Nearly 10 per cent of judicial institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina which responded to BIRN’s FOI request insisted that requests for access to information be submitted in person or by mail, while some offered fax as an alternative.
BIRN sent inquiries to 96 courts and prosecutors’ offices on how they receive requests for free access to information.
The majority, 51, said they allow inquiries to be sent in a variety of ways, including email.
But of the 58 who responded, two prosecutors’ offices and four courts said they do not look at inquiries sent by email, which is common practice in most state institutions.
In their responses they said that they receive such requests exclusively by mail or in person, citing the lack of an electronic seal law and the impossibility of establishing the identities of the persons sending requests by email.
Experts criticised this as a way to restrict access to information for citizens and journalists.
The editor of the Capital.ba portal and president of the Banja Luka Journalists’ Club, Sinisa Vukelic, said such an approach makes it difficult for journalists to work.
“The message they are sending is that they do not want to change, and the only conclusion that can be drawn from that is that they are looking for every possible way to be less transparent,” Vukelic said.
Making inquiries in person, or sending them by mail, takes up valuable time when working on a text and prevents journalists from doing the stories they would otherwise do, if judicial institutions were more open, he added.
When you receive information after ten days, it is often by then unusable from a journalistic point of view, Vukelic noted.
Besides creating obstacles to sending inquiries, journalists face non-responses or delays in obtaining information from the judiciary. BIRN’s inquiries were not answered at all by 38 judicial institutions, and of the 58 that did answer, their answers arrived after 14 days.
BIRN’s recently published annual Freedom of Information report concluded that FOI laws in Bosnia and Herzegovina are outdated and do not meet the needs and expectations of the digital age.
Furthermore, Bosnia remains the only country in the Balkans that does not offer access to public records in electronic form.
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.”
We’re looking for people who are willing to share their experience with us to help in a story we’re currently working on. Scroll down for information on how to part take.
The key things we want to know:
What type of violations have you reported?
In what language was the content?
How was the report processed?
What do we consider to be violations of social media community guidelines:
Violent threats (direct or indirect)
Harassment, which entails inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others
Hateful conduct, which entails promoting violence against or directly attacking or threatening other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability or disease.
Things to note:
We are looking for social media users that reported content in the Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Albanian, and Macedonian languages. We want to hear as many different experiences from all around Southeast Europe.
Your stories will be used to help us with an ongoing investigation.
How to take part?
To submit your experience, all you need to do is fill out this form.
Experts told an online debate hosted by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network on Tuesday that the current regulation systems for online media in the Western Balkans are not good enough, but efforts to curb the publication of hate speech and defamatory comments must not tip over into censorship.
Media and legal experts from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia who spoke at the debate entitled ‘Case Law and Online Media Regulation in the Balkans’ also said that the application of existing legislation is inadequate.
Authorities often rely on legislation that was developed for traditional media which has not been adapted accordingly, or on self-regulation which is not mandatory.
Lazar Sandev, an attorney at law from North Macedonia argued that “those who create public opinion regarding matters of public interest do not uphold any standards, they do not have any legal knowledge”.
Jelena Kleut, associate professor at the University of Novi Sad’s Faculty of Philosophy, said that in Serbia there is lack of willingness to apply standards in online media, and noted a difference between rich and poor media outlets as well as responsible and not responsible ones.
“The wealthy, irresponsible media – they have legal knowledge but they don’t care. They would rather see the complaints in court, pay a certain amount of fines and continue along, they don’t care. On the other end of the spectrum, we have responsible but poor media,” Kleut said.
The media experts also debated the controversial issue of reader comment sections on websites, which some sites around the world have removed in recent years because of a proliferation of hate speech, defamation and insulting language.
According to Montenegro’s Media Law, which came in force in August this year, the founder of an online publication is obliged to remove a comment “that is obviously illegal content” without delay, and no later than 60 minutes from learning or receiving a report that a comment is illegal.
Milan Radovic, programme director of the Civil Alliance NGO and a member of the Montenegrin Public Broadcaster’s governing council, argued that this “it is clear that in such a short period of time, if it is applied, will damage those affected, but also damages for freedom of expression”.
Edina Harbinja, a senior lecturer at Britain’s Aston University, warned that there is a conflict between regulatory attempts and media freedom, and that “this is when we need to be careful in how we regulate, not to result in censorship”.
This was the second debate in a series of discussions on online media regulation with various stakeholders, organised as a part of the regional Media for All project, which aim to support independent media outlets in the Western Balkans to become more audience-oriented and financially sustainable.
