The head of Kosovo’s Independent Media Commission IMC, has defended its decision on Saturday to ban the broadcasting of Russia Today and RT Documentary TV channels in Kosovo, saying it took the decision to prevent the spread of Russian propaganda following the Russian military invasion of Ukraine.
The two channels are broadcasted in the Serb-run north of Kosovo by MTS, Serbia’s state telecom company. Serbia and Russia are close allies.
The head of the IMC, Faruk Rexhaj, told Prishtina Insight that it was important to counter misinformation about the war.
“We have appealed to the media to provide sources of information. The decision does not match a violation of media freedom, but measures must be taken not to spread misinformation,” he said.
He said Russia Today and RT Documentary were widely watched in Serb-majority municipalities in northern Kosovo. “Today we are on the ground and identifying all distribution operators, to see if there are other [Russian] channels on platforms,” he said.
According to him, the decision is not a permanent restriction but only temporary prevention, until the situation in Ukraine improves. As Russia’s assault on Ukraine continues, fears about what is being served to citizens through the media, and the security of the source of information, have grown.
“Taking into account that the security of the Republic of Kosovo is related to the fate and security of other democratic countries, the IMC considers it necessary and indispensable to take this decision,” the decision for the ban read.
On Sunday, the President of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, said Russian TV channels would be banned across the EU, attacking what she called “a media machine”.
“We will ban the Kremlin’s media machine in the EU. The state-owned Russia Today and Sputnik, and their subsidiaries, will no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin’s war,” she wrote on Twitter. “We are developing tools to ban their toxic and harmful disinformation in Europe,” she added.
The IMC is responsible for regulating, managing and supervising the spectrum of broadcasting frequencies in Kosovo.
It licenses public and private broadcasters, determines and implements the broadcasting policy and regulates the rights, obligations and responsibilities of natural and legal persons who provide audio and audiovisual media services.
BIRN itself monitors the media in Kosovo, tracking information with unreliable sources about the attacks in Ukraine.
As fierce fighting continues in Ukraine, a meeting was scheduled to take place between leaders of both countries. Airstrikes have targeted several cities and overnight Russia bombed Chernihiv and Kharkiv, Ukrainian officials said.
A BIRN Freedom of Information Request has revealed that Prime Minister Edi Rama on 29 September last year appointed his own former spokesperson, Endri Fuga, as head of the newly established Media and Information Agency, MIA. The appointment was not published and was disclosed only recently following the FOI request.
The establishment of the MIA has alarmed rights organisations, who fear it will enable the government to further stifle freedom of the media and further reduce media access to government.
Fuga has been a spokesperson for Rama since at least a decade ago, when Rama was still Mayor of Tirana. For a short period he was the Socialist Party chairman.
“The General Director of the Media and Information Agency, Endri Fuga, has been appointed by order of the Prime Minister, No 96, on 29.9.2021,” the written answer to BIRN’s FOI reads.
The new agency will have a staff of some 61 and its job includes producing print and audiovisual materials to promote the work of the government and to “monitor means of mass communications” for assessing public opinion on the government. The new agency director will have “the level of State Minister,” the decision reads.
The agency will control all government communications, including that of separate ministries and other state agencies. It will hire and fire PR officers in any state institution and will organise the press conferences of any minister.
The government has awarded the agency office space at the Palace of Congress, a Communist-era palace in Tirana.
Rights organizations have condemned the creation of the agency, noting the established practice of the government of producing its own “news” and of banning journalists or video reporters from following its activities directly.
A letter signed by six international rights organisations last September called for the cancelling of the agency.
“Rather than improve journalists’ access to public information, the establishment of the MIA may result in the exact opposite,” the joint letter read.
“Context is vital here,” it added. “Journalists in Albania currently work in an extremely difficult climate for accessing information from government sources. The government communicates with journalists via WhatsApp groups instead of using official communication channels.
“Reporters working for independent media are regularly discriminated against when seeking information or comment from ministers. Journalists viewed as representing ‘opposition’ outlets are denied accreditation or barred from asking questions at press conferences,” it continued.
The letter said the agency’s stated role of “observing mass communication means” was problematic and “sets alarm bells ringing”.
“Following major revelations about the collection of citizen’s data by political parties via state institutions, the notion of tax-payer money being used to fund the monitoring of the press and social media by a government agency sets alarm bells ringing,” it read.
