first six months of 2020. Turkey wants Twitter to come to the country [in terms of a representative] for this reason,” Yaman Akdeniz, a Turkish digital rights activist wrote on Twitter on Wednesday.

“Coming to Turkey will result with Twitter becoming complicit in rights violations and would be against the current approach and policy adopted by Twitter regarding demands from Turkey,” Akdeniz added.

So far, only YouTube and Russia’s VK social media platform have appointed legal representatives to Turkey. Facebook, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, has said it will not appoint a representative while Twitter is still undecided on the matter.

Turkey Investigates Facebook, WhatsApp Over New Privacy Agreement

Turkey’s Competition Board on Monday said an investigation had been launched into Facebook and WhatsApp over a new privacy agreement that forces WhatsApp user to share its data with Facebook. Users who reject the terms of the agreement will not be able to use WhatsApp after February 8.

The Turkish competition watchdog said the requirement allowing collection of that data should be suspended until the investigation is over.

“WhatsApp Inc and WhatsApp LLC companies will be known as Facebook after the new agreement and this will allow Facebook to collect more data. The board will investigate whether this violates Turkish competition law,” the board said.

The Turkish government is calling on its citizens to delete WhatsApp and to use domestic messaging app BiP instead, developed by Turkey’s mobile operator Turkcell, in addition to other secure messing apps such as Telegram and Signal.

Turkey’s presidency, ministries, state institutions and many other people have announced that they have deleted WhatsApp and downloaded other applications.

“Let’s stand against digital fascism together,” Ali Taha Koc, head of the Turkish Presidential Digital Transformation Office, said on Twitter on January 10, urging people to use the domestic BiP app.

BiP gained 1.12 million new users on Sunday alone after the new privacy agreement was introduced.

The new privacy agreement will not be in force in the EU and the UK because of its tight digital privacy law.

The EU fined Facebook 110 million euros earlier in 2017 euros for giving misleading statements on the company’s $19 billion acquisition of the internet messaging service WhatsApp in 2014.

Millions of people around the globe have abandoned WhatsApp and migrated to other messaging apps, Signal and Telegram in particular, and Signal and Telegram had server issues hosting such a large number of users.

Telegram and Signal which are accepted as the most secure messaging apps have become the most downloaded application in the past week for both Android and Apple phones users.

Share This Now! How Conspiracy Theories Swamped North Macedonia

The day starts with coffee and unread messages: a few from friends, a few work related, a paid furniture ad, and one with lots of exclamation marks that indicates that it must be read immediately before it is deleted from the Internet. This is because it reveals a big secret, hidden from ordinary people.

That “secret” may refer to the “fake” pandemic, the “dangerous” new vaccine, the “global conspiracy against Donald Trump”, the “dark truth about child-eating elites” –  an especially a popular term – and so on.

The sender or sharer may well be an ordinary person that we know personally or through social networks, and who sends such content for the first time or occasionally.

Spreading misinformation through personal messages has become increasingly common in North Macedonia, as elsewhere.

But this is not the only novelty. As the fight against fake news has intensified, with changes of algorithms on social networks and the inclusion of independent fact-checkers, so have the techniques that allow false content to remain undetected on social networks for as long as possible.

“Sending personal messages is an attempt to spread misinformation faster, before it can be detected,” explains Rosana Aleksoska, from, Fighting Fake News Narratives, F2N2, a project led by the well-known Skopje based NGO MOST, which searches for misinformation on the Internet.

Among the newer methods used to avoid detection, she notes, is the mass sharing of print screens instead of whole texts, and, in countries that use Cyrillic script like North Macedonia, Cyrillic and Latin letters are deliberately mixed.


Spreaders of misinformation are always in search of new ways to avoid detection. Illustration photo: BIRN

See and share before it’s removed

One video that recently went viral on social networks in North Macedonia, fuelling panic about COVID vaccines, was released on December 8.

In it, a former journalist appears to interpret a document outlining possible contra-indications in and side-effects from the newly developed Pfizer vaccine against COVID-19 – but presents them as established facts.

It got more than 270,000 views and 5,300 shares on Facebook.

While the video reached a large audience, those numbers only partly show just how far the misinformation spread.

The video soon found itself in the inboxes of many other people, after Facebook acquaintances sent it to them in a direct message, urging them to see it as soon as possible, before it was deleted or marked as fake.