The project is funded by the UK government and delivered by a consortium led by the British Council in partnership with BIRN, the Thomson Foundation and the International NGO Training and Research Centre, INTRAC.
With a full-time job and a family, Safija Vucenovic, now 67, from the central Bosnian city of Zenica, could rarely find time to commit to music and sewing – her two great passions – when she was younger.
It was only when she was pensioned and her children grew up that she started singing in a local female choir, performing solo at music events and designing her own dresses for them.
But her newfound pleasure was shaken this spring by the arrival of COVID-19, tying her to her home without social contacts or performances.
To banish the feeling of uncertainty and anxiety that overwhelmed many of her peers, she began recording herself with a smartphone while singing her favourite “sevdalinke” songs and making clothes, sharing the videos with her friends via Facebook and Viber.
“It helped me, and the others, to keep our spirits up,” Vucenovic recalls.
Even though it is not mandatory to stay inside any more, many older people still spend most of their time at home, especially since the number of COVID-19 cases began rising in early July.
People aged 65 years and older make up about 14 per cent of Bosnia’s population, according to the 2013 census, and their share in the overall population is increasing.
The UN estimates that this age group will represent more than 30 per cent of the population of Bosnia by 2060. Many seniors live on the edge of poverty and are socially excluded. Average pensions of around 200 euros a month often cannot cover even basic expenses.
Several reports, including those published by Caritas BiHand the Institution of the Human Rights Ombudsman of BiH, have noted that the lack of activities in which elderly people can take part makes them isolated and prone to mental illnesses, particularly depression.
Ever since the beginning of the pandemic, media have reported that the elderly are the most at-risk group from COVID-19, although the evidence shows that the disease can be deadly to anyone.
At the same time, regular health care services, slow and inadequate even under normal conditions, have now become almost inaccessible to many seniors now because of the special COVID-19-related working regime.
For Safija and other members of the Zenica-basedNas most (Our Bridge) association, the only way to keep up with their peers, rather than depressing news, was to turn to technology.
From their own homes, they have been engaging in collective creative work and socializing – the same as they had been doing during the gatherings held in Our Bridge’s art centre before the pandemic – but this time over the Internet.
Virus puts centre’s work on hold
The Our Bridge local association has organised artistic and cultural activities for seniors and persons with disabilities in Zenica since the beginning of 2013.
It has staged numerous arts and crafts classes, art exhibitions and music and theatre performances involving the elderly – mostly women – in order to foster their social inclusion.
While other bigger cities in Bosnia have government-supportedcentres for healthy ageing to aid the socialization of the elderly, Our Bridge’s work is mainly funded by members’ own fees and is based on the volunteer work of senior activists.
The number of its activities and its members has steadily grown in the last two years but, as the association closed in March due to the pandemic, all of its initiatives have been halted.
But, soon after the initial shock caused by the crisis, the association began organising Facebook-based creative challenges and live streams of art workshops, art classes on Viber and online art residencies for international artists.
“We wanted to stay connected and motivate each other to create arts and crafts so that we can distract ourselves from our worries,” says Zdena Saric, president of Our Bridge. “It’s been really a blessing that we have the Internet and smartphones to do so.”
Saric, a locally renowned artist and art activist helping women, seniors and persons with disabilities to overcome mental health struggles through art, began giving online painting classes via Facebook live streams in April.
Her first live-streamed video class on the so-called encaustic technique – using molten wax that is then ironed – has been viewed over 1,000 times.
Many of Saric’s Facebook friends began contacting her about additional tips and tricks on how to use the iron as a painting tool, which is why she decided to continue to hold live streams once a week until the end of May.
Some of her virtual “students” even sent her the photos of the paintings they made during the lockdown that have been inspired by her online classes.
She also began regularly posting on Facebook her art works created in isolation at home, trying to encourage others who felt depressed and apathetic to lift their dark thoughts through the bright colours of paint and start painting themselves.
Meliha Bico Druzic, 65, one of Our Bridge’s volunteers, was one of those who needed such a stimulus.
She was having a hard time adjusting to the new reality of not being able to leave her home for weeks.
As an Our Bridge activist, she had been busy for years with the association’s activities. She also loves to paint but couldn’t find any inspiration. Suddenly, after being stuck at home, she realised she had a lot of time on her hands and didn’t know what to do with it.
“I wanted a [real] spring to come, which is why the first painting I made in isolation was a vase full of lilacs,” said Bico Druzic, who after some days of persuasion accepted Zdena’s virtual creative challenge.
She began painting at home and posting her works on Facebook, and challenging her Facebook friends to follow her lead.
