The head of the prominent Montenegrin watchdog MANS, Vanja Calovic Markovic, on Wednesday alleged that most political parties concealed part of their election funding sources and the actual costs of their campaigns for last year’s parliamentary elections.
At the promotion of MANS’ parliamentary election report, Calovic Markovic also said one of the parties in the now ruling For the Future of Montenegro coalition used an offshore company to make camaign videos.
“They hired an offshore company, Limanaki Studios LTD, from Cyprus, to produce videos. That company has not submitted financial reports since its establishment, and its owners are hidden,” Calovic Markovic said, not naming the actual party.
“The contract specifies the given company to do advertising videos for 50,000 euros, without the number of commercials or the deadline by when it must be completed, only the payment deadline,” she added.
In parliamentary elections held on August 30 last year, three opposition blocs won a slender majority of 41 of the 81 seats in parliament, ousting the long-ruling Democratic Party of Socialists, DPS.
New Prime Minister Zdravko Krivokaic led the largest bloc in the now ruling majority, the pro-Serbian For the Future of Montenegro, with the Democratic Front, DF, as its strongest member.
DF officials and the Prime Minister have not commented on the MANS report.
Calovic Markovic said that all the competing electoral lists spent a total of about 245,000 euros on advertising on social networks, almost ten times more than in the 2016 parliamentary elections.
“The administrators on social networks that financed the advertising of certain political structures were exclusively from Serbia,” Calovic Markovic noted.
In December 2020, in its report on the election, the OSCE/ODIHR mission said that Montenegro had not managed to ensure transparency, accountability and integrity of campaign finances, despite changes to electoral laws.
“There is general public mistrust in the campaign finance regulatory system, as currently implemented, and despite some improvements, the legal framework does not establish effective safeguards against corruption or circumvention of campaign finance rules,” the report said.
In its 2020 progress report on the country, the European Commission warned that the electoral legal framework remained largely unchanged since the parliamentary elections in 2016.
“While it provides basic regulations for the conduct of democratic elections, gaps and ambiguities allow for circumvention, particularly in campaign finance,” it observed.
Suspicions about secret camaign funds grew in January 2019, when a video clip from 2016 surfaced in which Dusko Knezevic, chairman of the Montenegro-based Atlas Group, appears to hand the then-mayor of Podgorica, Slavoljub Stijepovic, an envelope containing what Knezevic later said was $200,000 to fund election campaigns.
Knezevic, now believed to be in London, told the media he had been giving the DPS, led by President Milo Djukanovic, such sums for about 25 years, during which time the DPS had never been out of power.
In February 2019, the DPS was fined 20,000 euros and ordered to pay 47,500 euros to the state budget, while in February this year the Higher Court in Podgorica suspended criminal proceedings on Stijepovic.
The Press Council of Kosovo, PCK, and the Association of Journalists of Kosovo, AJK, on Wednesday voiced concern over the proposed regulation of online media content under the Law on the Independent Media Commission, IMC, deeming it a violation of “international rules of journalism”.
The IMC is an independent state body that regulates, manages, and oversees TV broadcasting in Kosovo but now it has said it wants video production on local websites added to its jurisdiction. Print media are already monitored by the PCK.
The PCK is a self-regulatory body formed by the print media in Kosovo, which is recognized by the Assembly of Kosovo through the Law on Defamation and Insult. Rulings that the PCK issues for parties and the media are “respected and valued by local courts in cases where they decide for defamation and insult”.
“Each of the media should be held accountable for their actions before state bodies, based on relevant laws, but initially no one can better assess their ethics than the media themselves, or professionals of the field,” the PCK and AJK said in a joint press release.
The reaction comes after the IMC head, Xhevat Latifi, said a new law on the IMC should include audio-visual content of websites within its auspices.
Latifi said this at a presentation of the IMC’s Annual Report for 2020 to parliament’s Committee on Local Government, Regional Development and Media on Tuesday. “We are witnessing a toxic state of media vocabulary in Kosovo,” Latifi said, justifying the initiative.
Later he told BIRN that the initiative was not his own and explained it as “concern of society”.
“I have stated that portals which deal with audio-visual production would best be included in the new law; not all portals, only these which deal with audio-visual parts. It is only a request. We are only measuring the public, their concerns. I have presented it as a concern of society, we cannot say this is my opinion or IMC position,” he said.
The Press Council and journalists’ associations deem the idea dangerous.
“Initiatives to control and evaluate ethics for print and online media by a state organisation are harmful and do not help the media and journalists,” their press release said.
Facebook has for the first time published a report on what Albanian parties have spent on online advertising on the social media giant during the current parliamentary election campaign.
According to the report, the biggest parties predictably spent more money in sponsored posts for political content than the others.
The biggest advertiser was the ruling Socialist Party, which so far posted 394 ads costing 21,907 US dollars, followed by the main opposition centre-right Democratic Party, which spent 11,536 dollars on 81 ads.
According to BIRN’s calculations, 123,152 dollars was spent on political and social advertising by the parties in all. However, its data show that only 113,252 dollars were actually spent by parties, candidates or sites that distribute political ads. The rest of the ads were from the media and from companies that have been wrongly categorized by Facebook’s algorithm.
Gent Progni a web developer, told BIRN that the total amount spent by each party on FB seems quite low for a target audience of two million people, but the figures change if every candidate or other Facebook page campaigning for a political party is counted.
“The amounts are small for an audience of two million Albanians, looked at from the official websites of the parties. But if you see each candidate in particular, or sites that have just opened and are campaigning for parties, we have a completely different reflection of the amount, which increases several times,” he told BIRN.