People who believe in conspiracy theories, or regularly participate in disseminating them, send direct messages to each other, informing them that new material has been released.

At a first glance, one might think it sounds like a small obscure group, hanging out online.

But the results of a recent public opinion poll conducted by the Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group, BiEPAG, showed that only 7 per cent of the population in the region do not believe any of the best-known conspiracy theories, and over 50 per cent believe in all of them. The combined percentage of all those who said they believed in all or just in some of the theories was over 80 per cent.

With these huge numbers, it is not surprising that more misinformation also ends up in the virtual mailboxes of those who “don’t believe”, persuading them to switch sides. Some of these people receive three or four such messages a week.

What the messages have in common is that they are accompanied by urgent words: “See this before they delete it from Facebook”, or, “Share and disseminate”, or “They could no longer remain silent, take a look”, etc.

Because people pay more attention to personal messages than to other social media posts, they are more likely to see this content. They may well also spread them, explains Bojan Kordalov, a Skopje-based expert on social networks and new media.

“The way they are set up and designed, fake news gives people a strong incentive to spread them,” he said.

The pandemic was the main topic of misinformation this year, but in North Macedonia this topic intertwines with others, ranging from Euro-Atlantic integration to politics, Aleksoska from F2N2 observes.

“The object of the attack is people’s emotions – to provoke an intense reaction,” she says.

As the year went on, the subject of messages also changed. At first they focused on the “false” nature of the virus, and then later on how there was no need to wear masks or observe social distancing and other health-protection measures.

After the breakthrough in discovering a vaccine was made, the messages began to focus on the alleged dangers and health risks of vaccination.


The way they are set up and designed, fake news gives people a strong incentive to spread them. Illustration photo: BIRN

“Don’t believe, check” – as we instruct you

The video about the supposed effects of the vaccine that gained traction in North Macedonia is a typical example of what typical disinformation looks like. Similar videos are produced every day.

Among the private messages received by social networks users are videos of people posing as doctors from the US, Canada, Belgium, Britain or Germany, filming themselves with webcams, warning that vaccines may well be deadly.

In one video, which focuses on reading the instructions on the Astra Zeneca vaccine, it is also clear that the creators of fake news use the same messages as those who fight fake news, such as: “Don’t believe, check”.

However, they also provide the guidelines about what to “check”.

“Don’t trust us, investigate for yourself. For example, visit these sites. Or google this term, ChAdOx-1. See here, it says – micro cloning,” the narrator in this video can be heard saying as the inscriptions from the vaccine packaging are displayed.

“They convince us that it is safe, but the traces are here in front of us,” the narrator adds, in a dramatic tone.


The pandemic was the main topic of misinformation this year. Illustration photo: BIRN

Finding new ways to bypass filters

Although outsiders have no direct insight into exactly how social networking algorithms detect suspicious content, as they are business secrets, many experts on these technologies told BIRN that certain assumptions can be drawn.

As the creators of disinformation can also be technologically savvy,  they have likely drawn their own conclusions and seek new ways to bypass known filters.

One common alarm is when content goes viral quickly. This signals to social networks that the content needs to be checked. But if several different messages containing the same main point are sent, instead of one identical message, the protection algorithms may have a harder time detecting the content’s risk.

Apart from masking the content, spreaders of misinformation use different formats to avoid detection.

Print screens of articles and of social media posts may be shared instead of the actual articles or posts. Some users even do this with their own posts, and republish them as photos.

“Print screens are common in conducting disinformation campaigns. This is just one of the mechanisms they use,” Aleksoska explains. “The problem is much bigger, so the answer must be comprehensive and coordinated.”

Print screens are not only more difficult for the software to detect, but make it harder for people to check, especially if the name of the media outlet that published the content is omitted or cut from the photo.

The part of the internet in North Macedonia recently saw a print screen from a Swiss media outlet circulating with the title in German reading: “Currently no vaccine can be approved.” Hundreds of people shared it.

The publisher that first spread this print screen claimed that the Swiss had rejected the German vaccine “because of the risk of death”.

But the real text does not say at all that Switzerland rejected the German vaccine but only that it will first implement a risk control strategy “to prevent side effects or fatalities”.

This way, those who spread fake news have a clear advantage over those who fight to stop it.

In order to reach the original article, one has to first rewrite the title in German in a search engine, find the text with an identical title among the results and translate it with an online tool. While doing this, ten people will have since received this print screen and will just click “Share”.