Bico Druzic has since exhibited her paintings created during the lockdown at the “My Quarantine” (“Moj Karantin”) art show held at the Our Bridge centre in July. The exhibition included art works of other Our Bridge members as well.
Shifting from offline to online activities
Last year’s offline creative activities for seniors in Our Bridge. Photo: Ajdin Kamber
The response from their online creative communities encouraged Bico Druzic and Saric to continue painting and sharing works on Facebook. As other Our Bridge members began doing the same, their Facebook news feeds have become full of photographed paintings and other handicrafts.
To continue these efforts, but in a more varied and structured manner, they gathered Our Bridge’s members in an art-focused Viber group.
The initiative, called “There is some secret connection” (“Ima neka tajna veza”), has been designed in collaboration with the Serbian association Art Aparat, whose co-founder and music teacher, Maja Curcic, started producing video singing lessons in Belgrade and sharing them with the members of the Viber group in June.
Apart from singing, the women teach each other how to paint, design bags and do handicrafts via video messages. The Viber group also serves as a channel of everyday communication.
The project was originally designed to bring together seniors from Zenica and the Serbian capital Belgrade through music and painting classes.
In both countries, the elderly suffer from an absence of systemic protection of their rights, not only related to health and social protection, but to their cultural needs as well, according to Curcic.
Apart from cultural programmes in homes for the aged and the activities of local pensioners’ associations, seniors have limited options to participate in cultural initiatives.
Similar to the centers for healthy aging, Serbia also has daily centres for seniors that provide some cultural activities, but these are limited in their number and capacities.
That is why Art Aparat and Our Bridge established a partnership, though the initial idea had to be adjusted due to the pandemic and transformed into a remote creative exchange, focused only on Zenica.
“Projects like this one encourage seniors to use new technologies and learn how to adapt to the new times,” Curcic says. She believes it helps the elderly to overcome barriers such as physical distance or inability to move, and restore a sense of belonging to their community.
This is the first time Curcic, who has been using music as a tool of social integration for vulnerable groups of children and youngsters in Serbia for a decade, has worked with seniors. Judging by the feedback from the members of her Zenica online choir, she has succeeded.
“I can’t wait to meet Maja in person and sing with her,” Vucenovic says. Bico Druzic agrees, adding that Maja’s choice of the song for the lessons – which is Imagine life in the rhythm of music to dance to (Zamisli život u ritmu muzike za ples – a song of from the popular Yugoslav band Film – fits her taste perfectly: “I love music, especially the songs that are closer to my younger age, and that have a soul.”
Bico Druzic is also participating in another Our Bridge international collaboration that was re-shaped from an art residency in Zenica into an online artistic platform when the pandemic broke out.
The project called “Urban Herstories – The female face of Zenica” – aims to document social, political and urban changes in Bosnia since the 1950s through the eyes of Zenica’s elderly women, and Bico Druzic’s story, related to her elementary school, is part of it.
Artists from Slovakia and Ukraine were about to visit Zenica in mid-March and work with Bico Druzic and five other women just when Bosnia – and Europe – began to close down. The stories will, however, still serve as a female audio guide to the city and as a basis for online-based art residencies of Slovakian and Ukrainian artists.
‘It’s nicer when you can see a person live’
Our Bridge members learning how to use Viber and social media on smartphones during training. Photo: Facebook/Nas most Zenica
Although new artistic ideas have arisen from the necessary adaptations of the “Urban Herstories” project to the online sphere, physical encounters between the women in Zenica and the Slovakian and Ukrainian artists – which could not take place – are an irreplaceable part of the experience, says Katarzyna Zielińska, manager of the Polish cultural institution Strefa Kultury Wroclaw, one of Our Bridge’s partner organisations on the project.
“I had a feeling that we have lost the human aspect due to the lack of the real, person-to-person contacts with the storytellers [women] and the lack of a first-hand experience of the place we were supposed to work in [Zenica],” Zielińska says.
Curcic from Art Aparat shares that sentiment, warning that it can demotivate people who never before attended an online education class to follow the instructions of a teacher who they can see only on a screen.
“It’s nicer when you can see a person live, encourage him or her or explain [in more detail] what you wanted to say. The pre-recorded rehearsals are not the same as the real contact,” Curcic adds.
Working with people not used to communication platforms like Viber or social networks like Facebook is another major challenge. Adjusting to the new ways of socialization and collaboration has been difficult for most of the Our Bridge’s membership, whose average age is 60.
The association ran several offline training sessions on how to use smartphones once the strict epidemiological measures had been lifted. But a few women still felt discouraged by the amount of information they needed to absorb, and haven’t continued to participate in smartphone-based activities.