A new report published by the Freedom of Expression Association in Turkey on Monday says that the Turkish government under Recep Tayyip Erdogan has increased its censorship over the years on internet and social media.
The report, entitled ‘Disabled Web 2020: Fahrenheit 5651, The Corrosive Effect of Censorship’, says that more than 467,000 websites have been banned in Turkey since 2006, with 58,809 website bans in 2020.
Since 2006, the Turkish authorities have also banned access to 150,000 URLs, 7,500 Twitter accounts, 12,000 YouTube videos, 8,000 Facebook posts and 6,800 Instagram posts, according to the report.
In 2020 alone, 15,832 news articles were ordered to be removed from media webpages, the majority of them critical of Erdogan’s government.
“The Turkish state’s complex internet censorship mechanism continues to be more active than ever before,” the report says.
The Freedom of Expression Association accuses the government of using measures to curb the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity to increase censorship.
The report says that 764 different state institutions – ministries, directorates and the presidency and its branches, as well as courts – have banned access to webpages for various reasons.
However, according to the data collected by the Freedom of Expression Association, a relatively small proportion of the websites and URLs have been banned by the courts – around 35,000 since 2006.
According to the data that the Freedom of Expression Association obtained from the Interior Ministry, a total of 75,292 social media accounts were investigated in 2020 and legal action was taken against 32,000 of them.
The report also says that sanctions on the internet are “no longer limited to only access-blocking practices, there has been a significant increase in the number of news and content removed with the content removal sanction, and censorship has begun to be implemented more effectively”.
“The corrosive and destructive effect of censorship and control mechanisms will continue in the years to come,” the report concludes.
International media watchdog Reporters Without Borders has accused Bulgarian National Television BNT, of bias in its election coverage towards the former ruling GERB party, in a statement released on Tuesday.
A report on how BNT covered GERB in the July elections by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, said BNT had failed in its duty as a public broadcaster by giving more airtime to GERB, Bulgaria’s ruling party until last April.
“Reporters Without Borders, RSF, calls on the political forces in Bulgaria’s new parliament to carry out deep-seated, systemic reforms to strengthen public media independence after Bulgarian National Television, BNT, violated its legal obligation to provide unbiased coverage of the campaign for the snap parliamentary elections held on 11 July,” the statement says.
On Wednesday, caretaker Minister of Culture and a key voice in the 2020-2021 anti-government protests, Velislav Minekov, said he hopes the authorities will look further into BNT’s reporting after the RSF analysis.
“This distortion of informational politics deprives the viewers and the tax-payers of unbiased and informative choice, especially as elections are being held,” Milenkov said.
Emil Koushlukov, BNT’s Director General, has not commented on the accusations, and former PM and GERB leader Boyko Borissov also did not address the issue at a press conference on Wednesday.
Koushlukov was a controversial figure even before becoming BNT director in 2019, after siding with different political figures over the years.
He was advisor to the first democratically elected President of Bulgaria, Zhelyo Zhelev, from 1991 to 1996 before becoming an MP in 2001 through the NDSV – National Movement Simeon II – headed by Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Bulgaria’s former deposed Tsar.
Between 2013 and 2016, he was working at TV7, then owned by Tsvetan Vassilev, whose Corporate Commercial Bank collapsed and is currently exiled in Serbia, and later at Kanal 3. Between 2016 and 2017 he was a director of Alpha TV, owned by the far-right party Ataka.
BNT’s coverage of the 2020-2021 protest wave has also come under fire, with protesters often gathering in front of its office in Sofia and accusing it of underrepresenting the size and the seriousness of the demonstrations.
On July 14, 2020, a petition seeking Koushlukov’s resignation was published and signed by various intellectuals, journalists, artists, and protest figures.
On August 6, Koushlukov was fined 1,500 euros by the Council for Electronic Media for not following the Law on Radio and Television and offering a right to reply to the caretaker cabinet’s Culture Minister, Velislav Minekov.
In early June, Minekov had said BNT should be investigated over its alleged pro-GERB coverage. This was met by claims about an “unprecedented attack from the authorities” from Koushlukov, who further accused the caretaker cabinet of trying to put pressure on BNT. Minekov demanded airtime to answer these claims.