Print screens in North Macedonia have also recently been used to spread untrue information about the current dispute between North Macedonia and its neighbour, Bulgaria, which has refused to allow Skopje to start EU accession talks.

Some of these posts present Bulgaria’s demands as something that North Macedonia already accepted.

Since the main bone of contention is the Macedonian language and identity, it is one of the most sensitive issues currently preoccupying the public.

Another technique used to avoid or baffle filters is mixing Cyrillic and Latin letters that are identical in meaning or form, like the letters a, e, n, x, u, j, s, as well as some others.

When a social media user complains that a post has been removed from their profile, in some cases, another user will advise them next time to mix up the letters, making it harder to detect problematic content.


Some people spread fake news because they believe in it and think they are contributing. Photo: Pixabay

Ideological foot-soldiers do the hard work

But why would anyone advise others on how to make it harder to for social networks to detect their problematic content.

Checking some of the profiles that publish and spread misinformation reveals that, besides the usual suspicious suspects – like thematic profiles with false names that only publish information from one or more sources, or people who are part of formal or informal organizations and spread their ideology – a large number of users have no known connection to disinformation networks.

Most are ordinary people who do not hide their identities, publish photos of family trips, but also from time to time share some “undiscovered truth” about the coronavirus or a “child abuse plot” – wedged between lunch recipes and pictures of walks in parks.

Fact-checkers and communication technology experts agree that disseminating misinformation is a highly organised activity, often done with a malicious intent – but also that many people share such content without hidden motives. They clearly feel a responsibility to be “on the right side”.

“Some people spread fake news because they believe in it and think that by doing so they are contributing to some kind of fight for the truth to come to light,” Kordalov explains.

This makes the fight against misinformation even more difficult, because while organised networks create and spread false news at the top, most of the work of dissemination is done by individuals and micro-communities that have no connection to them, or even between each other.

“All conspiracy theories are just pieces of the master theory that says that certain elites rule the world. The more somebody believes in that, the more likely he or she would read and share content supporting this theory,” Aleksoska notes.

However, there are some solutions. Algorithms, according to Kordalov, can be reprogrammed to recognise new forms of false news. No final answer can be found to misinformation, he admits, but the two sides constantly compete and the side that invests most effort and resources will lead in the end.

Technological competition, however, is not enough if it is not matched by stronger institutional action, because creating mistrust in institutions is one of the main goals of disinformation campaigns.

Kordalov says it is not enough for the PR services of institutions just to issue announcements rebutting fake news related to their work each time they spot it. They must be actively involved in a two-way communication and react to false news quickly.

“This is often called ‘damage control’ but this is not the point. Their [institutions’] job is to serve the citizens, and providing real information is part of that service,” he says.

One way for institutions to protect public trust in them is to provide high quality services, he adds. If they work well, and if citizens feel satisfied with them, it will be harder for disinformation to hurt them.

On 5G ‘Journey’, Opportunity at Every Turn for Balkan Economies

To Matjaz Bericic, chief technology officer at Telekom Slovenije, 5G is “not the destination, it is the journey”.

If that’s the case, the countries of the Balkans are at very different stages of that journey, but for all of them the potential benefits of the next cellular standard are vast, experts say.

“An early strategy on 5G deployment and frequency licencing could be a great opportunity for the region, as it can be seen as part of the advanced infrastructure that can attract investments from, for example, industrial production companies or multimedia production companies,” Petar Popovski, professor of wireless connectivity at Denmark’s Aalborg University, told BIRN.

“Reliable connectivity infrastructure becomes a must-have commodity, such as electricity or water,” he said.

In the Balkans, Slovenia is ahead of the rest, with Telekom, the country’s leading provider of ICT services, having already launched the first 5G mobile network in July this year. Slovenia is now one of 18 of the European Union’s 27 members with a 5G commercial network.

Bericic said the road to launch was long and complex, requiring advanced network technology and testing of the whole network chain – antennae systems, base stations, transfer systems, aggregation and core networks, services and terminal equipment. But the benefits are huge, he said.

“This evolutionarily upgrade allows users to achieve higher data transfer speeds than on the LTE/4G, while the full potential of 5G technology will become available after additional frequency bands are awarded,” Bericic told BIRN.

Various stages of rollout


Illustration. Photo: Unspash/James Yarema

Wireless connectivity experts say the Balkan region stands to benefit most from the reliable connectivity, infrastructure and services that 5G technology offers.