According to BIRN, many newly opened Facebook pages are spreading political advertising but their expenses, which are high, are not connected always to parties or political candidates.
Facebook asked Albania to be transparent with political advertising in March during the election campaign by including “paid for by…” in sponsored posts.
Political expert Afrim Krasniqi, head of the Albanian Institute of Political Studies, a think tank based in Tirana, told BIRN that this is the first time an Albanian election campaign is being held more virtually than physically.
“This is why parties and candidates are using social media as the cheapest and fastest source of communication,” he told BIRN.
He added that Albania lacks a strong regulatory legal basis or control mechanism concerning the finances of election campaigns or party propaganda on social media.
A law, “On Political Parties”, only obliges parties to be transparent about their financial resources, while the Central Election Commission is responsible for monitoring and auditing the finances of political parties.
For years, London-based writer and artist Mary Morgan has used social media to raise awareness and engage in debate, particularly Twitter and Instagram. Until the hate speech became too much.
“Anyone who spends time on Twitter knows it can be an absolutely horrible place,” said Morgan, whose work focuses on body politics, or the practices and policies through which powers of society regulate the human body.
So she began exploring alternative apps, settling on Clubhouse, an audio-based social network where users can join rooms and listen to, participate or moderate discussions on any topic that might interest them.
“The power of Clubhouse is that you can choose who you speak to. You can’t just randomly start messaging people with hate. I think that’s a real power to the platform,” Morgan told BIRN.
“Especially when it comes to activism, like-minded individuals and people who want to participate and learn will be drawn to houses and clubs, meaning we can all speak to and learn from each other in an environment that is encouraging of that.”
Launched in April 2020, Clubhouse currently boasts more than eight million users worldwide.
And it’s not alone in winning new users turned off by the inability of social media giants to find a way to filter out offensive content on their platforms – Mastodon, MeWe and CloutHub are just a few of the emerging names benefitting from a backlash against the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Experts, however, warn that while these alternative apps might be motivated by high ideals, they face the same issues that have dogged the giants – how to provide transparency, avoid hate speech and protect privacy, while also making money.
“I understand the desire that people have to move to new platforms,” said Ayden Ferdeline, a Berlin-based public interest technologist.
“We desperately need more spaces for lawful speech, but we need these new platforms to be more transparent than Facebook or Twitter are, about how they operationalise their policies and procedures, and to be designed from day one to uphold and respect fundamental human rights.”
Turned off Twitter
A mobile phone displays the suspended status of the Twitter account of Donald J. Trump, 2021. Photo: EPA-EFE/MICHAEL REYNOLDS
Skopje-born Katarina P. spent 11 years on Twitter as an active member of the Twitter community in North Macedonia. Under an alias, Katarina, who declined to give her surname, used her profile to follow and comment on the events of any day in her home country and the wider Balkan region, engaging in sometimes heated debates.
Then, in February this year, Twitter suspended Katarina’s profile, without any specific explanation.
“I believe I got suspended because I came into a conflict with another Twitter account that was promoting misogyny through quasi-Christian Orthodox theology,” Katarina recalled. “After my impulsive reaction to these tweets, my account got suspended.”
She appealed to Twitter’s Support Team, but, after a generic response to say they would look into it her case, Katarina never heard back. She assumed she was shut down based on the complaints of “religious fanatics”, and was frustrated at the lack of communication from Twitter.
Stung by criticism over how social media was used in the storming of the US Capitol by Donald Trump supporters on January 6, Twitter and Facebook appear to have adopted more restrictive approaches to what can and cannot be posted on their platforms.
Experts, however, say that the use of Artificial Intelligence has resulted in a litany of errors, with AI lacking the required contextual and nuanced analysis to distinguish strong criticism from defamation and radical political opinions from expressions of hatred and racism or indictment to violence, particularly in languages spoken by far fewer people than, say, English, French, German or Russian.
Katarina believes she is a victim of this, and is already looking for an alternative platform where she can engage in debate.
“I liked Twitter since it was unique for the microblogging opportunities it offered,” she said. “I hope that a new network with similar content might appear soon. And I won’t lie when I say that I am looking forward to it.”
Friendlier Facebooks
A Facebook logo. Photo: EPA-EFE/Julien de Rosa
Clubhouse might still be in its beta stage, but it has attracted huge attention.
“It is a completely new and different app, and I see it as great replacement for all of the podcasts, with the addition that you can not only listen to them, but also actively engage in the discussion,” said Marija Andrejska, a digital marketing specialist in Skopje who began using Clubhouse this year. “I believe this is one fantastic feature that has never been seen before.”
The app has an air of exclusivity to it that not everyone likes, however. As an invite-only app, a new user has to be invited by an existing member to join, and it’s only available for those using iPhones.
“On the downside, I think it’s a pretty ‘elitist’ app, and I don’t like that,” Andrejska told BIRN. “Since it functions only by invites and it’s only for iPhone users, it can create closed, in a way segregated groups, which can be dangerous in the long run. Therefore, I think that you cannot really use Clubhouse with the same intensity as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or even TikTok.”
Turkish journalist Dilek Kutuk said Clubhouse was a great place to exchange ideas, “especially in Turkey”, where society is deeply polarised along political lines.
“I see many voice chat rooms in Clubhouse where people talk and share their opinions, as opposed to Twitter, where all you can see is fights between those that have different political opinions,” Kutuk told BIRN.