Despite the shortcomings of such initiatives, the online-based creative programmes might remain the safest – and possibly the only – way to work with the elderly during the pandemic.
“Organisations like Our Bridge, which facilitate online creative connections, are of great importance for the elderly,” says Zenica-raised psychologist and psycho-therapist Dzelila Mulic Corbo. “In that way, they [elderly] stay in touch with the outside world, have contacts with others, and make their days meaningful.”
Recalling that adjusting to the “new normality” imposed by the pandemic has been hard for practically everyone, Mulic Corbo says that for the elderly, whose flexibility in new circumstances is naturally lower, the adaptation process is much harder.
Our Bridge will keep developing online-based activities as long as the risk of COVID-19 infection continues, according to Saric. In the meantime, it is looking for other innovative ways to help motivate seniors stay connected through their mobile phones and so mentally overcome the challenges of the pandemic.
“Nothing would make us more happy than to be able to freely gather in our space. But, until then, our [mobile] phones will have to play their role,” Saric concluded.
This publication was produced with the financial support of the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of BIRN and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
Media giant Google has announced that Google for Nonprofits, which offers eligible organizations access to Google products that can help them solve some of the challenges that nonprofits face, has expanded to ten more states: Nigeria, Tanzania, Ghana, Pakistan, Ukraine, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Malta, Cyprus, Iceland and Ecuador.
The Google products can help nonprofits deal with such challenges as finding new donors and volunteers, working more efficiently, and getting supporters to take action.
As of June 9, nonprofits in the 10 new countries will have access to digital tools to continue operations, maintain productivity and raise awareness, such as Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Drive, and Google Meet and various others.
Google for Nonprofits provides access to these products at no charge: G Suite for Nonprofits and nonprofit discounts for G Suite Business and Enterprise; Google Ad Grants; YouTube Nonprofit program and Google Maps Platform. Eligible nonprofits should nevertheless check the availability of these products in their respective countries.
Some of the benefits include unlimited email addresses at a nonprofit’s custom domain via Gmail, the use of a Google Meet video conference and its premium features, that can host up to 100 participants, use of shared drives for additional storage, a 24/7 support by phone, chat, and email. Users will also be able to access Google Docs, Sheets, Forms, and Slides from any device, with 30GB of storage space per user across Gmail and Google Drive.
Thanks to Google Ad Grants, nonprofits will be able to receive up to $10,000/month in text-based ads on Google Search to raise awareness for their nonprofit organisation.
Google for Nonprofits is available in 67 countries, receiving over 1,000 new applications each week from organizations around the world. Apart from Bosnia, other countries from the region on the list include Serbia, Romania, Croatia and Bulgaria.
A Sarajevo municipality has temporarily stopped issuing birth certificates due to a computer virus that locks documents in its database for the second time in some two weeks.
The central Centar Municipality, whose offices are next door to the Bosnian presidency building, said on its website that the problem caused by a “ransomware virus” was detected on Saturday. Such viruses typically block computer systems and their originators demand payment in exchange for removing them.
But the municipality denied that it was the target of a hacker attack, or that the central electronic register with all birth and death certificates in Bosnia’s Federation entity was in danger of being wiped out, as the Interior Ministry of the Federation entity was quoted as saying by the media.
“Information about a targeted attack on the IT system of the Center Municipality and the destruction of the registar and documents is not true,” the municipality said. It added the problem was reported to the police, as it was the second time in a little over two weeks that this happened.
On May 22, the municipality reported on its website that the issue of birth, death and marriage certificates was stopped because of “an electrical problem” but added that it was soon resolved.
Bosnia lags behind with the introduction of e-government, but the Centar municipality has provided a number of services electronically.
From January 26 to May 26, BIRN collected information about 163 cases of breaches of digital rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, North Macedonia, Romania and Serbia.
Sixty-eight of the cases related to the manipulation in digital environment, while 25 related to publishing falsehoods and unverified information with the intention to damage someone’s reputation.
BIRN’s monitoring of digital rights, developed together with the SHARE Foundation, has shown that ordinary people were the most affected by such violations, with members of the public being the target in 126 of the cases.
State institutions or state officials violated digital rights in a total of 37 cases, meanwhile.
States rarely addressed the abuses arising from these violations, and in 45 cases, the perpetrators were not identified, while 139 of the total of 163 cases were not resolved.
Eight cases were the result of pressure related to the publication of information, 12 were linked to insults and unfounded accusations and 11 were hate speech and discrimination.
Medical and personal data breaches featured in 18 cases, computer fraud was registered on 11 occasions, while the destruction and theft of data and programs happened in three cases.
