“I would like to focus on the global level, but also on the journalistic perspective. We have three main pillars of democracy, legislators, executive power and judiciary, and in an ideal democracy we have a fourth pillar which is the media.”, said political analyst Marion Kraske at Conference: Attacks on democracy and human rights: Civil society organizations in support of Western Balkans societies facing disinformation, hate speech and hybrid attacks, organized by CIVIL in cooperation with Balkan Forum and members of the Civil Society Platform for Democracy and Human Rights (CSP).
She mentioned that nowadays, everybody can infuse their content- so called news on the internet.
“We have a bipolarity – a fact based professional journalism, but on the other hand, we have a flow of disinformation and fake news. And this trend is becoming more and more global. People no longer believe what the professional media is providing, they get their information from questionable sources, such as Facebook and Instagram.” said Kraske.
Kraske said that she would like to focus on three examples, because they show how misinformation brings democracies in danger.
“First, is the topic of migrants. We saw this in Germany in 2015/16 when there was a high influx of migration. Right wing propaganda machinery started discrediting the migrants and the government. Even though we had a normalization of the situation, right wing propaganda was infused in the internet, and the narrative was that there is a lot of migrants that puts Germany, Christianity in risk. The fact that Germany needed workers was not mentioned, however. As a consequence, we see that the public discourse is highly radicalized; right wing propaganda brings traditional democracies under pressure.
The second example are the US elections in 2020, the Trump administration launched a tsunami of fake news during the 4 years of Mr. Trump’s time in the White House, but this culminated in the narrative of a stolen election after the elections took place. In contrary, there was a study that this was one of the most secure elections in the history of America. The Republican party was supporting these fake news and as a consequence we saw a storm happen on the 6th of January when right wing extremists, but also ordinary people stormed the Capitol Hill. This was a clear attack on state institutions based on wrong narratives, and again it shows how a functioning democracy is put under danger only by using a wrong narrative.
So cyber-crime is only one aspect, we also have to focus and reflect on the propaganda machineries coming from the people in power, especially in southeastern Europe.
The corona pandemic is another example of spreading of disinformation. We had a trend of undermining the state institutions and health experts. We saw this in Germany, America, Brazil, as a worldwide trend but especially in the Western Balkan countries. At the end, we saw two major consequences, denial of the pandemic and the denial of the dangers of the virus itself. We were confronted with conspiracy theory of any kind. These attacks pretty much organized. Some of these fake news were also coming from Russia. We also saw a destabilization effect.
As a conclusion, we really have to state that fake news are becoming more and more a global challenge. That’s why we need global agendas, global networks, we have to question people in power.
We have to clearly say that this is also a problem in the EU. We need to focus also on media literacy, education. We should create a network in South-East Europe. We will proceed with this. We should create a network of free media. Hopefully, you will join us in establishing this network. This would help in making the problem visible and then to work on counter measures” explained Marion Kraske on Wednesday (7.28.2021), Skopje.
