Miller: The Balkans, among the regions most sensitive to information manipulation

The Balkans remains one of the regions most sensitive to influence and manipulation of information, where various actors such as Russia try to influence the political orientation of countries, says the co-founder of the Center for Social Media Analysis Demos, Carl Miller.

In the interview with The Geopost, Miller shares his views on the current situation in the Western Balkans, emphasizing Russian efforts to distance the region from Western values ​​and liberal democracy.

According to him, through propaganda and other strategies of influence, a narrative is created that favors orientation towards the east, challenging the stability and integration of the region in Europe.

Full interview:

The Geopost: How do you see the disinformation situation in social media, generally?

Miller: What we’ve seen is the kind of emergence of this whole tradecraft around manipulating the space in order to have effects. And from its small beginnings in probably around 2012 or 2013, there’s obviously profusion that’s happening all over the place. And not just with the actors that you think. So, there’s a tremendous amount of attention, of course, on actors like Russia and Iran and China when it comes to information manipulation, but we also see it happening in Saudi Arabian information spaces and in the Emirates and in the Philippines and in lots of different African information contexts as well. So, it’s obviously become quite a widespread practice and something which is partly done for domestic control and partly done for geopolitical advantage.

The Geopost: And how do you see the situation of Russian influence and propaganda in Europe?

Miller: We obviously see a huge amount of Russian influence operations in Europe, but I would say that probably the most successful ones are actually not those targeting the West per se, it’s those targeting the global South to try and diminish the influence of the West. So if you go to South Africa, there you’ll see stories of people probably linked to Russia one way or another buying up stations and reusing mastheads, paying for influences, even illicit financial transfers sometimes as well, and it’s pretty clear I think, at least to me, that these are far more kind of competed over information environments than certainly the one I live in.

The Geopost: What about the situation in the Balkans?

Miller: The Balkans is a good example of a contested information space. Now, I haven’t done any specific research that recently into Balkans’ information environment, but we do see coming up all across both Kosovo and the Western Balkans in general, like a lot of activity which is seeking to try and detach those countries from the West and from Europe, portrayals of the West, Europe, liberal democracy as being fragile and decadent, and making arguments instead for long-term interests of those countries is to kind of pivot east.

The Geopost: Which is your message for organizations, media and journalists who are fighting disinformation in Balkans?

Miller: My message to all the journalists, firstly, is thank you for what you do. It’s not easy what you do, especially in that part of the world. I know that journalists are often on the front line of this and that means that they often are kind of targeted by the very tools of information warfare themselves. They get under cyber security pressures, they can get investigated by all kinds of shadowy actors, and their reputations can be targeted as well. So firstly, thank you. We have to, by the way, find ways of making journalists safer for what they do.

Probably my main message for journalists, apart from that though, is we really need to target the actual campaigns when we investigate them. So it’s quite easy to find examples of disinformation floating around. But what we actually need to do is to dig into the campaigns, the money transfers, the people. And that requires probably the most difficult and fragile bit of journalism, which is investigative journalism, long term, sometimes quite risky investigations.

It’s only via that that we’re really going to learn more about how information operations really works, who does it and who pays for it.

/The Geopost