Beyond the countries listed above, BIRN noticed an unprecedented rise of digital violations in Montenegro and Turkey, where there were arbitrary arrests and data breaches.
Hackers, data breaches and illegal processing
Infografic: BIRN
Leaked documents, fake websites and the publication of people’s personal and health data have been commonplaces during the ongoing pandemic, but the scale and consequences of the breaches and of the illegal processing of data has yet to be established.
Speculation about the number and identity of COVID-19-infected people led to the mass exposure of personal and private data on social media and messaging platforms. In some cases, the leaks were small in terms of data, but had potentially serious consequences, particularly in situations in which patients’ personal data was revealed.
The most serious cases were reported in Croatia, North Macedonia and Montenegro.
In March in Croatia, a message containing a list of infected patients was shared among people living on the island of Murter, mostly through messaging apps.
Illegal personal data processing and privacy breaches took place in North Macedonia as well. The country’s Agency for Personal Data Protection filed criminal charges against an unknown person for publishing the personal data of people living in the town of Kumanovo.
The public in Serbia became concerned when it was discovered that the login credentials for Serbia’s information system for analysis and storage of health data during the pandemic were publicly available on a health institution website for eight days.
Citizens of Montenegro suffered most from stigmatisation due to a number of leaks of COVID-19 patients’ records. The infected patients’ identities were revealed in posts on social media, sparking hate speech against them.
Individuals who were violated self-isolation measures were also targeted, and often, it was governments that were revealing their personal information.
In Bosnia’s Serb-dominated entity, Republika Srpska, authorities launched a website on which they published the names of people who did not follow the entity’s self-isolation measures. The list can still be found online.
As a measure against the spread of the coronavirus, Montenegro’s government published a list of individuals who were put in self-isolation after returning home from abroad. The lists, structured by municipalities, include the individuals’ names, surnames, the date when they were put into isolation, and their home addresses. The list was only removed a month after it was published.
People were also targeted by hacker attacks and fraudulent messages or emails, usually trying to collect their personal information or request payments to foreign banks or crypto-currency accounts, as cybercriminals took advantage of the public concerns and confusion created by the pandemic.
Scams, phishing campaigns and cyber-attacks exploiting people’s fear of COVID-19 were most common in Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, North Macedonia and Romania. The Romanian cybersecurity giant Bitdefender said in March that such attempts at fraud “have risen by 475 per cent in March as compared to the previous month”, and were expected to keep increasing.
Threats, hate speech and discrimination
Infographic: BIRN
While some countries limited the scope of the freedom of speech during the pandemic, some people used their online freedom to unleash threats, insults, discriminatory posts and hate campaigns.
BIRN’s overview looked at several categories of violations:
Hate speech and discrimination
Threatening content and the endangerment of security
Insults and unfounded accusations
Falsehoods and unverified information directed towards the damaging of reputations
In total, more than 15 per cent of all the cases that were monitored included one of these violations. The largest number –
This type of online behaviour was often combined with the use of fake accounts and the paid promotion of false content.
The people most commonly affected by the digital violations that were monitored were journalists, medical professionals and people in quarantine.
Discriminatory posts and acts were directed mostly towards refugees, Chinese and Jewish people, women and the Roma community, with the largest number of such cases occurring in Hungary.
Gender-based discrimination was reported in Serbia, where the victims were predominantly politically-engaged individuals and journalists who criticise the government.
Threats and calls for violence against the police in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina were found on Facebook. In both cases, authorities reacted promptly and perpetrators were identified and detained. In North Macedonia two police officers were fined for having taunted and offended people on social networks.
Violations related to damaging reputation predominantly affected governments’ political opponents, independent media and journalists.
Serbia was the country with the largest number of posts aimed at damaging the reputation of independent journalists. In three of four cases of publishing falsehoods, the journalists who were targeted were women.
Journalists were also targeted in North Macedonia and Hungary.
Pressure and arrests for publishing information
Infographic: BIRN
Due to the highly controlled media landscape and poor level of media literacy in the countries that were monitored, the public was overwhelmed with contradictory information and had much more difficulty in recognising false and misleading information during the pandemic than usual. At the same time, the public’s need for timely and proper information had never been bigger.
While the flow of information continued to grow immensely, states started to arrest citizens for posts on social media over the accusation they caused panic and unrest. Some countries imposed authoritarian regulations that limited the flow of information.
Members of the public, media representatives and politicians were arrested and fined for their writings on social media, often without any clear criteria. Journalists were arrested in Serbia, Kosovo and Turkey.
