In a series of country reports, SEE Check gives a comprehensive overview of the disinformation landscape across the region
Introduction
This report is a contribution of Raskrinkavanje.ba, a fact-checking newsroom established in 2017 and run by the organization Zašto ne based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Zašto ne has also established Istinomjer (2010), one of the first fact-checking projects in the region, dedicated to political fact-checking.
Raskrinkavanje has been a signatory of IFCN since 2019, EFCSN since 2023, Meta’s Third party fact-checking partner in BiH since 2020 and a member of regional network SEE Check since 2020. In addition to fact-checking and debunking, it is dedicated to research, analysis and policy in the areas of information integrity and media and information literacy. Some of the works by Raskrinkavanje / Zašto ne include mapping of disinformation hubs in the region (2019), research of impact of disinformation-based narratives and conspiracy theories in BiH (2021), mapping of content and spread of disinformation narratives about the Covid-19 pandemic (2021, with SEE Check) and invasion of Ukraine (2023) in BiH and the region. The newsroom also analyzes harmful practices in media coverage of sensitive topics like extreme and/or gender-based violence (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) and works on prebunking and other innovative ways to counter disinformation.
This report is based on Raskrinkavanje’s direct experience in the areas of fact-checking, reporting, research and analysis. It reflects the newsroom’s viewpoint and emphasizes the events and phenomena that the fact-checker finds relevant for the overall information environment in the country.
Disinformation Topics and Narratives in BiH
The most mainstream political disinformation narratives in BiH exist within an ethnonationalist paradigm that dominates the public space in the entity Republika Srpska. There are two main, sometimes overlapping disinformation “frames” within this paradigm, portraying Serb people and/or Republika Srpska as targets of Western conspiracies and/or Bosniak politicians’ nefarious plans. Specific disinformation narratives within these frames include stories about alleged Bosniak plans to conduct military or terrorist attacks on Republika Srpska, sometimes described as “jihadist” threat (1, 2, 3, 4, 5); false accounts of harm or disenfranchisement of Serbs in Sarajevo or Federation of BiH (1, 2, 3); plans of domestic or foreign actors to arrest, kidnap, oust, or assassinate the RS president Milroad Dodik (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and other alleged plots to “destabilize” Republika Srpska. The motive of foreign governments attempting to carry out coups, particularly those described as “colored revolutions”, frequently appears in these narratives and gets used on cue to discredit public protests in RS. The propaganda campaign unleashed in 2018-2019 against the protests “Pravda za Davida” (Justice for David) is a typical example (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11). Denial of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s statehood or the legality and legitimacy of its institutions also feature prominently within this frame of reference (1, 2, 3, 4). The Office of the High Representative (OHR), an international body established to oversee the peace process in BiH, is also a frequent target, especially since the current High Representative, Christian Schmidt, was appointed. His post is falsely claimed to be illegitimate, or even illegal, because it was not confirmed in the UN Security Council (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) – a position of the RS government that is vocally supported by China and the Russian Federation.
War crimes committed by Serb forces in 1990’s wars (1, 2), particularly the genocide in Srebrenica (1, 2, 3, 4), are subjects of elaborate denialist narratives, with actors like Bosniak politicians, Western media, international institutions, etc. accused of staging, faking or making up war crimes to defame Serbia or Republika Srpska. These stories are often a part of broader conspiratorial narratives that blame specific Western countries or the collective “West” for the breakup of SFR Yugoslavia and the wars that followed (1, 2, 3). All of these hostile narratives that use false claims and hate speech to instigate hate, fear or anger in their audiences, are created and amplified by ruling parties in RS and Serbia and the media they control or influence.
Scapegoating the West is also common in narratives about other conflicts – for example, in claims that US, NATO, or EU are responsible for Russian invasion of Ukraine, or that war crimes committed by pro-Assad forces in Syria, or Russian forces in Ukraine, are actually “staged by the Western media” (1, 2, 3). False narratives about the invasion on Ukraine in particular mirror the Kremlin propaganda (Ukraine planning to use biological, chemical and nuclear weapons against Russia, being a “Nazi state”, having a president who is a Nazi, a drug addict, a war profiteer, etc). In these narratives, Western democracies are portrayed as weak and/or sinister, while Russia, with Vladimir Putin at the helm, is presented as a “liberator”. Glorifying authoritarian rulers in contrast with “dysfunctional democracies” is a narrative in its own right, with stories about Putin, Gaddafi or Lukashenko as caring leaders who created social welfare “paradise” for their citizens.
Antiwestern sentiment is also present in most of the other hostile narratives observed in the work of Raskrinkavanje. Some are themselves Western in origin – for example, various “antiglobalist” conspiracy theories like QAnon, New World Order and similar, that originated in American countercultures, ranging from right-wing to new age ideologies. These narratives interpret most significant events as actions of secretive powerful entities such as “world government” or “cabals” that aim to hurt, control or destroy specific groups of people, or the entire humanity. They are usually focused on powerful countries like the US, or institutions with global impact like the United Nations. Many are more or less openly antisemitic (1, 2) sometimes targeting specific Jewish people like George Soros or the Rotschild family (1, 2, 3).