“The most important feature of 5G is that it is a flexible connectivity platform, capable to offer wide range of connections, from high-speed video streaming to low-latency tactile interactions with robots,” said Popovski.

At the end of November, Austrian mobile operator A1 launched a 5G network covering central areas, residential districts and business locations in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. In Croatia, A1 expects to make 5G available this month to more than 70 towns and cities.

Elsewhere in the region, Serbian mobile operator Telenor last year rolled out the first 5G base station in the country, in the Science Technology Park in the capital, Belgrade, and making it available for use by local and foreign companies, startups and students of technical faculties.

In North Macedonia, the Agency of Electronic Communications, AEK, expects to announce a tender for the allocation of radio frequencies for the introduction of 5G by the end of this year or the beginning of next, said AEK adviser Igor Bojadjiev.

“At the moment, from a technical and from a legal point of view, Macedonia has provided all the necessary conditions for starting the implementation of 5G,” Bojadjiev told BIRN.

North Macedonia is counting on 5G to aid the country’s economic development and the development of a national wireless ecosystem.

“The future economic and social development of Macedonia will largely depend on the development of new wireless technologies and digitalisation in all social spheres,” Bojadjiev said.

Vladimir Atanasovski, Vice Dean for Finance at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies in the capital, Skopje, said the early adoption of 5G “may provide a crucial advantage for Macedonia companies, making them more competitive on the international market.”

“5G can drive the economic development of a country by supporting both traditional manufacturers (that will embrace the technologies made practically usable by 5G) and novel and innovative companies that come up with products and solutions in the areas of data gathering, data analysis, associated artificial intelligence and machine learning concepts etc,” Atanasovski told BIRN.

Businesses already reaping the benefits


A 5G logo. Photo: EPA-EFE/WILL OLIVER+

Across Europe, businesses and industries are already starting to reap the benefits of 5G networks.

The technology’s impact can be seen in industries ranging from smart production to agriculture, transport and energy. Some countries are taking 5G usage to the next level.

“For example, Germany started very early to licence frequencies for private 5G networks,” said Popovski, of Aalborg University.

“Those frequencies can be owned within a restricted area (for example, a factory) and the owner can control interference to offer predictable link performance, which is not the case with the technologies using unlicensed access, such as Wifi.”

In Central Europe, Czech-based 2N Telekomunikace, which specialises in the development and manufacturing of communication solutions, is already working on projects which include the use of 5G.

“5G will be a game-changer in terms of unlocking the potential of the IoT and making smart cities a reality,” CEO Michal Kratochvil told BIRN.

“It will offer great opportunities for almost every industry. We at 2N are particularly excited about it because our IP access control products are already part of the smart city solution and are a natural fit into the 5G ecosystem.”

‘In the pandemic period’


A woman wears a protective face mask in Zagreb, Croatia, 2020. Photo: EPA-EFE/ANTONIO BAT+

Some companies also expect 5G technology to have a big impact on transport and infrastructure.

For example, Rail Baltica, an international railway project spanning the Baltic states, is considering 5G technology for projects such as strengthening railway security, together with the use of drone technology.

Earlier this year, Latvian mobile operator LMT successfully completed the first ever cross-border drone flight conducted entirely over the mobile network. 5G offers even greater potential.

“If there’s sufficient coverage in the air, the mobile network can ensure uninterrupted connectivity throughout the entirety of its flight, which significantly improves safety,” said LMT Vice President Ingmars Pukis. “LMT’s strong network coverage makes drone flight and other 5G use case testing a possibility.”

Such developments offer hope for up-and-coming industries in the Balkans.

“5G also supports efficient simultaneous connections of a large number of devices, which will facilitate the development of smart industry, smart cities and communities and, through the option of network slicing, provide continued digitalisation of the economy and the introduction of numerous virtual dedicated (campus) networks,” said Bericic, of Telekom Slovenije.

The introduction of these “campus” networks would mean that a single physical infrastructure can host several virtual dedicated networks for various business verticals, such as energy supply, transportation, logistics, manufacturing, smart cities, healthcare, protection and rescue…

“We can hardly imagine living without the proper support of high capacity mobile services at every step, especially also now in pandemic period,” Bericic told BIRN. “Same goes for communication through different apps, unlimited access to information, social networks or the option of remote learning or remote work.”

