Good morning! Yesterday in my town the people of Plav were welcomed with genocidal choreography and messagesꓼ Brano Mandic and URA thought about me, each in their own way, Brano dealt with an important topic, and URA lied as usual.
By clicking here, you join our Viber group, where we inform you live from hour to hour about news and answer your questions directly.
Answer to Brano Mandic and some more trivialities
I like to read Brano Mandic’s columns. Not as much as Nikolaidis’, but I still like them. I would have missed Brano’s column yesterday if people hadn’t sent me a screenshot of a paragraph in which Brano mentioned me: “Tough questions… The democratic dream came true like a nightmare. No one can say society is closed anymore, but what to do with so much openness to stupidity? Where politics is going on the web in its catharsis and prolonged orgasm, no one can see that anymore except maybe Ljubo Filipovic while pointing his finger at Moscow”.
Here, it is completely irrelevant whether Brano acknowledged my expert analysis, or made an ironic joke to please the Vijesti audience, which is always ready to throw out a good amount of likes and shares at the mention of my name in a negative context, thus boosting Brano’s dopamine and improving his day. In both cases, the outcome is good and positive.
Brano tackled a good question, which is the question of organized political activity on the Internet. Brano well recognizes the difficulty of controlling such actions and recognizes the regularities of the political market in which the product is created on the fly, with constant feedback from users. However, this is not a phenomenon in today’s politics. Crowd pleasing has always been an effective method of gaining the sympathy of dear people. Populism is listening to public opinion and creating your public message in such a way that it pleases the wishes and hopes of the masses. Riding a horse in the direction in which the horse has already started going. Brano also recognizes well that Ivan Vukovic and DPS tried to rein in the galloping horse and redirect it, and that the horse overthrew them precisely because of that. Such a maneuver requires much more than pulling on the reins. Especially because, in the once orderly stable, angry clegs flew in and began to frantically “bite” the respected public opinion.
Those clegs are something Brano calls bots, but they’re actually trolls. Anonymous profiles on networks, behind which stand real people, who, hidden behind anonymity and devoid of inhibitions, spew hatred on the Internet. Montenegro is a small society, so these “emperors of web bubbles”, as Brano calls them, are quickly identified and politicians start to socialize with them on and off the Internet. Some of them earned promotion in that way, and some reached high party positions.
The problem is that Brano and his half of the political scene started dealing with this late, i.e. when they became victims of (dis)organized hatred on the Internet. Until this year, as long as this phenomenon, fed by the algorithms of digital and analogous politics, as well as the human addiction to the hormones produced by their bodies, was the wind at Brano’s half-media scene, these sowers of hatred were celebrated as “sharp and insightful critics of power” and “fighters for a better society”. Interviews were organized with them, priests, politicians and journalists socialized with them. They were even mentioned in Serbian drama series. Some, like the Old Liberal, were also awarded a Chevening scholarship by the British government. The nastier and more creative they were in their malice and harm, the more popular they were.
So, all this started three years ago, and both Moscow and Belgrade significantly sponsored this phenomenon, namely with troll farms, which pushed the Serbian political revival on the Internet. This is how the “new age Chetniks” were born, a group whose one founder ended up in psychiatry, and the other on the front in Donbass. Attacks on precisely targeted activists and politicians, who should be silenced, were and are being coordinated from such groups.
What Brano felt on his own skin, and why he decided to write, was a reaction to the years-long rape of Montenegrin public opinion, which was initiated and carried out by the mentioned operations of external influence, through various methods of manipulating public opinion via the Internet.
Montenegrins are slow learners, but they learn well. Thus, after 2020, various chat groups were created, where initially ideas were spontaneously exchanged and network activities were coordinated. And very successfully, I must say. Twitter was completely dominated by the Montenegrin narrative, while the Serbian one was completely relegated to Facebook. Very quickly, party spokespersons and professional politicians, and representatives of other interest groups, infiltrated these groups incognito and with false profiles, and started promoting their narrow interests.
Internet companies, under public pressure and regulatory action, were forced to regulate their operations, and this somewhat curbed the hatred at a global level. It happens here too, but it goes slower in small languages. Nevertheless, the organized fight against hatred on the Internet is heating up in our country as well. However, there are also problems and dilemmas related to freedom of speech and the non-transparency of the content curation process on the Internet. We’ll see if Musk turns it around, and in whose favour.
This is a big topic, and a small one for a commune. It is enough to underline what Brano also recognized. Politicians and other public officials can choose whether or not to feed the evil internet god and his little demons, i.e. trolls who have taken over people at keyboards.
That’s it for today. We will meet again tomorrow at the same place and at the same time.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM analyst