In the months leading up to inconclusive elections in April, which were followed by repeat elections in July and will probably be followed by a third round in the autumn, BNT often broadcasted press conferences and announcements by former PM Borissov.
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.”
A company that specializes in analyzing harmful content on the internet has told BIRN that two terms favoured by hard-line Serbian nationalists – “Serbia Strong” and “Remove Kebab” – were searched for more than 4,000 times in Bosnia and Herzegovina over five months in 2020.
Research by Moonshot said these keywords were particularly searched for in May and early June 2020, which coincided with the anniversary of the May 1995 Bosnian Serb massacre in the northern city of Tuzla and Muslim festival Eid al-Fitr, and came just ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Bosnian Serb-perpetrated genocide at the eastern town of Srebrenica.
According to data collected by Moonshot, “Serbia Strong” and “Remove Kebab” were searched for 468 times in under one week from May 30 to June 4.
Its report, “Tracking Far-Right Extremist Searches in Bosnia and Herzegovina”, which it has shared with BIRN, says the rise in such searches reflects the wider rise of political and ethnic extremism in ethnically divided Bosnia.
“Karadzic, lead your Serbs” is the opening line of a song which normally appears when searches are done for “Serbia Strong” or “Remove Kebab” on the internet.
The former Bosnian Serb leader in the 1992-5 war in Bosnia was sentenced for life in 2019 for the crimes of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Significantly, the song lauding Karadzic was played on a video recording the attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019, when 51 people were killed and more than 20 injured.
It was allegedly recorded in 1995 but only published in 2006. Researchers describe the song as “an anti-Muslim hymn” that calls on the former Bosnian Serb chief to lead “his Serbs” against both “Ustashas” – referencing Croats, and “Turks” – a pejorative Serbian term for Bosniaks, or Bosnian Muslims.
Moonshot analyst Liam Monsell told BIRN that searches for “Serbia Strong” and “Remove Kebab” “significantly increased over the 25th anniversary of various crimes against Bosnian Muslims during the 1990s war”.
“Searches increased substantially just a few days after the 25th anniversary of the Tuzla massacre of May 25, 1995, which also coincides with festival Eid al-Fitr, when Muslims celebrate the end of Ramadan,” Monsell noted.
He added that the highest level of searches was recorded on June 2, but that sporadic leaps in searches also appeared during the marking of other wartime crimes in Bosnia.
Besides these two keywords, people in Bosnia also searched for the term “Za dom spremni”, or Ready for the Homeland, a World War II-era Croatian fascist slogan, “Kebab Remover”, an alternative construction to “Remove Kebab”, as well as for “antimigrant.ba”, an anti-immigrant portal. They were searched for 517 times over the course of the same five months.
Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in court in The Hague in 2018. Photo: EPA-EFE/YVES HERMAN/POOL.
Monsell said the popularity of the Karadzic song and searches done in English from Bosnia indicate that a “Western discourse of ‘white nationalists’ sometimes spreads back into the region,” and that specific local extremist dialogues are increasingly drawing on international symbolism.
Data obtained by Moonshot suggest that over the period in which the targeting was deployed, just under half the searches came from the Serb-led entity in Bosnia, Republika Srpska. According to Moonshot, the highest number of searches per 100,000 inhabitants was registered in the northern Brcko District.
Sead Turcalo, Dean of the Faculty of Political Sciences in Sarajevo, said the searches focus on themes around which key far-right groups’ narratives focus.
“A continuous denial of genocide and glorification of war criminals reflect on right-wing circles throughout Europe,” he said, adding that this was evident not only in the terrorist attack on Muslims in New Zealand, but in the previous case of Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Breivik who shot dead 69 young leftists in 2011 and killed another eight in a bomb attack.
“The aspect of interconnectedness of genocide denial and influence on the growth of the radical right, not only in the region, but in Europe as well, is still insufficiently researched, but is coming into the focus of researchers more and more,” Turcalo said.
“Their narrative is based on Islamophobic and anti-migrant content, accompanied by glorification of fascist groups and puppet states from World War Two,” Turcalo said, adding that, besides that, they also try to present Bosnia as a safe haven for radical extremists.
Standing on the blue-backed stage of the Globsec Forum in Bratislava on October 7, wearing an elegant black mask coordinated with her dress, Slovak President Zuzana Caputova addressed the main challenges that the pandemic poses to the world and the rule of law.