The structure of such narratives is rather consistent. For example, narratives about “depopulation” always feature a powerful person or organization that uses some tool (products or technologies ascribed fictitious dangerous properties, including anything from food, water, medicine, vaccines, microchips and 5G networks, to HAARP and made up phenomena like “chemtrails”) to harm the human population in order to reduce the number of people on Earth. The main “actors” occasionally change with current events: for example, Bill Gates and the World Health Organization were the main protagonists of “depopulation” narratives during the Covid-19 pandemic, the focus then briefly shifted to the World Economic Forum and its founder Klaus Schwab, and all the aforementioned actors still remain targets of such conspiracies. Sometimes the narratives overlap and the same targets are “repurposed” to fit into new stories: for example, George Soros used to be targeted mainly with accusations of conspiracies against Serbs or other instances of “meddling” in the region (1, 2); during the Covid-19 pandemic he became a target of the “plandemic” or QAnon narratives (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and in 2022 he was accused of starting the war in Ukraine. Similarly, Gates, Schwab and other easily recognizable targets have been inserted into multiple conspiratorial “agendas” (New World Order, Agenda 2030, Agenda 21, The Great Reset,“Plandemic”, depopulation, geoengineering, transhumanism and others) with many bizarre claims used interchangeably across these narratives (stories about “the global elite forcing people to eat insects” (1, 2) are a recent trend and a good example).
Many widespread conspiratorial narratives are about control, sometimes presented quite literally as “mind control” exercised through various technologies (1, 2, 3), other times as indirect control through economic and political means. Banks, money, digital currency, digital commerce, property ownership are thematized in such narratives as either tools or targets of future authoritarian dystopias. Since the Covid-19 lockdowns, imaginary restrictions of movement are an increasingly present theme, manifested in claims that climate change is just an excuse to introduce future open-air prisons (climate lockdowns, 15 minute cities, ban on car ownership). https://raskrinkavanje.ba/analiza/ne-svjetski-ekonomski-forum-nije-predlozio-ukidanje-privatnih-automobila
As seen in many of these examples, the Covid-19 pandemic was an event that exponentially increased the popularity of conspiracy theories. It has also rehashed and reinvigorated the antivaccination narratives that were already popular in BiH and the region. Falsehoods about Covid-19 vaccines stayed the dominant disinformation narratives well into 2022. The intensity and spread of false information about vaccines has most likely influenced the low level of immunization in the country that was already notoriously late to obtain Covid-19 vaccines, only to see large quantities destroyed once they become widely available due to low interest. The initial focus of antivaccination narratives was on the MMR vaccine, falsely claimed to cause autism or various illnesses (1, 2). This narrative remains present (1, 2, 3, 4) and continues to threaten public health in BiH, where immunization against measles, mumps and rubella has been on decline for over a decade, dropping as low as 63% in 2023.
Antivaccination disinformation is a part of a broader narrative frame that vilifies evidence-based medicine, accusing it to intentionally harm people either to make profit (making people sick to sell them medication), or as a part of depopulation agendas (1, 2). This reasoning is frequently used to promote or sell “alternative medicine” advice, recipes, products or services, presented as real cures or prophylactics as opposed to pharmaceutical products (1, 2). Recipes for various “natural cures”, ranging from home remedies for benign issues to alleged treatments for deadly illnesses, are among the most widespread falsehoods published by anonymous websites, some specializing exclusively in such content and thus appearing to their readers as places with health information (1, 2, 3). Marketed as traditional/folk medicine that is “natural”, safe and efficient as opposed to allegedly dangerous and ineffective “synthetic” products, such content can also be found in “health” and “wellness” sections of many mainstream media outlets. This practice has greatly contributed to profiling highly non-credible sources as authorities on health, even propelling some of them to regional stardom – most notably Branimir Nestorović, a doctor from Serbia who peddles antiscience narratives and conspiracy theories. Pseudomedicinal claims are sometimes attached to stories about alleged dangers of everyday technologies and used to sell bogus products that supposedly offer “protection from radiation”, sometimes crossing over into supernatural concepts like “healing energies” and similar.
Narratives about medical “conspiracies of silence” are common within this frame, for example claims that harmful properties of pharmaceuticals and/or benefits of “natural medicine” are kept hidden from the general public, especially the alleged natural cures for cancer (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). These stories go as far as claiming that “Big Pharma” assassinates doctors or other those who threaten to reveal their secrets (1, 2, 3, 4). Narratives about the SARS-CoV-2 virus were fitted into similar molds, ranging from claims that it was artificially created and designed to cause the most harm, to those denying that the virus exists. The claim that the pandemic was a hoax was often paired with claims that Covid-19 deaths were made up, that patients died of other illnesses, or, in the most extreme versions, that they were murdered by doctors and nurses in hospitals.
The anti-medicinal narratives belong to a wider corpus of antiscience conspiracy theories which deny established scientific knowledge, even basic concepts like evolution, or the shape of planet Earth, claimed to be a flat disc (1, 2). Beliefs that the 1969 Moon landing was “staged” (1, 2) or that condensation trails produced by airplane fuel combustion are poisonous “chemtrails” are both persistent and widespread (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). Even meteorological phenomena like snow, clouds, storms and others are interpreted in the context of conspiratorial narratives with claims that they are created by “chemtrails”, HAARP and similar.
Recently, some of these old stories have been fitted into climate change denial narratives coming to BiH and the region from right-wing conspiracy theorists, especially those based in the US, where denial of climate science has become a staple of conservative/right-wing politics (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). This is an example of how internal political divisions in globally influential countries translate into narratives that reach and shape local and regional disinformation space.