MeWe has also seen a recent spike in user numbers, particularly in January.
Launched in 2012, the network says it is built on “trust, control and love”, and represents a secure and private alternative to Facebook with more than 16 million worldwide logging in to it use its newsfeed, private text and video chats and groups.
Then there’s CloutHub, considered an alternative to Facebook and Twitter. With some 255,000 users, CloutHub describes itself as a “non-biased social network for people engaged in meaningful civic, social and political issues.” It has also seen a growth in its user base since the beginning of the year.
Mastodon, a decentralised open-source platform, is another under-the-radar alternative to Twitter. Users say it offers much better tools to protect privacy and fight online harassment than Twitter. Launched in 2016, the platform has more than two million users worldwide, and has been billed as a model for a “friendlier social network” dedicated to keeping out hateful content.
New apps under scrutiny
Illustration. Photo: Unsplash/Freestocks
But while such apps might bill themselves as ‘friendlier’, hate-free alternatives to Twitter and Facebook, experts say they face the same questions regarding privacy, transparency and how they moderate what’s being said, written or posted on their platforms.
“It is understandable why tech companies want to cleanse their platforms of mis- and dis- information, but neither their human moderators nor their technical measures are able to do so in a an accurate and human rights-respecting manner,” said Ferdeline.
Marcin de Kaminski, security and innovation director of Civil Rights Defenders, a Sweden-based international human rights organisation, said there is already concern.
“From our perspective, Clubhouse does allow users to speak freely, yes. But they also compromise on their users’ privacy, and there are no safeguards when it comes to protecting users from marginalised or targeted communities when it comes to verbal attacks, threats or slander,” said De Kaminski.
“Users that choose to use Clubhouse need to understand the risks, both technical and socio-legal.”
He warned of being blinded by the novelty of new features.
“It is easy to get mesmerized by new fascinating features and the possibility to have seamless voice chats with friends and colleagues may be tempting during the isolation of the ongoing pandemic,” De Kaminski told BIRN.
“However, Clubhouse has really made it possible to ask oneself very important questions – which data is harvested when you use the service and who has access to that data?”
Nor does being the new kid on the block necessarily protect against cyber attacks.
On Saturday, a report said that the personal data of 1.3 million Clubhouse users had been posted online on a popular hacker forum. Clubhouse denied being hacked and said that the data “is all public profile information from our app, which anyone can access via the app or out API [application programming interface].”
Privacy concerns have already prompted many users to migrate from messaging apps such as WhatsApp to the likes of Signal or Telegram, which claim to offer better privacy features.
Privacy and data protection strategist Lourdes M. Turrecha said any privacy failures could cost social media startups big.
“These privacy concerns are serious enough to create trouble for Clubhouse in a world where data protection enforcements have teeth – note the recent $650 million class action settlement following the $5 billion Federal Trade Commission’s fine against social media predecessor, Facebook,” said Turrecha.
“While these figures may seem like slaps on the wrist for a company like Facebook, a pre-revenue startup like Clubhouse doesn’t have the war chest to chalk these up as a cost of doing business, despite its $110 million in funding.”
Turrecha warned of the risks of users “trading” their privacy for greater freedom of speech.
“While neither speech nor privacy rights are absolute, I caution against pitting the two against each other through false tradeoffs,” she said. “We should demand technologies that protect both speech and privacy rights.”
Facebook removed more than 300 Facebook and Instagram accounts belonging to members of an Iranian dissident group based in Albania that had been targeting Iran and content related to Iran.
“The network violated our policy against foreign interference which is coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign entity,” the social media giant said in its March report, “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Report”, which it published on Tuesday.
According to the report, the network now taken down was very active in 2017 and in the second half of 2020.
“The people behind this activity relied on a combination of authentic and fake accounts to post MEK-related content and comment on their own and other people’s posts, including those of international news organizations like Radio Liberty, Voice of America and BBC,” said the report.
Facebook added that it will continue to monitor any attempts to re-establish the network by people behind this campaign.
“The operation relied heavily on fake accounts to post and amplify its messages. Some of these accounts went through repeated name changes. Other accounts used the names of deceased members of MEK. Some claimed to be located in Iran but were operated from Albania. All the accounts were overt in their support of MEK and their criticism of the Iranian government,” the report continued.
Some of the fake accounts were a decade old but most of them were created between 2014 and 2016. They were particularly active in 2017, reduced activity in 2018–2019 and resumed in 2020.
At first, journalist Tugay Can had no idea why he had been taken in for police questioning on March 25 last year in the Turkish port city of Izmir. Then cybercrime officers told him he was suspected of spreading fear and panic because of a report he wrote, published two days earlier, about COVID-19 outbreaks in two community health centres in the city that were subsequently quarantined.
“After I confirmed it with my sources, I reported the situation”, Can, who at the time worked for the local Izmir newspaper Iz Gazete, told BIRN.
Pressed to name his sources, Can refused. Hours of questioning resulted in a charge of spreading fake news and causing panic. The case was dropped several months later, but Can’s chilling experience was far from a one-off.
According to the media rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders, Can was among 10 Turkish editors and reporters interrogated just in March of last year concerning their coverage of the pandemic that had just begun.
“Governments are using the pandemic as an advantage over freedom speech,” Can said.
Turkey is well-known for its jailing of journalists, but it was not the only country in the region to employ draconian tools to control the pandemic narrative. Nor have journalists been the only targets.
BIRN has confirmed dozens of cases in which regular citizens have faced charges of causing panic on social media or in person. There are indications the true number of cases runs into the hundreds.