“It has exposed the real capacities and limitations of our crisis management, which has rested in peace for years,” she said. “Once again, we have seen that the spread of disinformation and hoaxes can be deadly,” she added, pinpointing one of the most pressing issues for her country.
Slovakia has been battling hybrid threats and disinformation for years, with most of the fighting falling on the shoulders of non-governmental activists and information and security experts. This year, however, the destructive power of disinformation manifested itself palpably for the first time.
“Slovakia is not doing a very good job in battling the pandemic at the moment,” admitted Marek Krajci, the Slovak health minister, on October 9, explaining the ever-growing numbers of new COVID-19 cases in the country. “I think the huge disinformation campaign is reflected in the bad results that we’re seeing right now.”
Another major manifestation of the frustration and anger caused by disinformation about COVID was witnessed at the weekend, when hundreds of people joined an unannounced and illegal protest in Bratislava, organised by football hooligans and neo-Nazi groups. Attacking the iron gate of the governmental office compound, they chanted vulgar slogans about the prime minister, threw stones at the police and called for people to ignore the new restrictive measures designed to combat the virus.
While during the first wave of the pandemic Slovakia saw itself as a “winner” of the crisis, largely thanks to the responsible behaviour of the general public, strict early measures and obligatory masks, this autumn has brought a much stronger second wave than the country feared.
According to opinion polls, people in Slovakia are unsure what information about coronavirus they can trust, support for government-mandated restrictive measures has decreased significantly and, ultimately, so has their trust in government leaders.
“It would be easy to blame the media or education systems or the internet for the erosion of citizens’ confidence, but do political leaders today project trust?” President Caputova asked rhetorically at Globsec, opening an important question for her own country, too.
Slovak President Zuzana Caputova gives the opening address at the Globsec Bratislava Forum 2020. Photo: Globsec
A good start, but a long way to go
The new Slovak government that came into office in March defined countering disinformation and hybrid threats as one of its main goals for the next four years. In its manifesto, Igor Matovic‘s government named the fight against disinformation as a priority in foreign politics, defence, education and the media.
“The spreading of disinformation and hoaxes endangers the development of a knowledge-based society,” said the program of the new government. “The Government of SR will prepare an action plan for coordinating the fight against hybrid threats and spreading of disinformation, and build adequate centralised capacities to carry it out.”
Almost seven months later, this “action plan” is still a work in progress, the coordination centre is nowhere to be seen and the disinformation agenda is scattered among a few ministries, with no clear unified strategy in place.
“The first key thing that happened is that this theme has finally been addressed politically, and it is being given the proper attention,” Daniel Milo, an analyst at the Globsec Policy Institute, told BIRN.
“In previous years, there were some lonely fighters at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or in the police, but there was no systematic support,” he said, adding that while it was good the new cabinet set as an official goal in its program the targeting of disinformation, it has yet to result in any concrete action.
One of the more visible efforts came this summer, when the Health Ministry hired Jakub Goda, a leading journalist focusing on disinformation, to help with its strategic communications. Reacting to the growing “infodemic” surrounding the coronavirus, the ministry is starting to focus on debunking hoaxes and sharing verified information from medical experts via social networks. “In the middle of the pandemic, the urgency of this problem became even clearer,” said Goda in an interview with BIRN earlier this month.
The Health Ministry prepared a short guide on how to see through disinformation about COVID-19, joined an information campaign by public broadcaster RTVS in which a leading expert on infectious diseases talked about the safety of wearing face masks, and recorded a video with COVID-19 patients sharing their personal experiences with the virus.
While the video registered an admirable 600,000 views with over 3,300 shares by October 19, the most viral posts from extremist politicians questioning the coronavirus crisis have been watched several times more, thanks to a developed network of dozens of Slovak Facebook pages that spread disinformation on a regular basis. The fight against disinformation by the Health Ministry is far from over, said Goda, adding that the ministry has already expanded capacities and more people should be hired soon.
Although Goda’s work at the ministry is essential, it is only a first step, experts think. “It is a good step, but to think that a single person will save the strategic communications of a whole ministry in such a big topic is naive,” said Milo.