Arrests and fines have become one of the main tactics to counter fake news and violations of restrictions imposed by all governments in the states that were monitored. In Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia and North Macedonia, top state officials warned the public that they faced immediate sanctions for spreading fake news amid the pandemic.
From conspiracy theories to false measures
Illustration: BIRN
Out of 163 cases, the largest number, 68, were linked with the misuse or manipulation of information. They mostly concerned different fake news, the use of false identities online, the sharing of conspiracy theories, or posts classified by the authorities as causing panic and disorder.
Some of the topics that were misused in this way included:
Medicines that can cure the coronavirus, vaccines and laboratory tests
Disinfection procedures
Tips and advices on how to cure the coronavirus
The number of infected people
Information about infected people
Information on medical institutions and their work
The start of the virus and how it developed
State measures and actions that have never been declared nor taken
Supermarkets and food shortages
5G
Other conspiracy theories
Online education and information relevant for students
Offensive posts and videos about quarantined citizens and about people who arrived from a foreign country
Disturbing announcements about the COVID-19 outbreak
In some countries, such as Serbia and Hungary, levels of media freedom are low, with mainstream media often spreading disinformation, while independent media are called fabricators of lies by the authorities.
Nearly 25 per cent of all cases of the misuse or manipulation of information were resolved in some way. The outcomes included:
Website or content removal by the state
A request for the removal of the problematic post
Detention or arrest of a person
Official statement about the incident or a public apology
In Romania, most cases in this category ended in content removal. In Serbia, Hungary and Croatia, arrest was the most common outcome.
Manipulated information, conspiracy theories and unfounded claims emerged en masse on social media platforms and news website when most of the countries introduced emergency measures.
Disinformation was most intensively distributed via YouTube, where content blamed the expansion of 5G technology for the COVID-19 outbreak, or blamed multinational companies or foreign governments for the pandemic. In Croatia, one person even destroyed WiFi equipment, thinking it was 5G infrastructure. Mentions of the alleged influence of 5G networks on the pandemic was noted in Romania and Serbia, both on news websites and on social media.
News websites in Serbia, Romania, Hungary and Croatia often published manipulative content that included false information.
April was the month with the largest number of cases reported in this category. Some 30 out of the total 68 cases of manipulations in the digital environment were registered that month.
Information circulating in April and May, which was manipulated or false, mainly referred to the curfew, the number of COVID-19 patients and tests, students’ exams, people in quarantined, 5G transmitters, enforced microchipping and the funding of religious communities. In almost all cases from this category, members of the public were ones affected.
The rise of ‘unknown’ attackers
Illustration: BIRN
In comparison to the cases of online violations reported before the COVID-19 outbreak, BIRN’s monitoring noted a significant rise in cases in which the perpetrators cannot be identified. The number of these cases increased tenfold on a monthly basis.
These unknown perpetrators have been creating Facebook pages, using the virus situation to persecute independent journalists and others, send fraudulent messages in order to destroy computer software systems or steal money, and creating fake website accounts to spread conspiracy theories or medical disinformation.
Unknown perpetrators have also been responsible for computer frauds, the destruction and theft of data and for making content unavailable using technical skills. Hungary had the most cases involving unknown perpetrators, mainly related to computer fraud.
Cases have also shown how states can be violators of digital rights and freedoms. The increased number of cases which ended in arrest or detention revealed the tendency of states to use more power than was necessary, particularly to arrest journalists and citizens for posts on social media.
From having double standards when it comes to reactions to fake news to using their authority to silence people, governments often acted against the interests of their own citizens. According to the monitoring findings, in almost 25 per cent of all cases, the state itself or a state official was described as the perpetrator of a violation of certain guaranteed rights or freedoms.
On the other hand, members of the public were the victims of violations in 126 cases.
Media regulations across the region have been tightened under states of emergency and journalists have been arrested on accusation of spreading misinformation about authorities’ responses to the spread of the coronavirus. Some countries, like Serbia, sought to centralise the dissemination of official information and banned certain media from regular briefings.
The first worrying legal initiative was noted in Croatia, where the government proposed a change to the Electronic Communications Act under which, in extraordinary situations, the health minister would ask telecommunications companies to provide data on the locations of users’ terminals. The legislative change is currently pending.
Romanian civil society organisations also drew attention to a lack of official transparency and the possibility of media freedoms being curbed by state-of-emergency provisions. Provisions enacted as part of the state of emergency to combat the spread of the coronavirus allowed the authorities to shut down websites that publish fake news and exempted the authorities from answering urgent inquiries from journalists. Access to a dozen websites has been blocked since then.