Turkey Fines Social Media Giants Second Time For Defying Law

Turkey’s Information and Communications Technologies Authority, BTK, on Friday imposed fines of 30 million Turkish lira, equal to 3.10 million euros, on digital media giants including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Periscope and TikTok, following the first 10 million lira fine a month ago.

The second fine came after the social media giants again failed to appoint official representatives to the country as required by a new digital media law adopted in July this year.

“Another 30 days were given to those companies [to appoint representatives] and this time expired this week. Another 30 million Turkish lira fine was imposed on each of the companies which did not comply with the necessities of the law,” BTK told Turkey’s Anadolu Agency.

In the past month, none of the social media giants has made any attempt to appoint official representatives, as the Turkish government demanded. The only social media company to appoint a representative is Russia’s VKontakte digital platform, VK.

“We require social media companies to appoint representatives in our country. We aim to protect our citizens, particularly children, who are more vulnerable than adults,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on December 1.

“We hope they voluntarily respond to our request. Otherwise, we will continue to protect the rights of our citizens at all times,” Erdogan added, accusing the social media giants of creating an uncontrolled environment in the name of freedoms.

If the media companies comply within three months, the fines will be reduced by 75 per cent. If not, they will face an advertising ban for three months. As final sanctions, their bandwidth will be halved and then cut by 90 per cent.

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

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

The new regulations might also prompt companies to quit the Turkish market, experts have warned. PayPal quit Turkey in 2016 because of similar requests and Wikipedia was blocked in Turkey for more than two-and-a-half years.

According to Twitter, Turkey has submitted the highest number of requests to Twitter to delete content and close accounts. Turkey asked Twitter to close nearly 9,000 accounts, but it only shut down 264 of them, in 2019.

The Human Factor: Experts Warn of Czech Hospitals’ Cyber Vulnerability

On the morning of Friday, March 13, the duty nurses at the University Hospital in the Czech city of Brno received emergency guidelines on conducting essential meetings.

The Czech Republic had just declared a strict nationwide lockdown and organisations across the country were scrambling to move their meetings online. But the hospital in Brno, bracing for its first wave of Covid patients, was going the other way.

The emergency guidelines said all operational matters must be discussed face-to-face rather than online, in team meetings to be held at regular intervals several times a day.

The measures worked, and the virus – a form of ransomware that had paralysed the hospital’s computers – was eventually contained.

“You cannot prepare for a situation like that,” recalls Branislav Moravcik, the head nurse at the hospital’s Clinic of Anaesthesiology, Resuscitation and Intensive Resuscitation. “The key is not to panic.”

Moravcik learnt of the cyber-attack in the early hours of Friday morning. Upon reaching work, he backed up his most important data on a flash drive and shared the emergency guidelines with his team.

With computers and medical equipment linked to the IT network shutting down around him, he sent the guidelines using a personal laptop tethered to his mobile phone’s internet connection.

Were such an attack to happen again, Moravcik said, it would be helpful if staff could draw upon planned protocols, as well as mandatory training, to work out what to do.


Healthcare workers care for COVID-19 patient in the department of anaesthesiology, resuscitation and intensive care medicine (ICU) at General University Hospital in Prague, Czech Republic. Photo: EPA-EFE/MARTIN DIVISEK.

The incident at the University Hospital in Brno was one of several cyber-attacks or attempted cyber-attacks targeting Czech medical facilities this spring.

In mid-April, hospitals in Ostrava, Olomouc and Carlsbad reported malicious activity in their IT systems, just days after the National Cyber and Information Security Agency, NUKIB, had issued a warning signalling the imminent threat of such attacks. As is usually the case, there was no clue to the hackers’ identity beyond the strings of numbers denoting their IP addresses.

These incidents revived a debate in mainstream media outlets about the state of the Czech public sector’s IT infrastructure, accompanied by speculation that the hacks might have been the work of foreign powers such as Russia and China.

The Czech government responded by pledging to upgrade its cyber defences. But as the country faces a second, deadlier surge of coronavirus infections over the winter, cyber-security experts are once again questioning the healthcare system’s ability to withstand attack at a time of crisis.

Experts interviewed by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, have said any investment in technical solutions must be accompanied by large-scale staff training in the basics of digital hygiene. Expensive upgrades, they argued, could only be as effective as the weakest links in the system – the tens of thousands of individuals who accessed public sector IT networks every day.