“Jakub has dealt with these topics for years and I value him as a colleague, but this alone doesn’t stand a chance in stopping the enormous avalanche of lies about COVID-19 that are shared online and on social networks every day,” he explained. “However, he can do his part and maybe he can convince the management at the ministry that the communication and information part is just as important today as the medical measures.”
Another visible and popular vehicle for combatting disinformation is the Slovak police force’s Facebook page dedicated specifically to uncovering hoaxes. During the pandemic, police experts have debunked dozens of lies and manipulative posts about the virus, sharing the verified information with its 85,000 followers. Its most popular videos debunking lies about COVID-19 testing sites or the government preparing a tough lockdown were viewed by between 100,00 and 200,000 people each.
The number of COVID-19 cases in Slovakia is growing exponentially, data shows. Photo: Office of the Government of SR
Saving democracy
Over the past few years, the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs has taken the lead in combatting disinformation in Slovakia, focusing on developing strategic communications with the public. This year it opened a new department to counter hybrid threats and “enforce resilience” in the system.
“We have basically provoked more government activity in this area,” said Imrich Babic, head of the strategic communications department at the Slovak Foreign Ministry. “Now, there is big hope that it becomes more systematic. It is in the legislative plans of different ministries already, so it’s on a good path.”
The Foreign Ministry, it seems, might be the one part of government where most people, including political leaders, understand the importance of having clear and unambiguous messages in communication. Foreign Minister Ivan Korcok, the former Slovak ambassador to Washington and Brussels, said in his first press conference in March that there is no doubt about Slovakia’s place in Europe and in the world: its allies are in the West, and its aim is to protect European values and unity.
“It’s a question of strategic importance, of protecting a healthy democracy,” said Marcel Pesko, the special ambassador who is heading up the hybrid threats department at the Foreign Ministry.
“Slovakia is very vulnerable in this sense,” he added, explaining that he thinks it’s due to the combination of history, political communication and the fragile democratic heritage. “Based on all of this, Slovaks are more prone to trusting disinformation.”
Experts at the ministry agree that Slovakia needs to significantly step up its fight against hybrid threats. And that means adopting the “whole of society” approach: reforming the education curriculum, pushing for more control of social networks and forming a centralised coordination mechanism within government. “The process has already started; we just need to frame it now. We would like to create the coordination mechanism by the end of the year,” Pesko told BIRN.
The proposed mechanism should create a system for dealing with hybrid threats, which includes all the ministries as well as other government offices. Its precise form, however, has yet to be decided.
In the meantime, the Foreign Ministry is organising educational programs at universities and schools; setting up workshops for Slovak diplomats and ministry employees; coordinating their policies and communication in strategic areas; and fighting disinformation online, in the media and through direct communication from political leaders.
Slovak Foreign Minister Ivan Korcok speaks at a press conference after a government meeting. Photo: Office of the Government of SR
Addressing security threats
Even before COVID-19 spread across Europe, Slovakia had been the target of propaganda campaigns by Russia and China, including various forms of hybrid warfare, according to the Slovak intelligence services.
In August, Slovakia became the 28th EU state to join the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in Helsinki and the Slovak Defence Ministry has become one of the leaders of the fight against disinformation within the new government.
“The Defence Ministry wants to be active in this area,” Martina Koval Kakascikova, spokeswoman for the ministry, told BIRN. “One of the reasons is that hybrid threats will become a significant part of military operations in the future.”
In October, the ministry hired a special advisor for dealing with hybrid threats, and the communications department has taken on an even bigger role debunking disinformation and hoaxes, too.
“Moreover, the pandemic has reinforced the disinformation narratives, so the Defence Ministry has intensified its strategic communications, whether on social networks or in the field,” said Koval Kakascikova. “We also think exchanging information and experiences in the area of combatting hybrid threats and disinformation with our partners is essential.”
Although public communication from leading politicians in the previous government could be described as chaotic or conflicting at best, there is some evidence that the activities of the individual experts at the foreign and defence ministries has bolstered public support for Slovakia’s membership of NATO and the EU over the past three years. While in 2017 only 43% of Slovaks supported NATO membership, by 2019 that support had grown to 56%, according to a Globsec Trends survey. Eurobarometer, which monitors the evolution of public opinion in all EU member states, confirmed that a steady majority of Slovaks still supports the EU. Trust in liberal democracy and Slovakia’s Western allies, particularly the US, remains a challenge, however.