In North Macedonia, the media faced new procedures for the issue of work permits during coronavirus curfews. The government insisted that its pandemic measures would not affect the public’s right to information, but in practice, institutions were less responsive to freedom of information requests.
In general, there was a trend among many countries to suspend freedom of information requests.
Digital rights, and rights to privacy and freedom of expression on the internet have all faced serious limitations and breaches in South-East and Central Europe. In the semi-democracies of the region, dominated by regimes with elements of authoritarianism, there is legitimate concern about disproportionate interference in citizens’ personal data and concern that recently-imposed measures are not properly tailored to achieve their objectives while causing the least possible damage to guaranteed rights.
Many people’s lives during this period have completely shifted to the online world, where harmful behaviour usually remains unnoticed by authorities preoccupied by offline violations.
During BIRN’s monitoring period, the lack of a human rights-based approach towards people in the digital environment led to discrimination, hate speech and threats. Although protection of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms should be guaranteed on the internet in the same way as it is offline, in practice we have seen an increase in the number of cases of online violations. The forms that those violations take have been evolving as well.
A lack of knowledge and understanding of the online space, and the subsequent lack of internet governance have opened a Pandora’s Box, allowing various state institutions to arbitrarily, partially and unequally interpret people’s online behaviour.
The intense nature of the battle for control of the narrative about the coronavirus has made meaningful oversight of online life and practices, and establishing accountability for online actions, harder than ever.
To read the detailed overview of our digital rights monitoring click here. For individual cases, check our regional database, developed together with the SHARE Foundation.
Facebook’s April 2020 Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour Report, published on May 5, said a total of eight networks of accounts, Pages and Groups were removed in the last month for violating the social media giant’s policy against foreign and domestic interference.
The report said that these influence operations were “coordinated efforts to manipulate public debate for a strategic goal where fake accounts are central to the operation”.
The media giant said it was working to stop coordinated inauthentic behaviour in the context of domestic and non-state campaigns as well as behaviours acting on behalf of a foreign or government actor.
Two of the removed networks, originating from Russia and Iran, were focused on international issues and were trying to interfere in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary and Serbia, the report said.
As for Russia, Facebook removed 46 Pages, 91 Facebook accounts, 2 Groups, and 1 Instagram account “for violating the policy against foreign interference which is coordinated inauthentic behaviour on behalf of a foreign entity”.
It said this activity originated not only from Russia but from the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine and the Russian-annexed Crimean Peninsula. The people behind it posted in Russian, English, German, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Serbian, Georgian, Indonesian and Farsi, focusing on a wide range of regions around the world.
“The individuals behind this activity relied on a combination of authentic, duplicate and fake accounts – many of which had been previously detected and disabled by our automated systems.
“They used fake accounts to post their content and manage Groups and Pages posing as independent news entities in the regions they targeted,” the report said, adding that the networks posted about geopolitical and local news including topics such as the military conflict in Ukraine, the Syrian civil war, the annexation of Crimea, NATO, US elections, and more recently the coronavirus pandemic.
Facebook’s investigation linked the activity to people in Russia and Donbass as well as to two media organizations in Crimea, NewsFront and SouthFront.
Following the report, SouthFront dismissed the claims that it offered misleading coverage concerning the coronavirus pandemic and said it does not operate from Crimea, calling it all “blatant lies”.
A total of$3,150 was spent for ads on Facebook and Instagram and was paid for primarily in US dollars, Russian rubles, and Euros, the report added.
Facebook also removed 118 Pages, 389 Facebook accounts, 27 Groups, and 6 Instagram accounts originating from Iran.
This activity was focused on a wide range of countries globally, including Algeria, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Egypt, Ghana, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, the United States, Britain and Zimbabwe.
These accounts, the report said, “sometimes repurposed Iranian state media content and posted primarily in Arabic, Bengali, Bosnian, and English about geopolitical and local news relevant to each region including topics like the civil war in Syria, the Arab Spring protests, the tensions between Libya and Turkey, criticism of Saudi involvement in the Middle East and Africa, Al Qaeda’s actions in Africa, the Occupy movement in the US, criticism of US policies in the Middle East and the 2012 US elections.”
As for the people behind the coordinated activity, the Facebook investigation found links to the state Iranian Broadcasting Corporation.
The remaining six networks of accounts, Pages and Groups that were also taken down were based in the US, Georgia, Myanmar and Mauritania, and were targeting domestic audiences in their home countries.
In total, Facebook removed 732 accounts, 793 Pages, 200 groups and 162 Instagram accounts. The report said they were also sharing misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.