“The human factor plays a big role in cyber security,” said Michal Salat, Director of Threat Intelligence at Avast, a Prague-based provider of anti-viral software that helped Brno’s University Hospital deal with the aftermath of the attack. “It is easier to trick a person than it is to hack into a system.”

Hackers often use seemingly innocuous e-mails to convince individuals to provide the confidential details or download the infected files that end up compromising entire networks. Salat said stressed-out, busy workers – such as those staffing a hospital during a pandemic – would be particularly vulnerable to such “social engineeering” tactics.

To minimise the risk, he said, medical facilities should keep their software up to date, make constant backups of important data, and train staff in best practices for digital hygiene as they do for other forms of hygiene.

Digital-hygiene lessons would have to be repeated at regular intervals for their message to be re-enforced. Jan Kozanek, a cybersecurity specialist at the Accenture consultancy, warned of long-ingrained bad habits in the public sector, describing how any visitor to a local hospital was free to check standards for themselves with a little test. “Just count how many times you can spot passwords written on a piece of paper” near a computer workstation, he told BIRN.

‘Only an amateur would leave tracks’

Hospitals’ overwhelming reliance on IT systems to provide urgent care has made them popular targets for hackers seeking to extort money. Ransomware attacks, in which hackers encrypt data and demand payment for restoring access, have been reported at medical facilities across the US and Europe this year.

An attack on a hospital in the German city of Dusseldorf in September was investigated for having caused the death of a seriously ill patient, in what was thought to be the first such case of its kind. The investigation was however dropped as there was not enough evidence that the hack had led to the death. The best-known such attack remains the 2017 “Wannacry” hack that plunged the UK’s National Health Service into crisis, leaving computer screens frozen with messages demanding ransom payments.

This year’s cyber-attacks in the Czech Republic fit within this global trend, as well as within a narrower trend for hacks targeting the country’s public sector IT infrastructure. In June last year, for instance, NUKIB reported that the Czech foreign ministry’s e-mail servers had been targeted by hackers. This April, the country’s main travel hub, the Vaclav Havel Airport, said it had thwarted an attack on its IT system.


Healthcare workers transport a COVID-19 patient to Motol University Hospital after transfer from Zlin region, in Prague, Czech Republic. Photo: EPA-EFE/MARTIN DIVISEK.

Both the EU and the US issued statements criticising the cyber-attacks in the Czech Republic this spring. Several Czech media outlets went further, accusing Russia of orchestrating the hacks – a claim described by the Russian embassy in Prague as a “provocation”. Russia has major business interests in the country and its government is frequently accused of trying to influence Czech politics, as well as public opinion through disinformation campaigns. Similar accusations have also been directed at China, another global player with interests in the Czech economy.

Experts are however cautious about claims that foreign governments are involved in the recent hacks. According to Yuval Ben-Itzhak, the former CEO of Israeli cyber-security firm, Finjan, who currently heads the Prague-based digital marketing company, Socialbakers, state actors prefer making discreet inroads into IT infrastructure over high-profile hacks. “Governments want to have access on a long-term basis, not visibility in the news,” he told BIRN.

Alexandra Alvarova, a writer on disinformation tactics in the Czech Republic, said claims of Russian involvement in the hacks would most likely remain unverified unless there was a high-profile defection from the ranks of its intelligence service. “In this business, only an amateur would leave tracks, and Russian intelligence hackers are some of the best in the world,” she told BIRN.

Czech lawmakers are currently seeking to amend laws in order to give NUKIB a bigger role in defending hospitals from cyber-attack. NUKIB spokesman Jiri Taborsky said the legislative changes are a response to a “long-term, unsatisfactory situation” in the Czech healthcare system’s cyber-defences.

“This situation in turn reflects long-term under-investment in hardware and software infrastructure, as  well as in human resources,” he told BIRN in an emailed statement. “NUKIB has been warning of this every year in its annual report on the state of cyber-security.”

The agency said it was also providing “educational materials and courses to help medical staff nationwide educate themselves” about the cyber threat.

‘Working crazy hours’

While claims of foreign involvement in specific hacks are rarely proven, the view that the Czech Republic is lagging behind in cyber-security matters has become a vote-winner.

The 2017 general election delivered a breakthrough for the Pirates Party, a new political formation that won the third-largest share of votes with a tech-savvy message that appealed to younger voters. A legislator for the party, Ondrej Profant, told BIRN that the country’s older governing class simply “did not understand the digital world – they lack the elementary habits”.