Such patterns can also be found in the spread of antivaccination movement, or in the influence of the right-wing “anti-gender movements” targeting LGBTIQ and womens’ rights. These narratives present the advancement of LGBTIQ and/or women’s reproductive rights as an expression of liberal or leftist “decadence” (often appearing as “Western decadence” in local versions), but at the same time painting dystopian conspiracies where certain institutions, values or identities, like “traditional family”, nation, or even civilization as we know it, are to be destroyed or “banned” (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). In recent years, transgender rights are increasingly a target of such disinformation, using “slippery slope” stories focusing particularly on children (for example, that schools in various Western countries allow children who “identify as animals” to behave in accordance with these “chosen identities”).
Typical narratives within this frame include false “revelations” of political figures being secretly gay or transgender (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) thus indicating their participation in “gay agenda” conspiracies, as well as false connections of LGBTIQ rights – but also sex education of any kind – to “brainwashing”, sexualization and trafficking of children, or even imaginary plans to legalize paedophilia (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). Often merged with such narratives are QAnon conspiracy theories, with child abuse as the central theme of stories about the “satanic cabal” (1, 2, 3). Religious undertones are also present in many conspiracy theories that label their targets as “satanists” – there is also a particular type of narratives looking for demonic or satanic symbols in public events, spaces, or works of art and entertainment (1, 2, 3, 4). In recent years, disinformation targeting the right to abortion has also started to appear in BiH (1, 2, 3, 4). Anti-abortion disinformation is almost entirely “imported” from external actors, mostly related to international religiously or ideologically motivated movements. That is not the case with homophobic and transphobic disinformation which also comes from local sources.
The mainstream media are a frequent target of conspiratorial claims, like accusations that they “stage” events or intentionally hide facts which may hurt the alleged agendas of their perceived “masters” (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). These accusations almost exclusively target the media in countries where government control over the press is the lowest and often come from actors situated in countries where state media capture is the highest. A typical example of such “reversal” tactic can be found in one of the most prominent narratives about Ukraine invasion, where sources from Russia, Serbia and Republika Srpska that regularly publish false claims about the war in Ukraine, accuse “Western media” of publishing propaganda or faking war reports. Some non-geopolitical variations of these narratives tie them to “big pharma” conspiracies, or allege that they are controlled by imaginary entities like the world government. Phrases like “you won’t see this in the media” or “this is what the media won’t tell you” are common “hooks” used by conspiracy theorists to promote their content on social networks.
In 2023, very few new narratives have been observed. The escalation of conflict between Israel and Palestine, particularly Israel’s ongoing invasion of Gaza that followed the Hamas October 7 attack, has produced one distinct disinformation narrative that falsely accuses Palestinians of fabricating war crimes and civilian victims. This is an echo of “Pallywood”, a globally present hostile narrative propagated by Israel-based sources. Additionally, two main types of disinformation appear about the conflict: false accounts of various actors showing support to either of the sides and footage from other conflict zones being misrepresented as recorded in Gaza. The latter has also been a common occurrence on social networks in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Actors Contributing to the Spread of Disinformation
Raskrinkavanje has a live database of almost 3.500 media and social media sources whose claims were fact-checked on the website at least once since 2017. These are news media, anonymous websites, as well as social media profiles, channels and pages that publish in Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian language.
In 2019, the mutual interactions of 447 sources from this database were analyzed to establish if there are groups of media that “intentionally publish and redistribute the same political disinformation in a regular, continuous and non-incidental manner”. The analysis pointed to a “disinformation hub” of about 30 interconnected media outlets that regularly use each other as sources and/or redistributors of disinformation. This hub is the main collective source of disinformation narratives belonging to the ethnonationalist paradigm dominant in RS and the neighboring Serbia, where 15 of these media are located. These include the public broadcaster RTS and news agency Tanjug (now privately owned); political tabloids (Kurir, Alo, Informer, Srpski telegraf, Blic and Novosti); anonymous right-wing websites and Sputnik Srbija, Russian state-owned outlet that operates in BCMS language. In Republika Srpska, among the 13 such sources were the public broadcaster RTRS and news agency SRNA, several mainstream media (Nezavisne novine, Srpska info, Glas Srpske, Alternativna televizija) and an anonymous website Infosrpska set up before the 2018 elections whose attack pieces against critics of the government were regularly republished by SRNA, RTRS and ATV (1, 2).
Most of the media in this hub have strong links to the government and ruling parties in Serbia (SNS) and Republika Srpska (SNSD). When it comes to internal politics, most of these media amplify claims and positions of Milorad Dodik, president of RS and Aleksandar Vučić, president of Serbia, often in a coordinated manner. ATV was also sanctioned by the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in 2022 for its ties to Dodik, who is said to exert “personal control over ATV behind the scenes”. Looking at the outside, they generally exhibit anti-Western and pro-Russian sentiments (visible, for example, in the way they reported about the invasion of Ukraine, many of them actively spreading Russian disinformation). The group of media from this hub, especially RTRS and the political tabloids from Serbia, remain among the most rated media on Raskrinkavanje.
Another common source of disinformation within this network are political commentators that support ethnonationalist narratives and conspiracy theories, usually coming from RS or Serbia (1, 2, 3, 4), but also from Russia and, to a lesser extent, other foreign countries (1, 2, 3). Among those that have been fact-checked the most by Raskrinkavanje are Dževad Galijašević, alleged security expert who “specializes” in made-up terrorist threats against RS, but has also “ventured” into Covid-19 conspiracies, and Predrag Ćeranić, former intelligence officer and dean of the Faculty of Security Sciences with a disputed tenure who peddles conspiracy theories about “colored revolutions”, “islamist threats” and similar (1, 2, 3, 4).