An additional challenge will come later this month after the Slovak government announced its intention to carry out a mass testing program across the entire country, with the aim of becoming the first country in Europe to pull off such a feat.
Disinformation experts have already warned that anti-COVID and anti-health system campaigns will definitely take off, putting an extra strain on the government’s efforts in trying to persuade people about the benefits of general testing. “In the next two weeks, so-called agitprop will take over – a fast drumming, the more absurd the better,” predicted Infosecurity.sk. “There’s nothing to lose. People are ready to listen.”
To counter this threat effectively, Marcel Pesko, the person heading up the hybrid threats department at the Foreign Ministry, admitted that, “there is still a lot of work to do in this area.”
Although all government experts agree that activists and NGOs have, until now, done a good job in fighting disinformation, they say it’s time the state picks up the baton. “The role of the state can’t be replaced by NGOs or the media,” said Pesko. “It is important to have political will to deal with these topics. And I can see that now.”
The spread of COVID-19 and the return to power of veteran right-winger Janez Jansa are contributing to an increasingly hostile environment for journalists in Slovenia, media watchdogs are warning.
Jansa, an anti-immigration ally of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, returned for a third stint as prime minister on March 13, a little over a week after Slovenia confirmed its first case of the novel coronavirus that has since killed 79 people in the former Yugoslav republic.
He replaced Marjan Sarec, whose centre-left coalition fell in January. The change of power coincided with what the International Press Institute, IPI, says is an unprecedented wave of insults and online smear campaigns against journalists in Slovenia.
Jansa himself has taken to Twitter to denounce the Slovenian public broadcaster; his government has sought to portray mainstream media outlets as heirs of the Yugoslav-era communist security services, while the government’s Crisis Headquarters tasked with coordinating the fight against COVID-19 has retweeted anonymous attacks on investigative journalist Blaz Zgaga.
“This is, in a way, a defeat in the field of democracy,” said Slovenian political scientist Alem Maksuti. “[Slovenian] media are coming under tremendous pressure, while like any other media they must simply objectively inform the public what’s going on.”
“And once again this thesis has emerged that authoritarian regimes which want to establish greater power are taking on those who have different opinions,” Maksuti told BIRN.
Governments exploiting pandemic to curb media freedoms
A cyclist wearing protective mask passes in the almost empty Preseren square, in Ljubljana. Photo: EPA-EFE/IGOR KUPLJENIK.
In mid-March, Zgaga, an investigative reporter and correspondent for the international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, RSF, complained to IPI that he had been the target of a smear article in a news weekly close to Jansa’s Slovenian Democratic Party, SDS, after he had asked the government about the operations and structure of a newly-founded Crisis Headquarters created by the government to lead the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Headquarters did not respond. Instead, its official Twitter account retweeted an anonymous attack on Zgaga describing him as having “escaped from quarantine” and carrying a “COVID-Marx/Lenin virus,” a play on a common smear by the Slovenian right-wing against its opponents on the left or centre. Zgaga also received anonymous, online death threats.
On April 17, RSF and six other press freedom organisations urged the European Commission – the executive arm of the European Union, of which Slovenia is a member – to do everything in its power to guarantee the safety of the Zgaga and ensure that “death threats and attacks against him are treated with the utmost seriousness by the Slovenian authorities.”
“Despite the unprecedented context in which Slovenia and other countries currently find themselves, the COVID-19 crisis shouldn’t be an excuse to prevent journalists from doing their job,” RSF said, echoing the deep concern felt by media watchdogs over press freedoms across Central and Eastern Europe since the onset of the pandemic.
‘Unjustified attacks’ on public broadcaster
Slovenian Minister of Economic Development and Technology Zdravko Pocivalsek speaks to the media during the reception of the first batch of a seven-ton shipment of personal protection equipment from Quingdao, China. Photo: EPA-EFE/IGOR KUPLJENIK.
Zgaga, however, was not the only target.
On March 20, the Council of Europe’s Platform for the Protection of Journalism and Safety of Journalists reported that Jansa had used social media to accuse public broadcaster Radiotelevizija Slovenija, RTVS, of spreading lies about the government. He issued a veiled threat over its funding.
RTVS Director General Igor Kadunc denounced what he said were “grossly unjustified attacks” on RTVS coverage aimed to the “subordination of the central media to one political option.”
