Education staff and public sector officials need specialised media literacy training to identify and address the growing problem of disinformation in Kosovo, a BIRN report urged.
The launch of BIRN Kosovo’s report on disinformation, ,The Story of Our Lies’, in Pristina on Monday. Photo: BIRN
Kosovo needs to adopt a media literacy strategy and include it as a subject in elementary and secondary school curricula in order to face the growing challenges posed by disinformation, said a report published by BIRN Kosovo on Monday.
The report, ‘The Story of Our Lies’, warned that dealing with disinformation is a serious problem for public institutions and decision-makers because officials and employees “lack adequate knowledge about disinformation, including how to identify and address it”.
BIRN surveyed around 50 participants from various professions, including teachers, doctors, judges, and prosecutors, to assess public officials’ level of knowledge about disinformation and skills to deal with it.
The survey found that more than half of them are not equipped with the necessary knowledge to tackle the issue.
“The situation in the field is very concerning. If a teacher has no basic knowledge of what disinformation is, it’s problematic for him to teach pupils about disinformation. The same goes with judges who have trusted non-verified news,” said Kreshnik Gashi, co-author of the report.
Alban Zeneli, a professor at the Department of Journalism at Pristina University, said that the Kosovo government should include media literacy in its elementary and secondary school curricula.
“Kosovo has become a fertile ground for the production and dissemination of disinformation and this is mainly linked with elementary and secondary education which is obliged to produce schoolchildren who should be able to make a judgment about the content they read,” Zeneli said.
The report said that some media have become creators and amplifiers of disinformation due to the absence of sustainable funding and sufficient staff, as well as non-transparent editorial policies and external influences.
It noted that Kosovo remains vulnerable to disinformation from inside and outside the country as mechanisms to monitor the dissemination of disinformation have not been established and judicial institutions have proved to be unable to handle such cases.
“With the meteoric spread of the use of the internet and social media in Kosovo, distributors of fictitious news have found social media platforms a fertile ground to push forward their malicious agenda and create confusion among audiences about which news is true and which is false,” ambassador Tomas Szunyog, head of the European Union’s office in Kosovo, said at the launch of the report in Pristina.
The report was based on data that BIRN Kosovo gathered from October 2022 to April 2023. The research aimed to identify disinformation narratives created within Kosovo, but also external efforts to spread falsehoods and cause destabilisation.
“As the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfolded, Kosovo also suffered from Russian disinformation campaigns aimed at the entire Western Balkans,” the report noted.
“In Kosovo this information was largely aimed at impeding the country’s NATO and EU integration processes, thus influencing Kosovo’s relationship with the outside world. Internally, however, the Russian disinformation was aimed at straining already tense interethnic relations between Kosovo Serbs and Kosovo Albanians,” it said.