Whether dealing with accurate but perhaps unflattering news reports or with what the World Health Organisation called last year an “infodemic” of false information, governments have not hesitated to turn to social media giants to get hold of the information that could help them track down those deemed to be breaking the rules.
“Every government has a duty to promote reliable information and correct harmful and untrue allegations in order to protect the personal integrity and trust of citizens,” said Tea Gorjanc Prelevic, head of the Montenegrin NGO Human Rights Action.
“But any measure taken to combat misinformation should not violate the fundamental right to expression.”
Internet sites shut down
Illustration: Unsplash.com
Battling an invisible enemy, governments across the region have sought to restrict information while cracking down on media reporting or social media posts that deviate from the official narrative. ‘Misinformation’ has been criminalised.
Some of these restrictions were part of the states of emergency that were declared; others were introduced with new legislation that outlasts any temporary emergency decrees.
But who draws the line between the right to free speech and the need to preserve public order?
In its November 2020 COVID and Free Speech report, the Council of Europe rights body cautioned that “crisis situations should not be used as a pretext for restricting the public’s access to information or clamping down on critics.”
But that’s precisely what has happened in some countries.
In Hungary, the Penal Code was amended to criminalise the dissemination of “false or distorted facts capable of hindering or obstructing the efficiency of the protection efforts” for the duration of a state of emergency, first between March and June and again since November.
Parliament subsequently passed a bill making it easier for governments to declare such emergencies in future. In March, the government introduced punishments of one to five years in prison for spreading “falsehoods” or “distorted truth” deemed to obstruct efforts to combat the pandemic.
Similar restrictions were imposed in Bosnia’s mainly Serb-populated Republika Srpska entity and in Romania.
The Centre for Independent Journalism, CJI, an NGO that promotes media freedom and good journalistic practices, has raised concern that provisions enacted as part of a state of emergency between mid-March and mid-May 2020 to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus in Romania could hamper the ability of journalists to inform the public.
“The most worrying aspect of all this is, from my perspective, the limitations to the access to information of public interest,” said CJI executive director Cristina Lupu.
“The lack of transparency of the authorities is a very bad sign and the biggest problem our media faces now,” Lupu told BIRN, lamenting the fact it left the public without “access to timely information.”
In March 2020, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, raised concern about what it said was the “removal of reports and entire websites, without providing appeal or redress mechanisms” in Romania.
The Venice Commission, the CoE’s advisory body on constitutional affairs, stressed that even in emergency situations, exceptions to freedom of expression must be narrowly construed and subject to parliamentary control to ensure that the free flow of information is not excessively impeded.
“It is doubtful whether restrictions on publishing “false” information about a disease that is still being studied can be in line with the [Venice Commission] requirement unless it concerns blatantly false or outright dangerous assertions,” it said.
Instead of prevention, fines and prison terms
Early on in the pandemic, the Republika Srpska government issued a decree allowing it to introduce punitive measures, including fines, for spreading ‘fake news’ about the virus in the media and on social networks during the state of emergency.
According to the decree, anyone using social or traditional media to spread ‘fake news’ and cause panic or public disorder faced possible fines of between 500 and 1,500 euros for private individuals and 1,500 and 4,500 euros for companies or organisations. It is not known how many people have been fined. The decree was dismissed in April.
In Montenegro, Article 398 of the Criminal Code, introduced in 2013, foresees a fine or a prison sentence of up to 12 months for the spreading of false news or allegations which cause panic or serious disturbances of public order or peace. For journalists, the punishment runs to three years in prison. The law was hardly used until protests erupted at the end of 2019 over a controversial religious freedom law.
In July 2019, long before the pandemic, North Macedonia’s government unveiled an action plan to deal with ‘fake news’, and doubled down in March 2020 with a vow to punish anyone deemed to be sharing disinformation about the novel coronavirus.
Skopje-based communications and new media specialist Bojan Kordalov said authorities would be better off focusing on prevention and raising awareness.
“It is necessary to build a system of active and digital transparency, as well as to create a real strategy for fast and efficient two-way communication of institutions with citizens and the media, which means highly-trained and prepared staff for 24-hour monitoring and publication of official and credible information to the public,” Kordalov told BIRN.
In Turkey, media censorship, particularly of online outlets, has increased since the onset of the pandemic, according to a report published in November by the Journalists’ Association of Turkey.
According to the report, between July and September 2020 alone, RTUK, the state agency for monitoring, regulating and sanctioning radio and television broadcasts, issued 90 penalties against independent media, including halts to broadcasting and administrative fines.
The government also passed several new draconian laws concerning digital rights and civil society organisations, forcing social media companies to appoint legal representatives to respond to government demands, including those requiring the closure of accounts or deleting of social media posts.
It is not known how many people were investigated or arrested under the new measures, but administrative fines during the pandemic totalled roughly one billion Turkish liras, or 115 million euros.
‘Fake news’ arrests
Illustration: Unsplash.com
In North Macedonia, fake news stories shared on social media ranged from a report that a garage was being used as a COVID-19 testing facility to health authorities being accused of negligence that led to the death of two sisters from COVID-19 complications. One fake story claimed food shortages were imminent.
According to the country’s Ministry of Interior, by September 2020 authorities had acted on a total of 58 cases stemming from the alleged dissemination of fake news related to COVID-19. Thirty-one cases were forwarded to prosecutors and criminal charges have been pressed in three, a ministry spokesman told BIRN.
