Disinformation in Southeast Europe is not a series of isolated falsehoods. It is an ecosystem built from recurring narratives, political incentives, weak information markets and moments of crisis.
Over the past years, SEE Check has documented how disinformation moves through the information environments of Southeast Europe: from political speeches to tabloids, from anonymous portals to Facebook pages, from Telegram channels to TikTok videos, and from one country to another. The annual regional State of Disinformation reports show that the problem is not simply that false claims appear online. They repeatedly attach themselves to the same fears, divisions and worldviews – and that they become most effective when institutions, media markets and political actors allow them to circulate without consequence.
1. The most durable disinformation is adaptable.
One of the clearest lessons from the reports is that disinformation in the region relies heavily on continuity. The same broad stories come back year after year: hidden global elites control world events, international institutions are plotting against citizens, the West is weak or predatory, the EU is censorial and anti-traditional, migration is organized as a threat, science cannot be trusted, and Russia is acting defensively against Western provocation. What changes are the triggers and formats.
The 2023 report mapped these narratives as part of larger metanarratives: anti-Western, ethnonationalist, anti-science and conspiratorial worldviews. In 2024, the same narrative families were still present, but some re-attached stronger to fresh topics: digital currencies, anti-migrant messaging, anti-gender campaigns and false interpretations of EU legislation. In 2025, familiar conspiracy theories again remained active, now strengthened by global developments, domestic crises, AI-generated content and renewed attacks on civil society and fact-checkers.
| Survey says: The 2025 regional poll conducted by SEE Check in four WB countries helps explain why these narratives remain resilient. Agreement with broad conspiratorial claims is not marginal: 74.8% of respondents in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia agreed that a small group of powerful people is responsible for all major world events, while 60.6% agreed that global elites want to reduce the world population. These numbers do not prove that every respondent believes every specific conspiracy story, but they show that the basic conspiratorial narrative architecture is widely recognizable and persuasive. |
2. Anti-Western and anti-EU narratives work because they connect global claims to local politics.
The annual reports consistently show that anti-Western narratives are among the strongest connective tissue in the regional disinformation landscape. These narratives are broad enough to absorb many themes: the war in Ukraine, sanctions against Russia, EU enlargement, LGBTQ+ rights, climate policy, digital regulation, migration, foreign funding and civil society work. Their central logic is stable: the West, the EU, NATO, international organizations or liberal values are framed as a threat to sovereignty, tradition, religion, family, national identity or freedom of expression.
This framework is especially visible in narratives about Russia and Ukraine. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, disinformation has repeatedly presented Russia as a defensive actor responding to NATO, the EU or the West; Ukraine as extremist, manipulated or dangerous; and Western support for Ukraine as a project of escalation rather than solidarity or international law. At the same time, the reports show that anti-EU narratives often repackage domestic political grievances into claims that the EU is collapsing, censoring speech, attacking traditional values or imposing harmful social changes. The regional reports also show that these narratives are rarely purely foreign imports. The same frame can appear as pro-Russian messaging in one context, anti-LGBT+ panic in another, anti-migration fearmongering in a third, and in the service of domestic ethno-politics in fourth.
| Survey says: The poll results match this pattern. At the regional level, 60.8% of respondents agreed that by sanctioning Russia the EU has weakened itself, 53.6% agreed that the EU is increasingly censoring free speech, and 50.1% agreed that EU integration will threaten traditional family values. These findings illustrate how anti-EU narratives documented in the annual reports have clear public resonance. |
3. Local historical conflicts remain one of the strongest engines of disinformation.
The reports show that the region cannot be understood only through global disinformation trends. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, narratives rooted in the wars of the 1990s, historical revisionism and ethnonationalist politics remain particularly central to political disinformation. They repeatedly peak around anniversaries of war crimes, debates on Srebrenica, constitutional disputes, elections and moments of interethnic tension. In Albania, disinformation related to Serbia-Kosovo relations remains a particularly sensitive trigger, especially when tensions escalate or dialogue processes stall.
Disinformation is, therefore, not only a distortion of facts, but also a tool for activating unresolved political and historical conflicts. False claims about war memory, national victimhood, minority rights or alleged threats to statehood do not need to invent fears from scratch – they reactivate well-recognizable matrixes and connect them to current political goals. This is why counter-disinformation work cannot be purely reactive. It has to anticipate which events will activate which narrative families.