The narrative about the “islamist / jihadist threat” propagated by these media and their “analysts” has sometimes been fitted into an islamophobic variant of the broader antimigrant narrative that escalated in 2019. False claims about crimes or conspiracies involving migrants and refugees from MENA countries were spread by numerous media and by politicians from almost all parties in BiH, but most notably by Fahrudin Radončić (SBBBiH), then minister of security of BiH (1, 2, 3, 4) and by Avaz, the paper he founded. Antimigrant, a website that started anonymously but later revealed to belong to Fatmir Alispahić, previously known for nationalist and homophobic hate speech, was a particularly extreme example of racist and xenophobic “reporting” about migrants and refugees.
When it comes to the media based in the Federation of BiH, the most fact-checked one is an anonymous website Novi that operates as a click-farm (see below), followed by mainstream commercial media Avaz, Slobodna Bosna, Hayat, Haber, Oslobođenje and Radio Sarajevo. While some of them do exhibit strong political bias (1, 2), these media mostly publish false or misleading claims either to capture audiences’ attention, or due to “copy/paste” practices and low regard for verification, accuracy and other professional standards (see “Tactics and Techniques Used to Spread Disinformation” in this report).
There are a few types of actors that spread conspiracy theories: social media “influencers” who use these narratives to build online following; fringe websites that are often anonymous and sometimes created by social media conspiracy theorists as a next step in monetization of these narratives; tabloids, pundits and political actors who propagate politically motivated conspiratorial narratives, and finally social media users who share such content “organically”, because they believe it. Depending on the content of the conspiracies, some are more present in tabloids or even mainstream media (for example, those that fit ethnonationalist narratives propagated through the “disinformation hub”), while others – especially those with elements of supernatural, esoteric, spiritual or “science fiction” – thrive on social media and anonymous websites. For example, the brief popularity of QAnon conspiracies in BiH and the region during the Covid-19 pandemic was almost entirely a social media phenomenon and its main propagators mostly remained unknown to wider audiences (1, 2), including some that only used pseudonyms and never revealed their actual identity (1, 2, 3, 4).
Conspiratorial websites whose content is shared and viewed by BiH-based users are also not from BiH in large majority (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22). There are some notable exceptions, like Logično, one of the most proliferant “conspiratorial” websites in the region, which is registered as property of a Brčko-based company, albeit it is more oriented towards Croatian “market”.
Almost all prominent sources of outlandish conspiracy theories and/or anti-vaccine narratives that reach audiences in BiH through social networks are also located outside of the country, in Serbia or Croatia. Some of these personalities are virtually unknown to audiences outside of conspiratorial websites and social media, regardless of the large following they managed to gather on Facebook, YouTube or X/Twitter (Slađana Velkov, Marija Stojaković, Mila Alečković); others have had moderate presence outside of the fringe media (Lidija Gajski and Srećko Sladoljev, both in Croatia), while some, like aforementioned Nestorović and Saša Borojević, are established as TV commentators on Serbian “tabloid” channels like TV Happy. Nestorović, a retired pulmonologist, has gained considerable popularity both in Serbia and Bosnia by peddling conspiracy theories, especially about and during the Covid-19 pandemic. He ran in 2023 parliamentary and local elections in Serbia and his party won about 5% of the vote in both.
Semir Osmanagić is one of the very few prominent conspiracy theorists from BiH. He rose to fame in mid 2000s when he proclaimed Visočica hill to be an ancient pyramid that emanates “healing energy”, managing to build an entire business and a borderline cult around this hoax with continuing support from multiple actors in BiH – local and regional media, politicians (1, 2), institutions and numerous celebrity figures. Serbian tennis player Novak Đoković, who occasionally promotes pseudoscientific narratives himself, makes such highly publicized “pilgrimages” to Visoko that it had even inspired false claims that he plans to build a hotel there. Osmanagić has built a considerable social media presence to promote his “Bosnian pyramids” complex in Visoko, which he continues to use to spread conspiracy theories, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic. Another prominent Bosnia-based promoter of conspiracy theories is Mirnes Ajanović, a lawyer and a local politician from Tuzla, who intensively used anti-vaccine disinformation to build a social media following during the pandemic. Among the rare pre-pandemic influential sources of such narratives was Mladen Marić, a journalist who hosted a conspiratorial prime-time show “Paralele” on Federal Television, a public broadcaster in FBiH, for almost 20 years. Video clips from the show about stories like “depopulation” or “New World Order” have gained new popularity during the pandemic, becoming viral on YouTube and other social media platforms (1, 2, 3, 4).
A considerable number of false claims fact-checked by Raskrinkavanje are related to hoaxes and scams on social media that trick users into sharing their personal data or financial information. Actors behind such frauds are anonymous and many are located outside of the region, running similar scams around the globe (1, 2, 3, 4). Another common type of fraudulent content are ads that use fake endorsements to sell supplements or herbal “remedies” (see the “Tactics” chapter in this report), often produced by companies based in BiH and/or the region, like Monetize Ad (1, 2).
Tactics and Techniques Used to Spread Disinformation
Tactics and techniques used to spread disinformation depend on several factors, such as actors’ motivations, the audience they aim to reach, their goals, the tools they have at their disposal and the type of content (false or misleading claims) they publish.
Depending on combinations of these factors, different tactics are employed to create content in a way that makes it more believable, as well as to present, distribute and promote it in order to make it more visible, impactful or profitable. In the realm of commercial disinformation, the goal is usually to achieve immediate engagement, usually of social media users, with the content or the publisher (clicking a link, reacting, sharing, commenting or otherwise establishing communication, sharing personal or financial data, buying a product, paying for a service). Political disinformation, on the other hand, usually aims for long-term goals of shaping public opinion (often in an attempt to “spin” current events) and influencing political decisions, particularly about voting. Various actors sometimes publish false claims aiming to instigate hostile engagements with a third party, for example to join a harassment campaign against a person or organization targeted with disinformation. This has become a growing problem for fact-checkers in BiH, the region, Europe and beyond, who are often targets of harassment and attempts at intimidation coming from actors that publish disinformation.