In Serbia, the penalty for the crime of causing disorder and panic is imprisonment for between three months and three years, as well as a fine. According to Serbian Interior Ministry, in the first two months of the pandemic dozens of people were charged.
After she broke news about the disarray in the Clinical Centre of Vojvodina, Serbia’s northern province, Nova.rs reporter Ana Lalic was questioned by police and her home was searched.
In neighbouring Montenegro, a heated political row over a disputed law on religions saw some people arrested for spreading panic even before the country confirmed its first case of COVID-19.
BIRN was able to confirm 14 cases in which journalists, editors and members of the public were arrested for causing panic.
Similarly in Turkey, the interior ministry investigated, fined and detained hundreds of people in the first few months of the pandemic over their social media posts. Later, however, the ministry stopped publishing such data.
Critics say the government was determined to muzzle complaints about its handling of the pandemic and the economy.
“Turkey in general has a problem when it comes to freedom of speech,” said Ali Gul, a lawyer and rights activist. “The government increases its pressure because it does not want people to speak about its failures.” Ali Gul.
In Croatia, no journalist has been charged with spreading fake news during the pandemic, but that’s not to say there was not any misleading information.
“Without any hesitation, I can say that, unfortunately, a large number of citizens have been involved in spreading false news,” said Tomislav Levak, a teaching assistant and PhD candidate at the Academy of Art and Culture in the eastern Croatian city of Osijek. “But in my opinion, in most cases, it is actually unintentional because they do not think critically enough.”
The Interior Ministry said that it had registered 40 violations of Article 16 of the Law on Misdemeanors against Public Order and Peace, “which are related to the COVID-19 epidemic”.
Rise in state requests to social media giants
The transparency reports of Facebook and Twitter shed light on the scale of government efforts to find and track accounts suspected of spreading panic.
According to Twitter, in 2020 emergency disclosure requests – when law enforcement bodies seek account information – accounted for roughly one out of every five global information requests submitted to Twitter, increasing by 20 per cent during the reporting period while the aggregate number of accounts specified in these requests increased by 24 per cent.
Turkey accounts for three per cent of all government requests for information from Twitter.
In the first six months of last year, Turkey registered a 160 per cent increase in emergency requests compared to the same period in 2019.
North Macedonia saw a 175 per cent increase.
In terms of removal requests, they multiplied several times over from Serbia, Turkey and Poland.
As for Facebook, Turkey last year submitted 6,171 requests, a threefold increase from 2019. In 4,904 cases, Facebook disclosed data, compared to 1,513 cases in 2019. Poland made 4,572 requests, up from 3,397 in 2019, and received information back in 2,666 cases, compared to 1,902 the previous year.
When it comes to legal process requests – when states ask for account information to aid an investigation – Turkey and Poland lead the region with 6,143 and 4,200 requests respectively, roughly double the numbers in 2019.
Compared to the same period in 2019, Facebook data shows a significant rise in all sorts of requests from most countries in the region.
In terms of preservation requests – when law enforcement bodies ask Facebook to preserve account records that may serve as evidence in legal proceedings – Bosnia and Herzegovina registered an increase of just over 150 per cent.
Turkey accounts for 3.55 per cent of and Poland 2.63 per cent of all government requests for information from Facebook.
Lawsuits designed to silence
And if that wasn’t enough, some media faced lawsuits that watchdogs say were designed simply to stop the free flow of information – a so-called SLAPP, or Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, the purpose of which is to censor or intimidate critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defence.
In Poland, the publisher and journalists of the weekly Newsweek Polska were subjected to a SLAPP for their reporting on Polish clothing company LLP, owner of the Reserved brand, which the weekly said had been sending masks bought in Poland to its factories in China despite a severe shortage in Poland.
The company is seeking damages of €1.37 million, an apology, the removal of articles about LPP published on March 22 and a “ban on disseminating claims that suggest that the company’s position on this matter is untrue.”
The case is ongoing.
Also in Poland, a court dismissed lawsuits brought against media outlet Wyborcza by Polish KGHM, one of the world’s biggest producers of copper and silver, over stories revealing that the company had paid huge sums of money for worthless masks from China.
In Turkey, a court granted a take-down request by pasta producer Oba Makarna over a report that 26 of its factory workers in the south-central city of Gaziantep had tested positive for COVID-19. According to the court ruling, while the report was true, it damaged the company’s commercial reputation.
In its report, the CoE warned that restrictions introduced during the pandemic could give rise to increased use of civil lawsuits, particularly defamation cases.
“While their use did not increase dramatically during the height of the pandemic, there is some concern that pandemic-related reporting will be subjected to SLAPP lawsuits and defamation cases in the future, it said.
Partners Serbia, a Belgrade-based NGO that works on initiatives to combat corruption and develop democracy and the rule of the law in the Balkan country, had been on Twitter for more than nine years when, in November 2020, the social media giant suspended its account.
Twitter gave no notice or explanation of the suspension, but Ana Toskic Cvetinovic, the executive director of Partners Serbia, had a hunch – that it was the result of a “coordinated attack”, probably other Twitter users submitting complaints about how the NGO was using its account.
“We tried for days to get at least some information from Twitter, like what could be the cause and how to solve the problem, but we haven’t received any answer,” Toskic Cvetinovic told BIRN. “After a month of silence, we saw that a new account was the only option.”
Twitter lifted the suspension in January, again without explanation. But Partners Serbia is far from alone among NGOs, media organisations and public figures in the Balkans who have had their social media accounts suspended without proper explanation or sometimes any explanation at all, according to BIRN monitoring of digital rights and freedom violations in the region.