“All of the networks we took down … in April were created before the COVID-19 pandemic began, however, we’ve seen people behind these campaigns opportunistically use coronavirus-related posts among many other topics to build an audience and drive people to their Pages or off-platform sites.
“The majority of the networks we took down this month were still trying to grow their audience, or had a large portion of engagement on their Pages generated by their own accounts,” the report noted.
Media freedom in Turkey, Bulgaria and Montenegro is the worst in the region, according to the 2020 World Press Freedom Index, published on Tuesday by Reporters Without Borders – but other Balkan countries have largely failed to improve.
“In southern Europe, a crusade by the authorities against the media is very active,” the report warns.
Turkey holds 154th place out of 180 countries worldwide in Reporters Without Borders’ media freedom rankings.
“Turkey is more authoritarian than ever,” the report says, noting an increase in media censorship, particularly of online outlets, despite the release of a number of imprisoned journalists.
Bulgaria is ranked in 111th place, and the report notes that despite international pressure, public radio management suspended experienced journalist Silvia Velikova, a government critic.
This highlighted the lack of independence of Bulgaria’s public broadcasting media and the hold some political leaders have over their editorial policy.
In Montenegro, which is ranked 105th, the report notes no progress, adding that authorities favour pro-government outlets while exercising pressure against other media outlets and journalists.
“In May 2018, investigative journalist Olivera Lakic was shot in the leg. Like in many previous physical attacks on journalists, Lakic’s case is still unsolved,” the report adds. It also mentioned the recent arrests of three journalists on suspicion of causing panic and disorder by publishing fake news.
Serbia is ranked in 93rd place. “After six years under the leadership of Aleksandar Vucic… Serbia has become a country where it is often dangerous to be a journalist and where fake news is gaining in visibility and popularity at an alarming rate,” the report notes.
It says that the number of verbal attacks by politicians on media has risen sharply, and that officials increasingly use inflammatory rhetoric against journalists.
It adds that the assailants who set fire to the house of investigative journalist Milan Jovanovic have yet to be convicted.
North Macedonia is ranked in 92nd place, an improvement on last year, which the report mostly attributes to the attempts for better self-regulation and the publishing of a register of professional online media.
But it also notes that municipal authorities are still able to place advertisements, which remains a tool for financial pressure on media outlets, and that the ruling party, the Social Democrats, have advertised their government’s achievements.
Moldova retains 91st position and the report notes an “extremely polarised” media landscape, with continuing concerns about ownership.
“The media empire built by former billionaire and Democratic Party boss Vladimir Plahotniuc has lost its influence but has been quickly replaced by a media group affiliated to the Democratic Party’s rival, the pro-Russian Party of Socialists,” the report says.
Albania is ranked 84th in the world, down two places from last year, a result of recently-adopted laws against defamation and tightened regulation of online media which could result in censorship and make journalists more vulnerable to government pressures.
Kosovo is ranked 70th by Reporters Without Borders, with the report noting that media in the country remains divided among ethnic lines, and that many outlets are not financially stable.
“Some of the shared concerns are physical and verbal attacks on journalists, cyber-attacks on online media as well as the lack of transparency of media ownership,” the report says.
Greece’s place in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index, 65th, remains unchanged this year.
Croatia moves up five places and is now ranked 59th, but the report notes that the government is still meddling in the affairs of the national broadcaster, HRT, the defamation is still criminalised and that investigative journalists are often the targets of harassment campaigns.
Bosnia and Herzegovina is ranked 58th, also scoring a five-point rise. The report says the further collapse of public service broadcasters in the country is one of the main weaknesses, along with the polarised political climate, marked by constant verbal attacks and nationalist rhetoric, which “has created a hostile environment for press freedom”.
Romania is ranked 48th in the global index – the best position of all Balkan countries – but the report highlights some continuing shortcomings.
“The attitude towards journalism and free speech that prevails within the state and the political class continues to encourage censorship and self-censorship,” it says.
“The media’s funding mechanisms are opaque or even corrupt, and editorial policies are subordinated to owner interests. The media have gradually been turned into political propaganda tools and are routinely subjected to surveillance by the security services,” it adds.
The report marks Norway, Finland and Denmark as the three best countries in the world for press freedom, while Eritrea, Turkmenistan and North Korea are at the bottom of the list of 180 countries.
Reporters Without Borders says the report shows that the decade ahead will be “decisive for the future of journalism, with the COVID-19 pandemic highlighting and amplifying the many crises that threaten the right to freely reported, independent, diverse and reliable information”.
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Our Bridge members learning how to use Viber and social media on smartphones during training. Photo: Facebook/Nas most Zenica