Spela Stare, secretary general of the Slovene Association of Journalists, DNS, noted that at the outset of the pandemic, the government had sought to halt journalists from asking questions at its regular COVID-19 press conferences. RTVS was supposed to simply broadcast the statements of speakers.
“Journalists could only send the questions in advance via email. No real-time questions,” Stare told BIRN. “We protested, of course, and demanded at least video conferences for questions.”
The government backed down, to a degree, allowing journalists to pose questions from a separate location or submit them in advance.
“Not ideal, but better than what was first announced,” Stare said, while noting that the opportunity for follow-up questions had clearly become limited.
For Slovenian media, trouble ahead
Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa. Photo: EPA-EFE/ANTONIO BAT.
Not long after the protest from the Council of Europe’s protection of journalism platform, a reply appeared on the platform’s site from Slovenia’s mission to the CoE, questioning the journalistic standards of Slovenian media and claiming that “the majority of the main media in Slovenia have their origins in the former Communist regime and even in the late 1990s the positions of editors-in-chief were held by the former members of the infamous security service UDBA.”
The Slovene Association of Journalists denounced the letter as having “no basis in reality.”
“It only reflects the ideological views of the biggest government party and smears Slovenia’s reputation internationally,” the association said.
Maksuti said the government was trying to “invent an enemy that has been dead for years – Communism.”
Foreign Minister Anze Logar defended the wording of the response, which he said was drawn up by a government communications office, telling parliament that the government had faced significant criticism in the media in its first month in office.
Journalists he ran into, Logar said, “do not seem scared… I did not see fear in their eyes.”
With the next parliamentary election due in 2022, Maksuti said the future of Jansa’s four-party coalition government was hard to predict.
“I think politics will be closer to what we can see in Hungary, Poland or Slovakia,” he said, “where some of the civilisational steps we’ve made are becoming issues again – abortion, same-sex marriage and so on.”
Jansa’s government is working on a package of laws, part of which Maksuti said may seek to abolish licence fees for the public broadcaster and give more prominence and improved frequencies to media seen, he said, as “party extensions” of Jansa’s SDS.
“In the media field, it’ll be bloody,” Maksuti said.
Serbian authorities have promised to withdraw a new regulation concerning the information flow about the pandemic after a journalist was arrested for reporting poor conditions in an important hospital.
Ana Lalic, who was released from custody on Thursday, was arrested on Wednesday and placed in 48-hours of police custody following publication of her article about conditions in the Clinical Centre of Vojvodina, Serbia’s northern province.
Her media outlet Nova.rs published the text, “KC Vojvodina about to crack: No protection for nurses”, on Wednesday. The article claimed the institution lacked basic equipment and had “chaotic working conditions at the time of the pandemic“.
Lalic claimed she tried to get comments on this from hospital officials and also from the provincial secretariat for health, but none of them responded.
The hospital issued an angry press release following the article, denying her report and announcing that it had informed the prosecutor’s office and the police “due to public disturbance and damage to its reputation”.
Lalic was detained on the first day of the application of new rule that says all information from local institutions about the pandemic must go to central Crisis Staff in Belgrade, led by Prime Minister Ana Brnabic. This alone can can further share information with the public. The government’s decision also applies to the work of the media.
“Information on health measures taken and other information related to the treatment of COVID-19 … given to the public by unauthorized persons, cannot be considered accurate and verified,” the measure says, noting “the possibility of applying regulations relating to liability and legal consequences for the spread of misinformation in a state of emergency.”
However, on Thursday, Brnabic said the government would withdraw the decision, blaming herself for any confusion caused.
“It is my fault that we brought in something like this and it is also my stupidity that when we brought it in, I did not explain it,” Brnabic told to Radio Television of Serbia, concerning the regulation.
Only hours after Nova.rs published Lalic’s article, police came to her home in Novi Sad. Her lawyer, Srdjan Kovacevic, said she was ordered to stay in Novi Sad police station for 48 hours “on suspicion that she could repeat the crime, publishing texts that cause panic and disorder”.
“They searched her apartment and kept a laptop and two mobile phones – official and private. They then brought her to the police station”, Kovacevic told to Nova.rs. He then said Lalic would stay in custody until her hearing.
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