Editor of the portal Unmasking: Parties use fake news in their campaigns

Political parties increasingly use the spread of fake news during election campaigns, claims the editor of the Raskrinkavanje portal, Darko Brkan.

In an interview with "Vijesti", he said that political parties most often spread disinformation by launching anonymous portals, from which news is often taken by regional media.

"During the pre-election period, we had a whole series of articles on pre-election disinformation that was used either by parties or people close to them to influence the public. And almost on a daily basis we check articles for which political bias is evident. All this leads to the conclusion that the connection of political parties with the media, both public and private, and even anonymous ones, is very evident. In some cases, we have clear activities of launching anonymous portals that deal exclusively with the production of disinformation in favor of or against certain parties or politicians," Brkan said.

In the countries of the region, the problem of the spread of fake news is becoming more and more present. How big is the problem?

The problem of fake news and disinformation is global. The amount of media and news, and the amount of what appears to be media and news is so great that we are much more likely to come across a media report that is not written by the person who published it than the opposite. All of these are prerequisites for the problem to take on these proportions, regionally and globally, and the motives for producing such content are money, influence or the consequence of an unintentional mistake. Perhaps the best way to illustrate the scale of the problem, at least in the regional framework, is the fact that after less than two years of operation of the Raskrinkavanje.ba platform, we have over 1.500 media in the database, and the only way to get into the database is to prove that the media published at least one media manipulation .

You recently stated that there is a whole network of domestic and local newspapers that spread fake news in an organized manner. How do they cooperate and who are the most influential among them?

The debunking made a study on disinformation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. One of the things we examined in the study is to see if there are connections between individual media and if there are regularities in the spread of misinformation. By using advanced algorithms on over 500.000 connections between media in our database, we found that the strongest mutual connections are between 29 media, and that a very large number of the same misinformation spread through that network. There we have 14 media from Bosnia and Herzegovina (mainly from Republika Srpska) and 15 media from Serbia. Among them are Radio-television of Republika Srpska, news agency SRNA, Alternative Television from BiH, and Sputnik, RTS, Informer and Kurir. This research was exclusively concerned with the fact that the media repeatedly transmitted the same misinformation, while concrete methods of cooperation and connection are something that still needs to be further investigated.

Do you think that social networks have threatened the mainstream media, given that readers are increasingly informed through networks?

The relationship between media and social networks is very complex. On the one hand, some of the media could not survive if it were not for social networks, while others have a problem staying alive precisely because of their strengthening. What is most debatable is the extent and what kind of role social networks and large technology companies play in ensuring the credibility of information. There is still very little work on this in the region. There are a large number of portals whose business model is disinformation and charging companies for advertising, and we still don't have consolidated actions from technology companies to solve it. Programs like the 'Third Party Fact-checking' program of Facebook have not yet taken root in our country, so the fight against disinformation by technology companies is still in its infancy in the region. Journalism will have to transform in order to keep pace with technology, and whether this will advance or set back the journalism profession remains to be seen.

Credible media are increasingly threatened

Considering that the portals are competing to be the first to transmit the information, do you think that this forces the journalists to check the information less before publication?

Absolutely. One of the biggest problems with the credibility of the media is that currently a large percentage of media content, especially online, is transmitted and very rarely or not at all checked. Journalists under the pressure of daily publication norms, do not check information and publish news on tape. The only remedy for this is for readers, with the help of fact-checking organizations and portals, to start demanding quality information. In this way, they can lead to the fact that only credible media that seriously check information before publication can survive on the market. This should make it easier for established media to survive on the market and reach a larger number of readers. Unfortunately, we currently have the opposite process in effect, that certain established media accept business models of media manipulation in order to reach readers and clicks more easily.