Original article (in Serbian) was published on 21/1/2026; Author: Teodora Koledin
Portal Vaseljenska shared an article in which it is claimed that students in the blockade “admitted they receive money for their work” and that they work for someone who is “at a much higher level.” However, this is a manipulatively presented statement by the vice president of the Student Parliament of the Faculty of Political Sciences, Vuk Aleksić, from his appearance on the show “Utisak nedelje” (Impression of the Week), whose meaning has been completely torn out of its primary context.
Master’s student of communicology at the Novi Sad Faculty of Philosophy, Boris Kojčinović, also a guest on the show, reminded viewers of cases when politically suitable individuals were appointed to the position of president of the Student Parliament of the Faculty of Philosophy. Aleksić then continued the story from the first-person plural perspective, noting:
“We come to study, we’ll take maybe three or four exams, … We give the impression of studying while actually dealing with some serious things. Do we get some money for it? Maybe, maybe not. Hm. The question is. But essentially we do the job for someone who is at some much higher instance who has a certain interest, and that is to control, obviously, students at the faculty and professors…”
The author of the problematic article, Sofija Marić, interprets this for the Vaseljenska audience as an “indirect admission that the blockades are not solely a result of spontaneous student dissatisfaction” but that “there is an organized structure and a clear line of responsibility behind them.”
Such manipulation is a typical example of a propaganda technique pervasive in the modern digital age — cheapfakes — in which authentic photos or videos are recontextualized to change their meaning deliberately. In this case, Vaseljenska journalists unethically used a small portion of the appearance edited in a way that cannot be clearly interpreted without appropriate context, inserting their own fabricated context. We debunked similar deceptions before in the Serbian media.
The article from Vaseljenska was also shared on their social networks of this portal (1, 2, 3), gathering hundreds of reactions and thousands of views.