The most developed “infrastructure” for distributing and promoting political disinformation rests within the aforementioned “hub” which perpetuates the ethnonationalist paradigm and/or creates support for the ruling parties in RS/Serbia. These and other similarly positioned media engage in mutual redistribution of the same content, as well as mirroring and “circular” referencing between the media and the political actors, thus amplifying the false claims which are treated as established facts. For example, the false story about the destruction of Serb graves in Sarajevo has resurfaced multiple times, both through media claims and the politicians referencing and repeating those claims, even after they were debunked (1, 2).
Content wise, their tactics are focused on creating seemingly credible sources to offer or support false or misleading claims. One is to use “fake experts” who are quoted as sources of claims, or used as pundits who provide “analyses” that confirm the false narratives. These are individuals without real expertise in the topics they discuss, often introduced with inaccurate titles to imply academic or professional achievements that they do not actually possess (1, 2, 3). An example of a former CIA employee (and a close associate of Dodik’s US lobbyists) who has been misrepresented as a former “CIA chief” or “CIA chief for the Balkans” for over two decades (1, 2, 3) demonstrates this and another frequent strategy – linking the narratives to intelligence services to make them seem more serious and credible. Making up or forging confidential documents, linking claims to alleged anonymous sources with access to confidential information, or attributing false statements to real intelligence agents or agencies, are some of the tactics used to accomplish that (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). Anonymous sources are frequently used by various actors as an alibi for false claims and/or personal attacks (1, 2). Political actors sometimes also create anonymous websites which resemble news media to spread rumors and attack their opponents without accountability, especially in election time. Such “news” is then republished by partisan mainstream media which present it as credible information (1, 2, 3).
Attributing false statements to public figures is a tactic used by various actors for multiple purposes. The “disinformation hub”, for example, was seen to use it to fake Western support for local nationalist narratives (1, 2). Some actors rely almost entirely on this tactic. A network of anonymous Facebook pages supportive of the SDA party, regularly attributes fake compromising statements to SDA’s political opponents (1, 2, 3, 4). These and similar sources (1, 2) also use hate speech to portray rival politicians as “traitors” and public figures of other ethnicities as enemies of Bosniaks (1, 2, 3). Political battles waged on social networks also include tactics like synchronized posting of networks of social media accounts run by political parties (locally known as “bots”); creating false accounts of targeted politicians, or presumably satirical pages de facto used to spread disinformation and slender political opponents (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).
False statements and interviews are also an essential feature of fraudulent advertising of products like supplements, herbal “remedies” and other untested and possibly unsafe products presented as medicine, that has surged during and after the lockdown stages of the Covid-19 pandemics. For years, such advertisers reached their customers primarily through a tactic known as native advertising, which uses “widgets” with ads’ thumbnails embedded in news media websites. Such ads are purposely not identified as advertisement, but rather mimic the surrounding content and blend in with the page. They provide both ad revenue and, through cross-linking with other websites, additional visibility to web portals who use them. In at least one case, the same entity – a BiH based company Monetize Ad with several subsidiaries – is both the manufacturer of products and the creator of the widget used to advertise these products (1, 2).
Clicking such ads usually redirects the user through a few temporary URLs, finally landing on a page where the product is presented and sold. False information is encountered in various steps of this process, from the claims visible in the “widget”, to the landing page which contains some form of made-up endorsement, with templated comments of nonexistent “satisfied customers” and photoshopped fake certificates for the advertised products.
The endorsements used to be mostly made-up recommendations of fake doctors created by pairing stock photos with names of doctors and their institutions “localized” to fit the market where the advertisement is placed. However, names and likenesses of well known doctors or other public figures were also used to create such endorsements in the form of textual interviews. With the development of AI tools, deepfake videos of public figures made to look like they are endorsing these products are becoming a dominant practice (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). In some versions, famous doctors are even presented as “inventors” of those supplements, vouching for their high quality and effectiveness.
In the past year, these advertisers have expanded from “native ads” into other spaces via ad services like Google’s AdSense or Meta’s Audience Network, reaching wider audiences through apps on smartphones and sponsored posts on social networks. Conspiratorial narratives about “Big Pharma” have been put to a particularly grotesque use in these fraudulent advertisements, with claims that doctors who endorsed the “banned” products were beaten up on live television, arrested, or even murdered for recommending the products that would “put pharmacies out of business” (1, 2, 3).
Other types of fraudulent content are usually encountered on social networks, particularly on Facebook. Pages that pretend to be well known brands or celebrities offer fake giveaways to get users to interact with them (1, 2) in order to obtain their personal or financial information, or to subscribe them to different paid services (1, 2, 3, 4). In a different type of scam, malicious actors imitate Meta’s notifications and send out false security warnings to administrators of Facebook pages. These posts and messages often use automatic translations as the scammers operate world-wide, and their goal is to get page administrators to click on malicious links to obtain access to their Facebook accounts (and with it, the access to pages they manage). These attacks have particularly spiked during 2023. In the past year Raskrinkavanje has also observed new international scams reaching BiH: app-based pyramid schemes where users are promised well paying “online jobs” and tricked into making payments to fraudulent companies.
