Serb trolls attack users who post about Serbia-Kosovo crisis online

Journalists and analysts of different nationalities have reported online threats, abuse and harassment when posting content related to the Serbia-Kosovo crisis, with most of the attacks coming from what many believe to be government-linked troll accounts.

In early July 2023, a Google Document purporting to show the names of nearly 15,000 individuals that work as “trolls”, including their Twitter handles, was leaked to the public. Checks conducted by EURACTIV on a selection of 30 names found that over half were listed as employed by the government on other social media platforms and in online records.

A freelance journalist from The Netherlands explained that when reporting on recent developments in Kosovo and Serbia, they receive attacks from Twitter accounts with strong Serbian nationalist leanings.

“They accuse me of being biased, try to frame me as anti-Serbian, take my words out of context, attack me for what other people have said, just because I was in the same podcast,“ they told EURACTIV.

“It might not look that extreme if you compare it to other examples, but for me, it feels intimidating and already results in me holding back from writing or speaking,” they added.

The journalist concluded they mute a lot of threads to avoid notifications but that when north Kosovo is on the agenda, it “sparks a lot of comments and verbal threats”.

In 2017, DW published an expose on alleged troll farms under the control of the ruling party. At the time, now-President Aleksander Vucic was prime minister.

The whistleblower spoke of a number of individuals, employed as civil servants and working in shifts whose job is to patrol social media platforms, praise the government and attack critics.

Additionally, in 2020, Twitter suspended some 8,558 accounts that promoted the ruling party, and Meta suspended 5,374 accounts and 12 Facebook Groups for similar activity. Additionally, Meta revealed that SNS spent over $150,000 on advertising on Facebook and Instagram in 2022 alone.

But for journalists reporting on the region, posting their articles on Twitter has become a source of anxiety.

“I have started muting threads but also leaving out certain words in the summary such as Kosovo or Serbia to avoid the response,” one journalist who wanted to remain anonymous told EURACTIV.

The comments come mainly in English, they explained, and include dismissive comments, disinformation, and even physical and sexual threats.

“I am not worried that these trolls will go ‘real life’ on me, but posting on certain topics definitely gives me a lot of anxiety and impacts whether I post or not,” they added.

Florian Bieber a political scientist and professor with a focus on the Balkans, said there is no doubt the trolls are controlled by Serbia’s ruling party. “That is one of their ways of governing, there is no question who is behind it,” he told EURACTIV.

“If one is based outside of the country, one enjoys a level of freedom to be critical, which many inside the country don’t. You have to have a thick skin to ignore the level of hatred and vitriol,” he said.

For those in Serbia, these threats can take on a real-life dimension and can result in being called a traitor and collaborator, meaning repercussions against the individual and their family, he said.

Bieber, describing a personal attack against him by a high-ranking official in the ruling party, said it is clear that attacks are orchestrated as the comments happen in waves and echo themes spread by “Serbian tabloids loyal to the government.”

Hot topics identified by Bieber include not just Serbia-Kosovo, but also Serbian war crimes, or criticisms that infringe on nationalist values, with retribution spanning both Facebook and Twitter.

Bieber also stated that these trolls are mostly employees in public administration, hired because of party loyalty.

“They’re not acting spontaneously, so they’re usually getting messages to respond to particular tweets. It’s basically a centralised party system, using party loyalists and especially people in the public administration to do this tweeting and at regular intervals and directed by the party itself.”

Jasmin Mujanovic, a political scientist and author, said that accounts attacking people on social media are split into two categories; state and government-directed and spontaneous nationalists.

“We know that the Serbian government has been repeatedly exposed as organising large scale, bot and troll armies to harass critics of the regime critics of the government for various ends, including people within Serbia,” he told EURACTIV.

He added there are Facebook groups where specific memes targeting individuals, academics, journalists and critics are posted to provide “rhetorical fodder by which people then are subsequently targeted, harassed, and intimidated.”

But not all of the harassment is organised. Mujanovic explained that the reality is that in Serbia and in Republika Srpska, there is a lot of sectarian animosity in the public domain which leads to organic ‘dogpiling’.

“Some of this behaviour, and some of these activities are organic, some of it is state-directed, and the two often actually kind of coexist simultaneously.”

Mujanovic said he mainly receives ethnic slurs when he posts about Bosnia and Herzegovina or the genocides carried out by Serbs in the 90s.

“I am accused of everything under the sun from being a radical Islamist to being a “faggot” to being communist, just everything,” he said, adding “You can go to virtually any single post that I make at any given point during the day and you will find these kinds of attacks.”

While it can take its emotional toll, he said it does not put him off. “I put my personal and professional efforts and energies into writing about and discussing and promoting memory memorialisation of these events. But I make very liberal use of block buttons and mute buttons and all the rest of it.”

He added that when he sees the scale of the attacks and vitriol, it simply convinces him further that his work is valuable.

Speaking to EURACTIV, head of the EU-Balkans Desk at Reporters Without Borders, Pavol Szalai said there have been verified reports of the ruling party using trolls in the past that have been observed for “many years”.

“It’s part of what seems to be a system of political attacks and smear campaigns in pro-government media and which endangers the safety of journalists,” he said, noting that these kind of attacks result in Serbia dropping 12 places in the RSF World Press Freedom Index in 2022.

He said RSF has called on the government to take action by stopping such practices and sanctioning officials that engage in public attacks, but “it seems the ruling party hasn’t learned any lessons and continues to play with fire.”

“Instead of supporting press freedom, the ruling party prefers to undermine the independent outlets,” Szalai said, adding that the government must take action on legislation which currently allows for fake news, hate, and violence to be spread by pro-government media- much of which is then echoed amongst social media’s trolls.

(Alice Taylor | Exit.al)