Disinformation surge targets Serbia's student protests

Yahoo

02-04-2025

Massive student-led protests in Serbia have been met with a barrage of disinformation from pro-government media and social networks, in what analysts say is an attempt to undermine the anti-graft movement.
The nationwide wave of demonstrations kicked off after a recently renovated train station roof collapsed in November in Serbia's second city Novi Sad, killing 16 people.
With many blaming the deaths on state corruption and inadequate oversight, the protests have piled pressure on the nationalist government of President Aleksandar Vucic.
Top officials and pro-government news outlets -- which dominate Serbia's media landscape -- for months have been portraying the students and their supporters as "foreign agents", violent troublemakers planning "a coup" or accused them of being funded by the opposition.
The Kurir tabloid said students "terrorise Belgrade" while the Informer tabloid and TV station alleged they are paid by US aid agency USAID and billionaire George Soros -- a regular target of right-wing conspiracy theories.
Another pro-government broadcaster, Pink TV, branded the protest movement an uprising supported by Albanian-majority Kosovo, which broke away from Serbia in 2008.
- 'Enemies of the state' -
Media expert and Belgrade University professor Snjezana Milivojevic told AFP such narratives aimed to frame the protests as an attempted "colour revolution", a reference to the pro-western revolts that shook post-Soviet states in recent decades.
Media outlets and officials were also regularly spreading false news about the protesters "to discredit them", she said.
In one recent example, students at the University of Arts in the central city of Kragujevac were filming a docudrama about the car ramming attacks that have struck several of the protests and left some people seriously injured.
Media outlets such as Informer and TV Prva used footage of the students re-enacting the attacks to falsely claim the students were carrying out the attacks, painting them as perpetrators rather than victims.
Bogdan Vucic, a student at the Belgrade Faculty of Political Science, told AFP that the pro-government reporting of the protests "contributes to the antagonisation of students, turning them into enemies of the state -- students who are the children and future of this country".
Professor Ana Milojevic from the Faculty of Political Science's Journalism department at the University of Belgrade, said the misinformation sought to "delegitimise the protests".
In another incident in March, a plain clothes police officer was injured during a student blockade of the headquarters of state broadcaster RTS in Belgrade.
- Photos of old protests -
Pro-government media accused the students of attacking the officer, a claim president Vucic repeated on his Instagram account along with an image of the injured officer. But video footage on social media showed the man being hit by a fellow police officer.
Vucic later acknowledged that the officer "may have taken a few hits from his colleagues" but insisted that several blows also came from the students and others gathered near the RTS building.
Serbia's pro-government media have been serving up "propaganda" for years, Milivojevic said, and their "tactics intensified once the protests started".
"Their goal is to criminalise the protests, depict them as violent and show them as ineffective."
The student protests are among the largest in recent Serbian history.
The demonstrations have regularly attracted crowds of tens of thousands but pro-government outlets have used old photos or aired footage when crowds are dispersing to make turnout seem smaller.
"According to media reports, more people gather in smaller squares for regime-backed events than in the largest squares during protests, and the number of students is constantly being downplayed," Milivojevic said.
- Combating falsehoods -
When high school students joined the blockades, Vucic claimed that minors had no legal right to protest.
Pro-government media quickly echoed his words and published headlines, widely shared on social media, that claimed students had the right to protest but minors did not.
However, according to the country's constitution and United Nations conventions, people in Serbia are allowed to protest regardless of age.
The protesters themselves are not immune to falling for disinformation.
One viral video purported to show the "arrest of RTS workers who want to expose the truth about protests". But it actually depicted the 2022 detainment of a small political movement's members who had stormed the RTS building.
To combat false news and what they consider biased coverage, student protesters regularly turn to social media to expose perceived disinformation spread by pro-government media.
They also have set up "Talk to a student" stands across Serbia to engage with citizens about misinformation, and created a group on messaging app Viber with more than 47,000 members to answer questions from the public.
They also have rallied outside the RTS and Informer offices.
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