Petrit Saracini, media expert, IMA, North Macedonia on the “Panel History and future of uncompromising commitment to democracy, human rights, and media freedoms”, at the Conference “Defending Democracy and Human Rights”, December 12, 2024 Skopje.
Obviously, we cannot be compared to Ukraine. The situation there is extremely difficult. We wish all the best to our colleagues, but also to the Ukrainian people in dealing with this aggression and, let me say, unprecedented aggression of the Russian Federation towards the sovereignty and the territorial integrity, but also to the people of Ukraine, where we cannot be compared. In that sense, we may feel lucky that we are dealing with the problems that we are dealing with, which are very difficult.
Problems that people in North Macedonia and the media community face, but also the region, and also Europe, which is under attack of authoritarian tendencies of political extremism, extreme ethno-nationalism, and this has all taken toll to the capacity of our democracies and media in general.
I come here from the Institute for Media and Analytics, which is an organization that deals with disinformation, hate speech, discrimination, and violation of human rights in our country. I would like to focus especially on dealing with disinformation, because I think that is the main threat to the security of our countries, to the stability of our countries, but also to the very existence of the professional media as we knew them in the past, but as we would hope to see them existing in the future as the key or the main pillar watchdog of democracy.
Our institute has been working on debunking and dealing with disinformation. We were producing lots of analyses, debunking, fact-checking stories. We were also the only organization in the region to produce jointly with the national TV station a short TV show of 10 minutes, which was debunking most actual information in the media and the public discourse.
I think it’s the only example in the region, and we still believe, that the fight against disinformation should be mainstream, and that the media, professional media outlets, influential media outlets, and mainstream media outlets should be at the forefront of this struggle, because, let’s be frank, civil society organizations, fact-checking organizations are doing a great job, but they are unable to reach mainstream audiences. And what we are seeing is that this disinformation industry that is undermining democracies, attacking human rights, producing violence, hate speech in the society, is predominantly threatening the professional media. It is taking audiences from them.
And if it continues like this, most of the media outlets, professional media outlets, as we see, the newsrooms are shrinking. Lots of them are having difficulty surviving.
A profile on Twitter was used by the Russian propaganda for obvious reasons, and then it got picked up by lots of media in Serbia, and then this piece of disinformation was published by over 30 media outlets in North Macedonia, including two national TV stations. And regardless of the fact that we had a fact-checking piece on that, and there were also international prominent media such as Reuters and the Associated Press fact-checking services who debunked this disinformation, our media outlets, among them several that define themselves as professional and who have newsrooms and people who could do this fact-check didn’t even bother to check whether this is true or not, did not.
We saw this piece of disinformation later appear on the telegram channel of Zakharova, and it was obviously a manipulated image from a billboard that never existed. The company that owns the billboard issued a statement for one of the fact-checking services that it never happened that they didn’t have a billboard for Ukraine at all. But nevertheless, our media outlets published it, including two national TV stations, several news media, online media outlets that are deemed by the public as professional and credible media outlets.
So, if this is happening for a piece that is not so, let’s say, not so important, but just let’s say clickbait that taps into the beliefs and let’s say the dominant belief of a great portion of the Macedonian public, what happens when we face more challenging stories, events, incidents that happen in our country more and more frequently. We have seen the effects of disinformation during the time of the Prespa Agreement.
We have seen what disinformation they produced, violence and violent protests. We have seen, not to speak about the year before that and what happened with disinformation and notorious nationalistic propaganda. We can see that disinformation and these attacks on democracy and human rights, not only on interethnic issues, not only related to NATO and the anti-Western propaganda produced by Russia, and some media outlets in Serbia, but also by domestic political actors. We have very active, even parliamentary parties, also non-parliamentary political parties that openly propagate and use this information to attack NATO, EU, generally the Western concept and democracies.
We see a spread of anti-gender disinformation, disinformation against vulnerable minorities, marginalized groups and I’m afraid that we democratic societies are not able still to find a solution to these problems.
Just imagine what can you do in a 30-second video on TikTok. How much disinformation? You can spread five sentences, each containing disinformation. To debunk this disinformation, you would need thorough research, finding the facts, telling it why it’s not true, and you cannot put it in 30 seconds. Also, these are very clickable, very sensationalistic pieces of content. They tap into the beliefs, previously formative beliefs of the people, and they tap to the habit of the audience, which is becoming more and more dominant. This confirmation bias, people simply see and watch the media and the content that confirms their beliefs.
In this sense, it’s very difficult for pro-democratic forces to counter this harsh propaganda and the overwhelming flood of disinformation content. It’s very difficult because if you want to do it, you have to use their tools and that’s not democracy. That’s not what we are about.
So, what are some of the possible solutions? Mainstreaming the fight against disinformation. As I said, there should be coalitions between civil society, fact-checking organizations and mainstream media. That should be something that should be the focus also of the international donor community, because yes, social networks are becoming more and more dominant in the way people consume content, but if this content is more professionally produced by professional TV stations, professional newsrooms, etc., and if they use their strong channels also on social media to spread this content, I think that they can somehow counter this flood of influencers, podcasters, YouTubers, etc., who are being used as tools for spreading propaganda and disinformation.
Also what we are not seeing, and which is very important, is a more consistent and active role of institutions in this regard. The only part of the society in North Macedonia that is fighting disinformation is civil society organizations. We are not seeing concrete actions from the institutions, from the media, or other parts of society. We are constantly speaking on these types of events about whole society approach. Unfortunately, it is not happening and that’s something that should happen.
On the long term, of course, we can speak about media literacy, about interventions through education, because our books in the primary and secondary education system are filled with disinformation and outdated disinformation. We need an enormous effort to fix those and incorporate media literacy in all the subjects, not just as some voluntary course in some of the stages of education.
Let’s not forget that the disinformation industry, people, anti-democratic forces, it was mentioned here also, they use lots of money. They invest lots of money, lots of human resources in what they do for their personal political gain, for their gain of their companies, etc. It’s like facing an army who is coming to you with tanks, with guns, with nuclear weapons, and you are taking out swords and horses on them. So this is not the way to enter this fight.
This fight should have adequate human and financial resources if we want to be successful. If not, I’m afraid that I don’t have such an optimistic picture about what is going to happen in the future, also with the impacts of social media, artificial intelligence, the degrading of professional media, degrading of education throughout the world. I think that we are going to face more and more difficult times before we come to grasp with reality and maybe try to make a more active fight against threats to democracy and human rights.
D. Tahiri
Camera: Atanas Petrovski/ Igor Chadinovski
Editing: Arian Mehmeti
Photo: Robert Atanasovski
CONFERENCE, FULL VIDEO, Streamed live on December 12, 2024:
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PHOTO ARCHIVES: #DefendingDemocracy, Panel 1: Democracy under Siege
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#DefendingDemocrcy Panel 3: Countering Authoritarianism
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#DefendingDemocracy Conference (overall)
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