He acknowledged that the government had prioritised cyber-security following the attacks this spring, and praised NUKIB’s new digital-hygiene guidelines for staff at public offices. However, he warned, more training was needed.

“We are willing to invest in expensive technologies which improve our security by some margin against highly sophisticated attacks, but we forget about the staff at the main entrance,” he said. “It is as if we are building a very high wall to protect ourselves but leaving the door unlocked.”

It is moreover uncertain how much of an impact additional training will have on everyday habits in Czech hospitals. Apolena Rychlikova, a journalist who has reported on the healthcare system, said the effectiveness of digital-hygiene training would also depend on variables such as staff members’ age and workload.

“In general, medical facilities were understaffed and people were working crazy hours – and that was before the pandemic,” she told BIRN.

Albin Sybera is a journalist and Visegrad Insight fellow based in Ljubljana. This article was edited by Neil Arun. It was produced with a Reporting Democracy grant for stories that reveal how the Covid-19 crisis is reshaping politics and society in Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe.

EU Set to Take on Big Tech with New Digital Services Act

Over the past two decades, the process of digitisation has completely transformed the European services sector, though EU legislation regulating the provision of those services has not kept up with the fast-changing technological environment. With consensus among European policymakers that the 20-year-old piece of legislation, the e-Commerce Directive, was in dire need of updating, the European Commission announced in January 2020 that it would pass a new Digital Services Act by the end of 2020. That date, expected to be December 2, is rapidly approaching.

With this brand new set of regulations governing the EU’s digital market, the Commission intends to clarify and introduce new digital services liability rules and ensure a more competitive digital market where even small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) can compete with the more established players.

Policymakers in the EU, which is already home to the world’s strictest data privacy laws, believe that Europe is in a unique position to set new standards for the regulation of digital services for the whole world. The forthcoming rules represent an unprecedented strike against the seemingly limitless power of big tech, which are likely to oppose the reforms.

A close-up image shows the slogan of the ‘StopHateForProfit’ campaign on the organization’s website displayed on a smartphone screen in Cologne, Germany, 29 June 2020. EPA-EFE/SASCHA STEINBACH

What new rules are coming?  

Although the final contours of the legislative package are not yet public knowledge, it is expected that the regulation will come in two legislative proposals. The first set of proposals contained in the Digital Services Act will likely focus on updating digital services providers’ responsibilities and liabilities. The Digital Markets Act will then likely be concerned with limiting the power of big platforms in general.

In a recent speech, Executive Vice-President of the Commission Margrethe Vestager said that digital media platforms need to be more transparent about the way they share the digital world that we see.

“They’ll have to report on what they’ve done to take down illegal material. They’ll have to tell us how they decide what information and products to recommend to us, and which ones to hide – and give us the ability to influence those decisions, instead of simply having them made for us. And they’ll have to tell us who’s paying for the ads that we see, and why we’ve been targeted by a certain ad,” Vestager said earlier this year.

Although it is not year clear which specific platforms will be targeted, it is widely expected that the new rules with mainly apply to social media platforms with more than 2 million users, which have, until now, bitterly resisted attempts to disclose their algorithms.

“Platforms need to ensure that their users can be protected from illegal goods and content online, by putting in place the right processes to react swiftly to illegal activities, and to cooperate with law enforcement authorities more effectively,” the Commission’s press officer for the digital economy, Charles Manoury, told BIRN an email.

When asked about the concrete rules being considered in Brussels, Manoury said that the Commission will “aim to harmonise a clear set of obligations (responsibilities) for online platforms, including notice-and-action procedures, redress, transparency and accountability measures, and cooperation obligations.”

In a report produced by the European Parliamentary Research Service in October, EU experts came up with the following recommendations for the Commission:

  1. Introduce a clear, standardised notice-and-action procedures to deal with illegal and harmful content;
  2. Enhanced transparency on content curation and reporting obligations for platforms;
  3. Out-of-court dispute settlement on content management, particularly on notice-and-action procedures.

Those policy recommendations are strikingly similar to the rules already in effect in the country currently holding the Presidency of the Council of the EU – Germany.

A Google logo is displayed at the Google offices in Berlin, Germany, 24 June 2019. EPA-EFE/HAYOUNG JEON

German lessons

 “The Commission in its impact assessments takes into account already existing EU laws, such as the NetzDG,” noted the Commission’s spokesman Manoury, referring to the Network Enforcement Act, which was passed by the German parliament back in 2017.