Experts say the lack of transparency is a significant problem for those using social media as a vital channel of communication, not least because they are left in the dark as to what can be done to prevent such suspensions in the future.
But while organisations like Partners Serbia can face arbitrary suspension, half of the posts on Facebook and Twitter that are reported as hate speech, threatening violence or harassment in Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin or Macedonian remain online, according to the results of a BIRN survey, despite confirmation from the companies that the posts violated rules.
The investigation shows that the tools used by social media giants to protect their community guidelines are failing: posts and accounts that violate the rules often remain available even when breaches are acknowledged, while others that remain within those rules can be suspended without any clear reason.
Among BIRN’s findings are the following:
Almost half of reports in Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin or Macedonian language to Facebook and Twitter are about hate speech
One in two posts reported as hate speech, threatening violence or harassment in Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin or Macedonian language, remains online. When it comes to reports of threatening violence, the content was removed in 60 per cent of cases, and 50 per cent in cases of targeted harassment.
Facebook and Twitter are using a hybrid model, a combination of artificial intelligence and human assessment in reviewing such reports, but declined to reveal how many of them are actually reviewed by a person proficient in Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin or Macedonian
Both social networks adopt a “proactive approach”, which means they remove content or suspend accounts even without a report of suspicious conduct, but the criteria employed is unclear and transparency lacking.
The survey showed that people were more ready to report content targeting them or minority groups.
Experts say the biggest problem could be the lack of transparency in how social media companies assess complaints.
The assessment itself is done in the first instance by an algorithm and, if necessary, a human gets involved later. But BIRN’s research shows that things get messy when it comes to the languages of the Balkans, precisely because of the specificity of language and context.
Distinguishing harsh criticism from defamation or radical political opinions from expressions of hatred and racism or incitement to violence require contextual and nuanced analysis.
Half of the posts containing hate speech remain online
Graphic: BIRN/Igor Vujcic
Facebook and Twitter are among the most popular social networks in the Balkans. The scope of their popularity is demonstrated in a 2020 report by DataReportal, an online platform that analyses how the world uses the Internet.
In January, there were around 3.7 million social media users in Serbia, 1.1 million in North Macedonia, 390,000 in Montenegro and 1.7 million in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In each of the countries, Facebook is the most popular, with an estimated three million users in Serbia, 970,000 in North Macedonia, 300,000 in Montenegro and 1.4 million in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Such numbers make Balkan countries attractive for advertising but also for the spread of political messages, opening the door to violations.
The debate over the benefits and the dangers of social media for 21st century society is well known.
In terms of violent content, besides the use of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, social media giants are trying to give users the means to react as well, chiefly by reporting violations to network administrators.
There are three kinds of filters – manual filtering by humans; automated filtering by algorithmic tools and hybrid filtering, performed by a combination of humans and automated tools.
In cases of uncertainty, posts or accounts are submitted to human review before decisions are taken, or after in the event a user complaints about automated removal.
“Today, we primarily rely on AI for the detection of violating content on Facebook and Instagram, and in some cases to take action on the content automatically as well,” a Facebook spokesperson told BIRN. “We utilize content reviewers for reviewing and labelling specific content, particularly when technology is less effective at making sense of context, intent or motivation.”
Twitter told BIRN that it is increasing the use of machine learning and automation to enforce the rules.
“Today, by using technology, more than 50 per cent of abusive content that’s enforced on our service is surfaced proactively for human review instead of relying on reports from people using Twitter,” said a company spokesperson.
“We have strong and dedicated teams of specialists who provide 24/7 global coverage in multiple different languages, and we are building more capacity to address increasingly complex issues.”
In order to check how effective those mechanisms are when it comes to content in Balkan languages, BIRN conducted a survey focusing on Facebook and Twitter reports and divided into three categories: violent threats (direct or indirect), harassment and hateful conduct.
The survey asked for the language of the disputedcontent, who was the target and who was the author, and whether or not the report was successful.
Over 48 per cent of respondents reported hate speech, some 20 per cent reported targeted harassment and some 17 per cent reported threatening violence.
The survey showed that people were more ready to report content targeting them or minority groups.
According to the survey, 43 per cent of content reported as hate speech remained online, while 57 per cent was removed. When it comes to reports of threatening violence, content was removed in 60 per cent of cases.
Roughly half of reports of targeted harassment resulted in removal.
Chloe Berthelemy, a policy advisor at European Digital Rights, EDRi, which works to promote digital rights, says the real-life consequences of neglect can be disastrous.
“For example, in cases of image-based sexual abuse [often wrongly called “revenge porn”], the majority of victims are women and they suffer from social exclusion as a result of these attacks,” Berthelemy said in a written response to BIRN. “For example, they can be discriminated against on the job market because recruiters search their online reputation.”
Content removal – censorship or corrective?
Graphic: BIRN/Igor Vujcic.
According to the responses to BIRN’s questionnaire, some 57 per cent of those who reported hate speech said they were notified that the reported post/account violated the rules.
On the other hand, some 28 per cent said they had received notification that the content they reported did not violate the rules, while 14 per cent received only confirmation that their report was filed.
In terms of reports of targeted harassment, half of people said they received confirmation that the content violated the rules; 16 per cent were told the content did not violate rules. A third of those who reported targeted harassment only received confirmation their report was received.
As for threatening violence, 40 per cent of people received confirmation that the reported post/account violated the rules while 60 per cent received only confirmation their complaint had been received.
