Politically fueled inflammatory speech and misinformation was also marked in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Serbia. In some cases, politicians were targeted by these violations. In others, they were the perpetrators, exerting pressure on human rights defenders, journalists, and opposition.
The case of a missing girl in Serbia pushed some online media and social media comments into an abyss in terms of violations. Leaks of data from the investigation, speculation, accusations and insults of the parents, started in March and continued through April. Three persons were detained in Bosnia and Herzegovina suspected of using TikTok to claim involvement in the disappearance of the girl. At the same time, arrests for child sexual abuse online were registered across Serbia, Romania and Bosnia.
Attacks on the critical infrastructure across the region increased, as several countries, including North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, and Serbia, saw major banks, telecoms and postal services reporting phishing SMS messages and emails. Meanwhile in Turkey, personal citizens’ data leaks were registered. Two ransomware attacks were also reported, one in Turkey against the Turkish Data Protection Authority, and another in North Macedonia, against the State Electric Transmission Operator, MEPSO.
Online bomb threats against schools continued and spilled over to include threats to bomb courts in Montenegro.
Moves to control social media and discredit opposition ahead of elections
Photo by EPA-EFE/CAROLINE BREHMAN
Two Romanian MPs from the National Liberal Party PNL and the Social Democratic Party PSD asked for an emergency bill to restrict TikTok in this country.
It came after polls showed that voters aged 18 and 35 intended to vote for the opposition, including for the extreme-right party AUR. The results were worrying for both the Liberals and the Social Democrats, who have been sharing power in a coalition government since November 2021. The two representatives accused TikTok of being a playing field for pro-Russian propaganda, leading to these results. It is not clear how serious these talks inside the coalition are. On March 27, the Minister for Digitalisation said the government does not plan to ban TikTok. Meanwhile, the company gave assurances that it will better filter potentially AI-generated political content.
Though trends on TikTok are worrying, a ban could open up space for more abuses in the future, such as in Turkey, where high-stakes local elections have led to an increase in digital rights violations, including court-ordered access restrictions.
BIRNs digital rights violations monitoring recorded cases of court bans on articles and accounts criticizing or exposing members of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, AKP, or his family.
Such bans also affected the media, with courts blocking access to Mesopotamia News Agency, which has a focus on Kurdish issues. Ahead of the local elections on March 31, Turkish Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya stated that 32,951 social media accounts were being investigated nationwide, with 18,032 of them being in İstanbul, during his tenure.
The local elections also prompted a surge of disinformation, most of it aimed at discrediting the opposition. One notable instance involved a fake video attempting to smear Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, depicting collapsed buses in his municipality.
Imamoglu denounced the video as sabotage ahead of the elections. Similar efforts to undermine the mayor and his party included hacked screens on buses showing fake videos of opposition members handling cash. A false election protocol circulated on social media, allegedly between the main opposition Republican People’s Party, CHP, and the pro-Kurdish DEM Party, although both parties denied its authenticity. Disinformation also targeted the Islamist New Welfare Party, YRP, a former AKP ally, with paid social media ads suggesting it was in an alliance with the opposition, among others.
With high-stakes elections looming in Croatia on April 17, pre-election campaigns were also marked by a surge in misinformation and disinformation targeting the opposition.
On March 10, the rap duo Tram 11 shared a photo attempting to mislead the public about the left-wing politician Katarina Peovic and her party, Radnicka fronta (Workers Front).
The photo depicted Radnicka fronta members holding a banner with lyrics on it from a song by Serbian nationalist singer Baja Mali Knindza, known for his extreme Serb nationalist views on the Yugoslav wars. Fact-checkers confirmed the photo was fake, revealing that the original picture was from a political protest in June 2018, where Radnicka fronta members held the same banner but with only the party’s name on it.
Several attempts to discredit their opposition or boost their appearance ahead of elections were made by Croatia’s ruling Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ.
The most notable case was a post from 17 March on its official Facebook profile promoting the party’s state-wide meeting. The post collected 1,200 likes in a short time, but it was quickly confirmed that most of the likes came from fake accounts. The news site Index.hr showed that most of the profiles used the Vietnamese naming convention in their names, which is unlikely to be representative of the voting population in Croatia.
In Hungary in a post-election frenzy, pro-government media launched a smear campaign against Peter Magyar, a former ally of PM Viktor Orban.
Various online platforms, Facebook pages, pro-government influencer network Megafon) and pro-government news sites regularly attacked Magyar. Posts ranged from portraying him as aggressive to comments on his looks and regular analyses by psychologists and communication experts with the aim of discrediting him.
With Pride in Albania announced in May, monitoring in the country registered an increase in attacks against LGBT activists.
These consisted of DDoS attacks targeting the Instagram page of a leading LGBT rights organisation, Aleanca, as well as inflammatory speech directed against Aleanca’s head, Xheni Karaj, and her partner. Hateful comments also came from an individual that works for the Ministry of Justice in Albania, according to Karaj.