Unlike fraudulent advertisers, scammers typically don’t use paid promotion. Instead, they develop tactics to “organically” increase the visibility of their content. The tactics usually include mixing some form of seemingly authentic content with links to malicious pages. For example, an image of an item that is supposedly being given away, or emotional images paired with sympathy appeals are used to draw attention, with links either posted in the comments, or sent via private message once the contact with the victim is established.
Similar attention-grabbing tactics are also used by “click farms” – networks of mutually connected anonymous websites that resemble news media, that share the same Facebook “assets” (pages, groups and user accounts) used to increase audience reach (1, 2, 3). Their content largely consists of false or misleading “news” they promote on social networks, with the ultimate goal to drive traffic to websites where they monetize pageviews through ad-services. The Facebook assets sometimes change owners as they are bought, sold and rented to multiple websites, amounting to a whole separate branch of online gray economy, particularly well developed in BiH. Click farms are a decade old tactic that is being increasingly used by mainstream media in the last few years. These are mostly, but not exclusively, tabloids that “rent” existing Facebook pages from their administrators, but some also maintain their own “farms”.
Monetizers of disinformation constantly evolve their tactics to stay up to date with the incentives created by tech platforms’ algorithms, which are closely monitored by such actors, and to bypass potential restrictions or safeguards that could limit visibility and reach of inauthentic, fraudulent or otherwise problematic content. Many use different technical tools to multiply ad-based revenue, from pop-ups that force readers to engage with ads in order to read the text, to scripts that scrape content from other websites, or multiply the published content by “cloning” an article URL with minor changes to create dozens addresses to share the same text, bypassing the spam/repetition detection on social networks (1, 2, 3).
In addition to this digital “infrastructure”, the owners of anonymous websites have also mastered tactics of creating deceptive content to capture attention and drive traffic to their pages. The examples are too numerous to list, but some of the most enduring include making up shocking or moving stories which often feature celebrities (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), where fake news about celebrity deaths, accidents or illnesses are a particular “subgenre” (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7); exploiting disasters, tragedies and extreme violence to publish false or misleading “exclusive” information (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6); publishing alerts for nonexistent dangers ranging from “plastic foods” to threats of war (1, 2, 3, 4) and alleged discoveries and recipes of “alternative medicine” as a go-to “evergreen” content that never stops flooding the pages of such sources. Some of the tactics are not directly connected to the content of the article, but are used to make the article more visible to search engines (for example, repetition of newsworthy names or phrases related to current events without providing any actual information about them) and/or keep the reader on the page longer and generate more page views (for example, dividing the text into several pages that need to be opened with separate clicks).
However, the most common tactic of “for profit” disinformation sources is clickbait. It is the main tactic for monetization developed in response to incentives created by big tech platforms, specifically Google and Facebook. Clickbait headlines use various techniques to trick the reader into opening articles where the ads are placed. They usually promise content that is not present in the article, whether by using explicit misinformation (placing false claims in the headline, but not necessarily in the article) or by manipulating the readers in more subtle ways – for example, by deliberately omitting relevant information, like time or place of events covered, to make the article seem relevant for targeted audience (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Clickbait is often used in addition to “copy-pasting” where the text of the article is scraped or copied in its entirety from another news source, but the headline is changed to make the content appear more sensationalist, shocking or exclusive.
“Copy paste journalism” and clickbait are not just fixtures of anonymous websites, but of many mainstream media as well. Republishing any “clickable” content without verification has become a common practice due to the dictate to constantly publish large amounts of content, while competing for audiences’ attention with a large number of outlets in very small media markets. Such content doesn’t just come from other media, but also from social networks (1, 2), claims of obscure figures made in attempts of self-promotion (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), or other unverified and obscure sources (1). The practice of republishing without verification contributes immensely to the spread of information disorder, low information integrity and “pervasive contamination of the information and media space” in BiH and the region. Some media use “hybrid” business models, where they rely both on monetization of deceptive attention-grabbing tactics and on financial support of political actors who provide access to public funding and other perks. Serbian tabloids that publish both political disinformation and clickbait / sensationalist misinformation are a good example of this model that benefits both from the closeness to political parties in power and from monetizing attention of online audiences.
Last but not least, the actors on the “conspiracy scene” also have some recognizable tactics to reach and keep their audiences, as well as to profit off of the claims they spread, either directly through online monetization, or by profiting off of the “cult” status they build which is then used to give paid talks, sell books, products, services, etc. Each “genre” of conspiracy theories develops its own specific motives and “conventions” that become instantly recognizable to their dedicated audiences, or even to the broad public. For example, antivaccination narratives will often intentionally misinterpret results of scientific research or other vaccine-related information to feign credibility of their claims; exaggerate intensity, frequency or scope of their potential unwanted effects or make up some that don’t exist (autism, sterility, pregnancy loss, cancer, etc.);claim that vaccines contain scary sounding ingredients like “monkey kidneys” or “aborted fetuses”, or connect them to technologies that have already been presented as dangerous in other conspiracy theories (5G, microchips).
Most of the global-scale conspiracy theories reach BiH from outside. This is usually content published by English speaking conspiracy theorists, translated and modified by their local or, more often, regional counterparts. Conspiratorial websites which publish large quantities of content and monetize them through ads services, often do this through low quality automated translation, sometimes making the claims they republish barely intelligible. When it comes to “infrastructure” and attention-grabbing, these sources share some of the tactics used by scammers, anonymous websites and commercial media for monetization. Content wise, there are some specific techniques they use, such as claiming that the information they are bringing is released by a “convert” – usually a fake whistleblower (1, 2, 3) from a powerful institution – who has decided to “come clean” about some conspiracy. Another common tactic is to claim that the institution itself has “admitted” the harm that conspiracy theories had been accusing it of. One of the most viral and most impactful examples is the false story that courts in the US have “admitted” that MMR vaccine causes autism (1, 2).
