In a situation of a pandemic, the citizens are more sensitive and fall more easily into fake news, misinformation. The President of the Red Cross, Francesco Roca, warned the institutions that the misinformation about the vaccination against Covid-19 has started, declaring it a “second pandemic”, ie that it is a big problem, said Flaka Polozhani from the Ministry of Information Society and Administration, at the panel discussion “Pandemic and Infodemic”of CIVIL, which took place on December 1.

False information, ie conspiracy theories such as 5-G, were strangely linked to the virus and this did not allow citizens to be properly informed about the pandemic, ie to be protected from those fake news.

The media create those fake news, but it’s not always the journalists who write it, because we are aware and we are witnessing portals that are not founded by journalists and in those portals, it is not the journalists who write, but it is some others. Exactly such contents are then shared by the citizens on their profiles on social networks.

Fake news about the pandemic have led to hate speech. All these phenomena can endanger interethnic relations and there should be some limit on freedom of expression that should be set and I think those examples of punishment of these bad phenomena will start to give results.

D.M.
camera: Atanas Petrovski
editing: Arian Mehmeti