Instances of inflammatory speech by politicians were registered in Montenegro as well, notably by Marko Kovacevic, President of Niksic Municipality, and the Municipality of Herceg Novi, with continuous targeting of the writer Andrej Nikolaidis. Similar events were noted in Bosnia, where the Srebrenica Mayor attacked a journalist, and with a smear campaign against Professor Franjo Sarcevic.
Kosovo, North Macedonia and other countries across the region continued to see a spree of unverified information, some of which directly targeted politicians.
Missing child reports in Serbia incite frenzy online
In March, news emerged about a missing two-year-old girl in Serbia, capturing attention across the region. Online news portals in Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Croatia reposted news on the incident by the minute in the coming days.
Articles contained alleged details of the investigation, ranging from reports on a girl like the one missing being seen in Vienna, to reporting on the mother’s refusal to take a polygraph test. The headlines and articles fueled viewers’ and readers’ imaginations, prompting conspiracy theories and disinformation on social media. Users directed hate towards the mother and initiated a barrage of derogatory posts speculating about her potential involvement in her own daughter’s disappearance.
Serbia’s Ministry of Interior issued an appeal to the media, urging them not to publish unverified information as it could jeopardize the investigation. The Service for Combating High-Tech Crime in Bosnia and Herzegovina traced the IP address of the user behind an account holder from Bosnia who had claimed on TikTok that the girl was in their basement, requesting 25,000 euros for more information. Police conducted a search and detained three individuals. They found that the information was false.
On the other side, there were positive developments in processing cases of child sexual abuse online in Romania, Bosnia and Serbia. Seven individuals were arrested in Serbia for sharing and collecting child sexual abuse material. Later in the month, a tennis coach who had organised tennis camps in Serbia and Austria was also arrested. He is suspected of communicating with multiple minors through various applications and social media platforms, exchanging sexually explicit messages, photographs, and videos.
In Romania, a man was arrested for contacting another man over Facebook, trying to convince him to allow him intercourse with his 18-month-old niece in exchange for 500 euros. His goal was to record the sexual assault and sell it on child pornography websites.
The man who was soliciting the child was detained and the authorities prevented the sexual assault of the toddler. However, prosecutors also accuse him of distributing a child sexual abuse video with an underage girl on Facebook.
In another case, a Romanian police officer was arrested for the rape of two minor girls, recording them and uploading sexual abuse material online. In Bosnia, a predator was arrested who groomed and tried to kidnap a girl and a minor who on social media threatened to massacre a school was questioned by police.
Cyber attacks on critical infrastructure and public institutions
Photo by Unsplash/Freestocks
Throughout March, banks, telecoms and postal services in Hungary, Romania, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina reported DDoS or phishing attacks. Simultaneous DDoS attacks affected the online banking services of three Romanian banks on March 15. Clients of the banks used social media to report issues with the online banking services provided by Banca Transilvania, BCR, and Alpha Bank.
Fraudsters sent out emails allegedly on behalf of OTP Bank in Hungary, trying to persuade their victims to download the bank’s new app. However, the link in the email takes users to a phishing site.
A similar scam was reported in Bosnia where Unicredit Bank warned its customers about fake SMS messages in which fraudsters pretend to be the bank. Phishing attempts were also registered by Croatian Telecom and BH Telecom operators. In Serbia, attacks concentrated on the postal services.
The North Macedonian Electric Transmission Operator, MEPSO, said it had fallen victim to a ransomware attack, losing access to financial data and reports. The company added that “the complete integrity of the electric power network and the supply of electricity are not threatened”.
At the same time in Albania, Homeland Justice, a group of Iranian hackers according to Microsoft and FBI reports, posted again on their Telegram group that they can log in to the Instat – the National Institute of Statistics – webpage, insinuating that they still have access to this institution’s data.
For two consecutive days, several courts in Podgorica, Montenegro received fake bomb alerts. Some of the threats contained pro-Russian and pro-Serbian messages, referring to the potential political influence on the court decision-making processes.
On March 11, the High Court received the first threat. The next day, the High Court, the Court of Appeal and the Basic Court all received a fake bomb threats. All the trials were rescheduled. Bomb threats to schools continued across Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia. In some cases, the police said they have identified the culprits, who were mainly minors.
Bosnia and Herzegovina has been covered by Elma Selimovic, Aida Trepanic and Azem Kurtic, Croatia by Leo Buljan, Romania by Adina Florea, North Macedonia by Bojan Stojkovski and Goce Trpkovski, Kosovo by Flaka Fazlija, Montenegro by Djurdja Radulovic, Albania by Nensi Bogdani, Serbia by Tijana Uzelac and Kalina Simic, Turkey by Hamdi Firat Buyuk.