The “conspiracy influencers”, who are focused on online monetization, usually work to build multiple channels of communication, both on anonymous websites and various social networks. They often use each other for mutual benefit, broadening their audiences by alternating as hosts and guests between their respective podcasts and channels, doing “collaborations”, or quoting each other in articles. This is done across the region, with recognizable figures from different countries “visiting” or “collaborating” with each other, effectively building a regional “conspiracy market”.
YouTube and Facebook used to be main outlets for such sources to reach their audiences, but many of them have moved partially or entirely to other platforms like Telegram and TikTok, especially since Meta’s TPFC program has started in the region (see: Antidisinformation update). In fact, claims of “censorship on Facebook” have become both a material for new conspiracy theories and a tool to rally followers around this type of “content creators”. Many of the fringe conspiratorial websites now end each article with a call to their supporters to join them on places like Telegram or TikTok, where they can “still tell the truth”. Some use similar “slogans” in all the materials they publish, aiming to drive engagement by asking their followers to share it in order to “spread the truth”, “wake up” and “be the media for others”, etc. Similar wording is used in calls to financially support these outlets and individuals, usually through services like Patreon that enable direct donations. These calls often contain more or less explicit “dog whistles” targeting fact-checkers, portrayed as “censors” and mercenaries of entities such as the world government, cabals, big pharma and similar.
However, equating fact-checking with censorship is not nearly limited to the conspiratorial scene alone, although this is where explicit calls for harassment come from. Several mainstream media in BiH have also engaged in campaigns against Raskrinkavanje in particular and/or fact-checking in general, some even engaging in direct threats and attempts of intimidation. Legal harassment in the form of SLAPPs and similar lawsuits has also been directed at Raskrinkavanje, specifically from aforementioned Monetize Ad and Mirnes Ajanović.
Events Instigating Spread of Disinformation
There are a few types of events that regularly trigger the surge of disinformation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Anniversaries of war crimes are always followed by spread of denialist narratives, with Srebrenica genocide denial dominating the political and media spheres covered by the “disinformation hub” described above (1, 2, 3, 4). The same sources regularly spread false or misleading claims around dates related to the statehood and constitutional set up of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1, 2, 3, 4), namely the BiH Statehood Day (November 25), Independence Day (March 1), the Republika Srpska Day (celebrated on January 9, despite the Constitutional Court’s decision deeming it unconstitutional), the day the Dayton Peace Agreement was established (November 21) and the day of the signing of the Dayton Agreement (December 14). The anniversary of the start of 1999 NATO bombing of FR Yugoslavia is another date that frequently triggers publishing and spread of various false claims (1, 2). Different types of information manipulation also follow the elections, held every two years, alternating between local and general elections on a four-year cycle.
Anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack is also frequently used to resurface old conspiracy theories about the attack as an “inside job”, including some with antisemitic undertones (1, 2, 3).
The BiH Pride March that has been taking place in Sarajevo in June since 2019 is another event that regularly triggers disinformation paired with homophobic and transphobic hate speech targeting LGBTIQ people, or instrumentalizing the event for internal political conflicts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a catalyst for an unprecedented surge in disinformation, particularly concerning vaccinations. The Ukraine invasion has also triggered a lot of disinformation, almost all of it in support of Putin’s propaganda. False narratives about vaccines and about the Ukraine invasion have dominated the disinformation space throughout 2022. In 2023, an escalation of another conflict, the one between Israel and Palestine, was a new major topic of disinformation in the BiH public sphere (see above).
In 2023, several particularly violent crimes have instigated spread of disinformation and manipulative reporting in BiH and the region. Mass shootings that happened in Serbia in May, first in the elementary school “Vladislav Ribnikar” in Belgrade and than in villages Dubona and Malo Orašje near Mladenovac, triggered an onslaught of false claims and sensationalist clickbait (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). The murders were also “explained” with conspiracy theories about “mind control” executed by cults or the US government (1, 2, 3, 4). In August, a man killed three people in Gradačac (BiH), including a former partner who reported him for domestic violence and was in hiding with her baby when he found, abused and killed her. Similar patterns of exploiting tragedies or extreme violence for clicks were seen in Media reports about this case (1, 2, 3, 4).
Natural disasters and extreme weather events often trigger a surge in climate change denial and conspiracy theories on social networks. When catastrophes like the earthquakes in Morocco and Turkey/Syria, wildfires in Hawaii, or severe storms or unusual natural phenomena occur in the region, conspiracy theorists frequently attribute these events to artificial causes like electromagnetic waves, “Direct Energy Weapons”, NATO military activity, or HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, falsely claimed to possess various, almost supernatural “powers”).
Antidisinformation Update
There has been an uptick in research and analyses published about disinformation in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the past couple of years.
Zašto ne / Raskrinkavanje conducted or contributed to several studies about information disorder in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the region since 2019, when the research paper “Disinformation in the online sphere: The case of BiH” was published with support of the European Union. The research uses data extrapolated from the fact-checking work of Raskrinkavanje to map out patterns of creation and distribution of political disinformation in BiH and SEE region, focusing also on actors who propagate disinformation and benefit from it and those that are targeted by it.