The 2024 campaign around the UN Resolution on the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica showed this clearly, as the false claim that the resolution labelled Serbs as a “genocidal people” was used to mobilize resentment and attack political opponents. The 2025 constitutional crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina showed the same pattern again: legal and institutional developments were reframed as existential attacks on Serbs, while long-standing disinformation about the High Representative, the Dayton Peace Agreement and state institutions was reused to deepen polarization.
| Read all regional reports: State of disinformation: SEE region in 2023 State of disinformation: SEE region in 2024 State of disinformation: SEE region in 2025 |
4. Disinformation spikes when crisis gives old narratives a new stage.
Across the annual reports, we see how major events act as accelerators of false, misleading and manipulative content. Elections, protests, natural disasters, disease outbreaks, wars, internal tensions and high-profile global events all create moments of heightened attention. Disinformation actors then use these moments to push existing narratives into wider circulation.
In 2024, elections across Europe and the United States, the Paris Olympics, disease outbreaks and extreme weather events all triggered waves of false or misleading claims. In Serbia, first the protests against lithium mining and then mass protests after the deadly Novi Sad railway station canopy collapse were framed by pro-government actors as foreign-backed destabilization. In 2025, the student-led protests in Serbia became a major regional disinformation topic, with protestors, journalists, prosecutors, lawyers and civic actors targeted through claims of a “color revolution”, terrorism, sabotage or foreign funding. The narratives peddled by political actors and pro-government media in Serbia also carried into neighboring countries. Occasionally those countries themselves became targets of anti-protest narratives – for example, accusations against Croatia of “orchestrating” protests as hostile act against Serbia.
| Survey says: The SEE Check 2025 poll points to the depth of geopolitical polarization around one of the most persistent crisis narratives. Regionally, 38.6% of respondents considered Russia’s armed actions in Ukraine justified, while 53.5% considered them unjustified. Serbia stood apart as the only country where a majority, 58.1%, considered Russia’s actions justified; Albania showed the strongest rejection, with only 22.8% considering them justified. |
5. The actors are familiar, but the distribution tactics evolve.
The reports identify a stable set of influential actors: political leaders and parties, pro-government media, public broadcasters in captured or polarized environments, tabloids, anonymous websites, fringe portals, conspiracy influencers, social media pages and channels, and foreign state-linked outlets. In the BCMS-speaking space, the reports repeatedly point to a cross-border “hub” involving pro-government tabloids in Serbia; RTRS and SRNA in Republika Srpska, along with Sputnik Srbija and related satellite outlets in both BiH and Serbia, as well as Montenegro. RT Balkan became an additional node in this ecosystem, strengthening the reach of pro-Russian and anti-Western narratives.
At the same time, the distribution routes are changing. Facebook remains central, especially for conspiracy theories and scams, but the reports show the growing relevance of Instagram, Telegram, TikTok, X and semi-private messaging spaces. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Telegram and TikTok rose sharply as sources of rated disinformation. In Serbia and Croatia, TikTok became increasingly relevant for political disinformation, hate speech and campaigns targeting protestors, migrants or minorities. In Albania, Instagram became an important channel for viral AI-modified content, deepfakes and misleading infographics.
This shift matters because different platforms create different visibility, accountability and moderation problems. Content that appears on an anonymous portal may be amplified through Facebook; political propaganda may be repackaged into short TikTok videos; conspiracy claims may circulate through Telegram; scams may use cloned media websites and paid ads. The ecosystem is multi-platform, and responses that focus on only one platform will miss much of the circulation.
| Survey says: The SEE Check poll underlines the centrality of platforms in the public information diet. Facebook was the most frequently mentioned online news source, used for news by 44.1% of respondents at least once a week, and was also the most common first-mentioned source at 39.3%. Messaging and semi-private channels such as Viber, WhatsApp, Messenger and Telegram together form an important secondary infrastructure for information circulation. |
6. Commercial disinformation brings major harm to societies in the region.
A recurring lesson from the reports is that profit and politics often reinforce each other. Commercially motivated disinformation appears through clickbait, copy-paste journalism, and anonymous websites and absorbs a broad scope of attention-grabbing tactics, from celebrity death hoaxes, to sensationalized crime stories, false health claims, fake giveaways, cryptocurrency scams and miracle-cure advertisements. But the same infrastructure that monetizes attention can also spread political propaganda and conspiracy narratives.
The 2023 report described how small and oversaturated online media markets, platform advertising incentives and weak professional standards created space for opportunistic disinformation. The 2024 report showed online scams rising across the region, including fake giveaways, fraudulent health products, cryptocurrency fraud and “recovery scams” targeting people who had already been defrauded. The 2025 report added that AI-generated and manipulated content is increasingly used in scams, fake endorsements, medical misinformation, political campaigns and war-related disinformation.
