Good morning! For the last few months, the CdM portal has been flooded with comments from SNS bots. Yesterday, I asked my colleagues to make their comments public below my text ‘Ten to Eight’ so that we could show how that matrix works.
Why we allowed bot comments on ‘Ten to Eight’ yesterday?
Yesterday, I asked my colleagues to make public almost all bot comments below the text ‘Vucic – the Stability Factor’. And they agreed. But you didn’t see the majority of it because they had deleted it before my request. Every comment posted in line with the same model, without interaction, as if they were written by some very weak artificial intelligence – ‘Serbia is a sovereign state that functions based on the will of the citizens, not according to the taste of foreign camps’. ‘Vucic’s openness to dialogue with the West and the East improves international relations.’ ‘Vucic is balancing in order to maintain peace and stability in Serbia’. ‘Serbia is finally a successful country because Vucic takes care of it.” Dozens and dozens of comments like this.
In Montenegro, they started with this a few years ago, but it wasn’t fruitful so they had to seek more creative options. Similar to the DPS with Informer and “Minute, Two” back then. We tend to import media manipulative know-how from Belgrade. Although every time it turned out to be ineffective. That’s why the reach of projects like Adria and Nova is bad, while Vijesti has been plummeting ever since staff from the headquarters in Belgrade have been engaged massively. Of all the Serbian projects in Montenegro, only Borba is growing, most likely fueled by these Vucic methods.
But let’s go back specifically to bots. DFC wrote about a series of profiles with stolen identities, which promoted and continue to promote Dritan Abazovic and URA. We saw how URA ended up.
The question is why they continue to do this in Serbia and whether this really continues to produce results. The answer is that it probably does, as soon as huge funds are invested to open fake NGOs that serve to organize the call centers the Serbian CIN wrote about a few weeks ago. The botnet works very similarly to the tabloid media. Everything is coordinated from a couple of heads and from Banjica, where BIA is seated. The bot operations are automated, which can be clearly concluded from yesterday’s comments, devoid of human touch.
The use of bot and troll farms in authoritarian regimes is a phenomenon that has long been written about and talked about globally. In Central Asian countries, civil activists and journalists have been debunking for years how social media are used to manipulate public opinion and create distortions in it. Apart from Central Asian countries, these methods are used in Azerbaijan, for example, whose leader Aleksandar Vucic praised for his democracy recently.
Montenegro must act and protect itself from such actions. An initiative to adopt a legal solution and strategy to combat influence operations would be a good start.
That’s all for today. Enjoy the rest of your day.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM observer and columnist
(The opinions and views of our columnists aren’t necessarily those of the CdM news team)