One of the respondents told BIRN they had reported at least seven accounts for spreading hatred and violent content.
“I do not engage actively on such reports nor do I keep looking and searching them. However, when I do come across one of these hateful, genocide deniers and genocide supporters, it feels the right thing to do, to stop such content from going further,” the respondent said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Maybe one of all the reported individuals stops and asks themselves what led to this and simply opens up discussions, with themselves or their circles.”
Although for those seven acounts Twitter confirmed they violate some of the rules, six of them are still available online.
Another issue that emerged is unclear criteria while reporting violations. Basic knowledge of English is also required.
Sanjana Hattotuwa, special advisor at ICT4Peace Foundation agreed that the in-app or web-based reporting process is confusing.
“Moreover, it is often in English even though the rest of the UI/UX [User Interface/User Experience] could be in the local language. Furthermore, the laborious selection of categories is, for a victim, not easy – especially under duress.”
Facebook told BIRN that the vast majority of reports are reviewed within 24 hours and that the company uses community reporting, human review and automation.
It refused, however, to give any specifics on those it employs to review content or reports in Balkan languages, saying “it isn’t accurate to only give the number of content reviewers”.
BIRN methodology
BIRN conducted its questionnaire via the network’s tool for engaging citizens in reporting, developed in cooperation with the British Council.
The anonymous questionnaire had the aim of collecting information on what type of violations people reported, who was the target and how successful the report was. The questions were available in English, Macedonian, Albanian and Bosnian/Serbian/Montenegrin. BIRN focused on Facebook and Twitter given their popularity in the Balkans and the sensitivity of shared content, which is mostly textual and harder to assess compared to videos and photos.
“That alone doesn’t reflect the number of people working on a content review for a particular country at any given time,” the spokesperson said.
Social networks often remove content themselves, in what they call a ‘proactive approach’.
According to data provided by Facebook, in the last quarter of 2017 their proactive detection rate was 23.6 per cent.
“This means that of the hate speech we removed, 23.6 per cent of it was found before a user reported it to us,” the spokesperson said. “The remaining majority of it was removed after a user reported it. Today we proactively detect about 95 per cent of hate speech content we remove.”
“Whether content is proactively detected or reported by users, we often use AI to take action on the straightforward cases and prioritise the more nuanced cases, where context needs to be considered, for our reviewers.”
There is no available data, however, when it comes to content in a specific language or country.
Facebook publishes a Community Standards Enforcement Report on a quarterly basis, but, according to the spokesperson, the company does not “disclose data regarding content moderation in specific countries.”
Whatever the tools, the results are sometimes highly questionable.
In May 2018, Facebook blocked for 24 hours the profile of Bosnian journalist Dragan Bursac after he posted a photo of a detention camp for Bosniaks in Serbia during the collapse of federal Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Facebook determined that Bursac’s post had violated “community standards,” local media reported.
Bojan Kordalov, Skopje-based public relations and new media specialist, said that, “when evaluating efficiency in this area, it is important to emphasise that the traffic in the Internet space is very dense and is increasing every second, which unequivocally makes it a field where everyone needs to contribute”.
“This means that social media managements are undeniably responsible for meeting the standards and compliance with regulations within their platforms, but this does not absolve legislators, governments and institutions of responsibility in adapting to the needs of the new digital age, nor does it give anyone the right to redefine and narrow down the notion and the benefits that democracy brings.”
Lack of language sensibility
Illustration. Photo: Unsplash/The Average Tech Guy
SHARE Foundation, a Belgrade-based NGO working on digital rights, said the question was crucial given the huge volume of content flowing through the likes of Facebook and Twitter in all languages.
“When it comes to relatively small language groups in absolute numbers of users, such as languages in the former Yugoslavia or even in the Balkans, there is simply no incentive or sufficient pressure from the public and political leaders to invest in human moderation,” SHARE told BIRN.
Berthelemy of EDRi said the Balkans were not a stand alone example, and that the content moderation practices and policies of Facebook and Twitter are “doomed to fail.”
“Many of these corporations operate on a massive scale, some of them serving up to a quarter of the world’s population with a single service,” Berthelemy told BIRN. “It is impossible for such monolithic architecture, and speech regulation process and policy to accommodate and satisfy the specific cultural and social needs of individuals and groups.”
The European Parliament has also stressed the importance of a combined assessment.
“The expressions of hatred can be conveyed in many ways, and the same words typically used to convey such expressions can also be used for different purposes,” according to a 2020 study – ‘The impact of algorithms for online content filtering or moderation’ – commissioned by the Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs.
“For instance, such words can be used for condemning violence, injustice or discrimination against the targeted groups, or just for describing their social circumstances. Thus, to identify hateful content in textual messages, an attempt must be made at grasping the meaning of such messages, using the resources provided by natural language processing.”
Hattotuwa said that, in general, “non-English language markets with non-Romanic (i.e. not English letter based) scripts are that much harder to design AI/ML solutions around”.
“And in many cases, these markets are out of sight and out of mind, unless the violence, abuse or platform harms are so significant they hit the New York Times front-page,” Hattotuwa told BIRN.
“Humans are necessary for evaluations, but as you know, there are serious emotional / PTSD issues related to the oversight of violent content, that companies like Facebook have been sued for (and lost, having to pay damages).”
Failing in non-English
Illustration. Photo: Unsplash/Ann Ann
Dragan Vujanovic of the Sarajevo-based NGO Vasa prava [Your Rights] criticised what he said was a “certain level of tolerance with regards to violations which support certain social narratives.”