This blurring of motives is important. A fake article about a miracle cure may be a scam, but it also undermines trust in medicine. A deepfake of a doctor may be designed to sell a product, but it also strengthens anti-science narratives. A sensationalist headline may be designed for clicks, but it can also reproduce hate speech or political polarization. The business model of attention can become the delivery system for ideological manipulation – but even without the added risk, its overall corrosive effects on trust and societal cohesion cannot be overstated.
7. Anti-science narratives have become a permanent part of the landscape.
The reports show that anti-science disinformation did not end with the Covid-19 pandemic. Antivaccination narratives remain persistent, including false claims about Covid-19 vaccines, MMR vaccines, HPV vaccines and seasonal vaccines. These narratives continue to circulate even as vaccine-preventable diseases return. The 2024 report notes measles outbreaks in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, as well as serious pertussis outbreaks in Serbia and Croatia, in a context where disinformation continues to undermine immunization.
Climate denial is a trend on the increase. The 2023 report described climate science denial as a more recent but rising phenomenon in the region. The 2024 and 2025 reports show its expansion: false claims about HAARP, “geoengineering”, “high energy weapons”, “climate lockdowns”, “15-minute cities”, electric vehicles and “green agendas” are folded into wider conspiracy theories about control. In this sense, climate denial is no longer a niche topic, but has become part of a broader anti-institutional and anti-Western narrative package.
| Survey says: The 2025 poll shows that climate change denial still has not taken roots as strongly as other conspiratorial narratives in the region. The claim that climate change is not real received 38% agreement, which is the lowest – although not negligible – support in every individual country and the region as a whole for any of the tested claims. This just might be an opportunity for a stronger, more precise and strategic outreach to prevent the narrative from gaining more strength. |
8. Fact-checking needs to be seen and heard more.
The annual reports document the growth of fact-checking, research, media literacy work, regional cooperation, partnerships with platforms, university collaborations, cross-border investigations and policy engagement. SEE Check members have expanded their work from debunking individual false claims to monitoring narratives, researching actors and tactics, responding to elections, tracking AI-generated content, explaining digital regulation and building regional cooperation.
At the same time, the backlash against fact-checking has intensified. In 2024, fact-checkers across the region were accused of censorship, bias, political manipulation or foreign loyalty. In 2025, Meta’s decision to end its third-party fact-checking program in the United States was quickly used in the Western Balkans as supposed proof that fact-checking is censorship. Attacks on fact-checkers often mirrored attacks on journalists and civil society more broadly, especially in contexts where independent media and watchdog organizations are already under political and financial pressure.
The lesson is clear: fact-checkers are targeted not because their work is irrelevant, but because it challenges actors who benefit from unaccountable information spaces. But the poll adds another important caution: fact-checking also needs a visibility boost. Across the region, the dominant response to questions about local fact-checkers was “don’t know” or “haven’t heard”. Among those familiar with fact-checkers, assessments were more often positive or neutral than negative, suggesting that the main obstacle is not credibility, but reach.
| Survey says: In the 2025 poll, 70.4% of respondents on average said they did not know or had not heard of the relevant fact-checking newsroom. Positive assessments were higher than negative ones among those who could rate the outlets. At the same time, 39.5% of respondents said they verify online news only rarely or never. This combination points to a practical challenge: the need to reach audiences before disinformation does. |
9. The response must match the ecosystem.
Four years of monitoring point to a final conclusion: disinformation in Southeast Europe cannot be addressed by debunking alone, and it cannot be addressed country by country in isolation. The same narratives cross borders, languages and platforms. The same actors repackage old claims for new crises. The same commercial incentives reward sensationalism, while political incentives reward polarization. The same attacks on fact-checkers, journalists and civil society appear whenever accountability work becomes inconvenient.
A stronger response therefore has to be structural. It requires support for independent media, safer conditions for journalists and fact-checkers, investment in media and information literacy, faster cross-border cooperation, better platform accountability, transparent and rights-respecting regulation, and communication strategies that address the worldviews behind false claims, not only the claims themselves. It also requires making high-quality fact-checking and research more visible to audiences who do not already seek it out.
The annual State of Disinformation reports show that the region already has a strong knowledge base and a growing community of organizations working on information integrity. The task now is to make that knowledge harder to ignore and easier to use – by journalists, educators, policy makers, donors, platforms and citizens.
* The annual regional and country reports on state of disinformation in the SEE region, as well as the SEE Check public opinion poll, were produced within the project “SEE Check Network – Fighting Disinformation and Misinformation through a Network of Fact-checkers” funded by the European Commission. These publications reflects the views only of their author(s), and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