According to the website of the German Ministry of Justice and and Consumer Protection, the law aims to fight hate crime and criminally punish fake news and other unlawful content on social networks more effectively. This includes insults, malicious gossip, defamation, public incitement to crime, incitement to hatred, disseminating portrayals of violence and threatening the commission of a felony.

In practice, all social media platforms (with more than 2 million users) that are accessible in Germany are obliged to take down or block access to “manifestly unlawful content” within 24 hours of receiving a complaint. They also have to offer their users an accessible procedure for reporting criminally punishable content and take “immediate notice” of any content that might violate German criminal law.

But German lawmakers didn’t stop there. In June this year, the Budestag decided to tighten further the laws against hate speech online by requiring social networks to report to the BKA (Federal Police) and transmit some user data, such as IP addresses or port numbers, directly to the authorities.

Moreover, new rules will oblige operators of social networks to submit biannual reports on their handling of complaints about criminally punishable content. These reports must contain information, for example, on the volume of complaints and the decision-making practices of the network, as well as about the teams responsible for processing reported content. They must be made available to everybody on the internet.

Social media platforms could be liable for fines of up to 50 million euros if they fail on their reporting duties, according to a statement from the Justice Ministry.

According to the German daily Stuttgarter Zeitung, so far nine social media platforms have offered transparency reports: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Tiktok, Soundcloud, Change.org and Google+. The number of complaints varies greatly. In the second half of 2019, 4,274 unsatisfied users reported to Facebook. There were 843,527 complaints on Twitter and 277,478 on YouTube. Facebook felt compelled to take action in almost a quarter of the cases. 87 per cent of these posts were deleted within 24 hours, a total of 488. Twitter took care of 16 per cent of the complaints, 86 per cent of which were removed from the network within a day, according to the German newspaper.

However, the new obligations have their critics. Some express concern that legal content will end up being deleted by overzealous platforms eager to avoid paying hefty fines, the so-called problem of “over-blocking”. In 2017, when the law was first passed by the German parliament, even journalism unions in Germany protested against it, fearing a new form of censorship.

Reacting to the criticisms, German Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht recently called for the introduction of a “counter-presentation procedure”, which would give authors of deleted content the right to ask social networks for a reassessment of their decision before any fines would be imposed.

There is also criticism that some of the proposed rules might even be in conflict with the German constitution. This particularly concerns the law intended to combat far-right extremism and hate crime, which was passed in the summer and is intended to force operators of social networks to report criminal content such as the threat of dangerous bodily harm or defamation of public figures (mayors or municipal councillors) to the Federal Criminal Police Office. It is because of those concerns that the president has not yet signed the law.

Long way to go

The German experience clearly shows that certain measures to combat the spread of hate speech and other form of illegal content online are relatively easy to implement, while others, like direct reporting to the police, might take much longer to build a consensus around.

That being said, even when it comes to the seemingly more trivial measures, the European Commission’s mission is an infinitely more challenging one. First of all, it needs to make all member states agree on what even constitutes a hate crime on the internet. Then it has to create a set of rules that would be applicable across all member states.

According to a source in the European Commission familiar with the legislation, the first task is the easier one. “There is actually a very broad agreement across the EU on the question of illegal content. Basically, what is illegal offline is also illegal online – it is just a question of how you monitor it and what measures to take to make sure that the rules are followed also online,” the source, who wished to remain anonymous, told BIRN.

Whatever the rules that the Commission ends up proposing in early December, the speed of the final implementation of those measures will largely depend on the legal form of the rules.

Generally speaking, if the rules assume the form of EU regulations, the final implementation might take a very long time, as regulations need unilateral agreement by all member states. If EU legislators decide to go with directives, which leave a lot of space for individual member states to translate into their own respective national laws and don’t require unilateral agreement, things could go much faster.

According to the source from the Commission, half a year is an absolute minimum to expect the legislative process to take.

“If you have an extremely well-drafted piece of legislation that everyone agrees on, it can take half a year. I’ve never heard about anything going faster than this. It is already clear that this will not be very straightforward,” the source said.

Net Searches for Far-Right Keywords Soar in Bosnia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BIRD Community

Are you a professional journalist or a media worker looking for an easily searchable and comprehensive database and interested in safely (re)connecting with more than thousands of colleagues from Southeastern and Central Europe?

We created BIRD Community, a place where you can have it all!

Join Now