“The situation with disinformation in our country is similar to the one of the entire region, after the Russian invasion started against Ukraine. That campaign, that activity has increased multiple times, while incomparably bigger is the activity of the propaganda centers that for years has been in continuity with the Russian influence and propaganda in the country”, said Xhabir Deralla, President of CIVIL, in the context of the contribution to “Resilient journalism in countering disinformation and propaganda”.
Assessing the situation with disinformation and propaganda, Deralla stressed that domestic centers of power, more specifically, political parties primarily, also engage in them. Depending on the motives and the goals set, says Deralla, we can talk about several types of propaganda.
“Apart from the Russian, the nationalist propaganda has the greatest visibility, which most often uses disinformation campaigns, but also hate speech aimed at political opponents, and also various ethnic communities. Disinformation and propaganda in our country are dominant on the social media as well, but they are also present in many media outlets, even in those that are considered big traditional media. Some of them do not refrain from spreading propaganda and disinformation”, says Deralla.
“Recently, it can be noticed that the Russian propaganda has additionally polarized the Macedonian society along various lines, and certainly the harmful role that the media played during those last days before the negotiations with the EU started also needs to be outlined. It could be noticed that the media didn’t quite understand their socially important role, and were a platform for various nationalist, anti-European and anti-Western centers, that is, goals”, said Deralla.
“CIVIL as an organization existing for 23 years now, has been working for years on countering disinformation and propaganda in different ways. It primarily performs this through monitoring of the media. CIVIL’s monitoring team works daily on monitoring the situation in the media, but also on the social networks. CIVIL monitors the situation on the ground and collects information on how disinformation and propaganda are spread, created and the kind of influence they have”, said Deralla.
CIVIL’s media platform in Macedonian, Albanian and English continuously places content that exposes disinformation, says Deralla, adding that the media should not be advertising boards for all sorts of information, but should have ethical and professional standard in their production.
“Non-governmental organizations can also do much more in countering disinformation and propaganda, especially in this dark period, against the Russian propaganda and, of course, against the anti-Western and nationalist propaganda, because they are pretty much connected”, said Deralla.
Biljana Jordanovska
camera: Aleksandar Rizinski
editing: Arian Mehmeti
Translation: N. Cvetkovska
The interview is part of the project “Resilient journalism in countering disinformation and propaganda”, which CIVIL is implementing in partnership with Youth4Media (Y4M), with the support of the Government of North Rhine-Westphalia, Dusseldorf, Germany.