In 2020, two in-depth analyses of the same material focused on disinformation targeting marginalized groups (Across the margin: Disinformation about marginalized groups in the media in Bosnia and Herzegovina) and distorting political processes (International politics through the prism of disinformation). A publication titled “Propaganda, disinformation and hate models of media and communication in Bosnia and Herzegovina” was published by South East European Network for Professionalization of Media, Mediacentar Sarajevo and Peace Institute in the same year. Mediacentar Sarajevo and Montenegro Media Institute published a study of public reactions to Covid-19 related information. Raskrinkavanje has entered Meta’s Third Party Fact-checking partnership, a program that enables fact-checkers to label misinformation directly on Meta’s platforms Facebook and Instagram.
In 2021, Zašto ne / Raskrinkavanje published “Disinformation in the election process in BiH”, presenting examples, sources and patterns of disinformation during elections. SEE Check members’ joint research and analysis on the “infodemic” in the region, “Disinformation during Covid-19 pandemic”, was published by Friedrich Naumann Stiftung für die Freiheit in the same year.
In 2022, Zašto ne / Raskrinkavanje published “Countering disinformation narratives and mapping conspiracy theories: The case of BiH,” another EU-supported research focusing on the prevalence of beliefs in conspiracy theories in BiH with emphasis on beliefs related to Covid-19 and immunization. In the same year, the newsroom contributed to ProPublica’s article researching bad actors’ monetization of disinformation through Google AdSense service (How Google’s Ad Business Funds Disinformation). In July 2022, SEE Check members published a joint analysis of disinformation narratives about the full scale invasion of Ukraine.
In 2023, Zašto ne published a series of analyses of most prominent disinformation narratives targeting Ukraine and a paper titled “Disinformation narratives in BiH and the region.” The findings were presented at the event marking one year of Russia’s full scale invasion, “The evolution of propaganda narratives about Ukraine” organized by European External Action Service and the Delegation of the EU in BiH in Sarajevo. Mediacentar Sarajevo published “Harmful narratives during elections: Smear campaigns, gender stereotypes and hate narratives 2022 General Elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” following the 2022 general elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
When it comes to events taking place in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zašto ne’s POINT conference (Political Accountability and New Technologies), that has been held annually in Sarajevo since 2012, continues to have a strong focus on fact-checking and fight against disinformation, serving as an important knowledge sharing and connecting point for this community. In September 2023, it was announced that the next global summit of fact-checkers, GlobalFact 11, will be held in Sarajevo in 2024, co-hosted by Poynter Institute and Zašto ne. This is the largest fact-checking event in the world, organized by Poynter / IFCN since 2015.
Zašto ne has also been active in the Civil Society Forum that accompanies the Berlin Process working groups, moderating two working groups dealing with information disorder (2022) and digitalization and connectivity (2023). The recommendations produced by the working groups put emphasis on systemic approaches and policies to fight against disinformation, including the needs and possibilities for the application of DSA and CoP in the region in the context of the Berlin Process and EU integrations (1, 2).
Legislation Overview
There is no specific law in BiH that defines or addresses disinformation. The Code on Audiovisual Media Services and Radio Services, a regulatory act enforced by the state Communications Regulatory Agency (CRA), states in Article 7 (“False or misleading audiovisual or radio programs”) that audiovisual and radio programs shall not “offer any content for which it is known or can be established based on common sense or through a routine check that it is false or misleading, or there is a justified assumption that it is false or misleading”. In case it is established that a program was false, it should be corrected as soon as possible. Article 22 of the Overview of Violations and Corresponding Sanctions by the CRA prescribes a fine ranging from 250 to 30,000 BAM (500-15,000 EUR) for violations of these provisions.
The Code also includes guidelines on how to report on topics like alternative medicine, quackery, and “paranormal” and “parapsychological” phenomena (Articles 12-14) in a way that does not support false premises or claims they are based on. Fines for violations range from 1,000 to 60,000 BAM (Articles 27-29 of the Overview of Violations).
According to a 2019 research (p 69-75), these provisions have little to no impact on the overall credibility of media reporting because the CRA is hesitant to enforce them and the fines are also too low to serve as a real deterrent.
In March 2020, during the time of the Covid-19 lockdown, the government of Republika Srpska adopted a short-lived decree prohibiting “causing of panic and disorder during a state of emergency,” with fines ranging from 1,000 to 9,000 BAM. International organizations such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) had expressed concerns and repeatedly called for the decree to be withdrawn (1, 2). The decree was enforced against a few individuals before it was withdrawn in April 2020.
In 2023, the government of Sarajevo Canton drafted a Law on Offenses Against Public Order and Peace, which treats the internet as a public space and prescribes fines ranging from 600 to 2,100 BAM (300-1,550 EUR) for individuals, and up to 15,000 BAM for legal entities, for spreading or disseminating false news or claims which cause panic, severely disrupt public order or peace, or obstruct the implementation of decisions and measures by public authorities. The draft was met with widespread criticism from civil society and international organizations. It did not become a law by the time of writing of this report.
In August 2023, the Criminal code of Republika Srpska was amended to make libel a criminal offense, despite protests of journalists and serious criticism from the media, civil society and other organizations. The RS Government also ignored the critics when it proceeded with a Draft Law on the Special Register and Publicity of the Work of Non-Profit Organizations, modeled after the infamous “Law on Foreign Agents” in Russia (both laws were falsely touted as an “American Law on NGOs”). Combined, these two legislations threaten to cement the media capture in Republika Srpska, where the few remaining independent media rely mostly or significantly on project-based funding from international foundations and organizations.