“This is particularly evident in the inconsistent behavior of social media moderators where accounts with fairly innocuous comments are banned or suspended while other accounts, with overt abuse and clear negative social impact, are tolerated.”
For Chloe Berthelemy, trying to apply a uniform set of rules on the very diverse range of norms, values and opinions on all available topics that exist in the world is “meant to fail.”
“For instance, where nudity is considered to be sensitive in the United States, other cultures take a more liberal approach,” she said.
The example of Myanmar, when Facebook effectively blocked an entire language by refusing all messages written in Jinghpaw, a language spoken by Myanmar’s ethnic Kachin and written with a Roman alphabet, shows the scale of the issue.
“The platform performs very poorly at detecting hate speech in non-English languages,” Berthelemy told BIRN.
The techniques used to filter content differ depending on the media analysed, according to the 2020 study for the European Parliament.
“A filter can work at different levels of complexity, spanning from simply comparing contents against a blacklist, to more sophisticated techniques employing complex AI techniques,” it said.
“In machine learning approaches, the system, rather than being provided with a logical definition of the criteria to be used to find and classify content (e.g., to determine what counts as hate speech, defamation, etc.) is provided with a vast set of data, from which it must learn on its own the criteria for making such a classification.”
Users of both Twitter and Facebook can appeal in the event their accounts are suspended or blocked.
“Unfortunately, the process lacks transparency, as the number of filed appeals is not mentioned in the transparency report, nor is the number of processed or reinstated accounts or tweets,” the study noted.
Between January and October 2020, Facebook restored some 50,000 items of content without an appeal and 613,000 after appeal.
Machine learning
As cited in the 2020 study commissioned by the European Parliament, Facebook has developed a machine learning approach called Whole Post Integrity Embeddings, WPIE, to deal with content violating Facebook guidelines.
The system addresses multimedia content by providing a holistic analysis of a post’s visual and textual content and related comments, across all dimensions of inappropriateness (violence, hate, nudity, drugs, etc.). The company claims that automated tools have improved the implementation of Facebook content guidelines. For instance, about 4.4 million items of drug sale content were removed in just the third quarter of 2019, 97.6 per cent of which were detected proactively.
When it comes to the ways in which social networks deal with suspicious content, Hattotuwa said that “context is key”.
While acknowledging advancements in the past two to three years, Hattotuwa said that, “No AI and ML [Machine Learning] I am aware of even in English language contexts can accurately identify the meaning behind an image.”
“With regards to content inciting hate, hurt and harm,” he said, “it is even more of a challenge.”
According to the Twitter Transparency report, in the first six months of 2020, 12.4 million accounts were reported to the company, just over six million of which were reported for hateful conduct and some 5.1 million for “abuse/harassment”.
In the same period, Twitter suspended 925,744 accounts, of which 127,954 were flagged for hateful conduct and 72,139 for abuse/harassment. The company removed such content in a little over 1.9 million cases: 955,212 in the hateful conduct category and 609,253 in the abuse/harassment category.
Toskic Cvetinovic said the rules needed to be clearer and better communicated to users by “living people.”
“Often, the content removal doesn’t have a corrective function, but amounts to censorship,” she said.
Berthelemy said that, “because the dominant social media platforms reproduce the social systems of oppression, they are also often unsafe for many groups at the margins.”
“They are unable to understand the discriminatory and violent online behaviours, including certain forms of harassment and violent threats and therefore, cannot address the needs of victims,” Berthelemy told BIRN.
“Furthermore,” she said, “those social media networks are also advertisement companies. They rely on inflammatory content to generate profiling data and thus advertisement profits. There will be no effective, systematic response without addressing the business models of accumulating and trading personal data.”
The Turkish Interior Ministry announced on Tuesday that security forces detained 39 social media users in the first week of February for allegedly posting propaganda for terrorist organisations online.
It said that a total of 575 offenders have been detected and that detentions continue.
“Debates and developments on social media platforms as well as the social media accounts of illegal groups and structures are being followed closely,” the ministry said in a written statement.
The detainees are accused of propaganda for organisations which Turkey accepted as terrorist organisations, including the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, PKK, the so-called Islamic State, extremist leftist groups and the so-called Fethullahist Terrorist Organisation – a name Turkey uses to brand followers of exiled Turkish preacher Fethullah Gulen, who Ankara accuses of orchestrating a failed coup attempt in 2016.
The 39 detainees include several students who allegedly run social media accounts to organise the recent series of high-profile protests against the political appointment of a new rector at the prestigious Bogazici University in Istanbul.
Riot police staged a major operation to disperse the student protesters last week, with hundreds detained and dozens charged.
Aysen Sahin, an independent Turkish journalist, was also detained by police at her home on Monday evening for posting a message on Twitter during last week’s student protests.
Sahin was detained after some pro-government newspapers criticised her. She was released on Tuesday morning.
The Turkish government’s crackdown on social media users intensified after it introduced a new law on digital media last year.
The new law allows security forces to detain anyone responsible for suspicious posts which are linked to terrorist organisations or any kind of disinformation.
As part of the new law, social media platforms are forced to appoint legal representatives in the country to answer the government’s demands to delete social media posts and close accounts.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Russia’s VK social media platform decided to appoint representatives after Turkish government fined them twice. Twitter, however, is still resisting the Turkish government’s new regulations.
According to the Turkish Interior Ministry, 14,186 social media accounts were investigated and 6,743 people were tried because of their posts on social media in first eight months of 2020.
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