Serbia

Twitter released a dataset containing a network of 8,558 accounts that promoted Serbia’s ruling party, the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS; its official account was one of the most retweeted in the data) and its leader, Aleksandar Vučić, and attacking its political opposition. Serbia’s government has faced criticism over creeping authoritarianism and accusations of influencing public media against its opponents, including via online activists. This has led to several civil demonstrations, which adopted the ‘One of five million’ (‘1od5miliona’) slogan after President Vučić claimed he would refuse to meet protesters’ requests ‘even if there were five million people on the street’. Accounts removed from the Twitter network largely focused on amplifying pro-government views by retweeting the official Twitter accounts of the SNS party, Vučić and the pro-government daily newspaper InformerNovine. Some of the most shared links in the data included URLs to other pro-government media, including a Serbian broadcasting company (b92), a Serbian tabloid (Večernje novosti; Вечерње новости), a pro-SNS tabloid (The Informer) and articles from Aleksandar Vučić’s website. The accounts were largely created during the peak of the 2018/2019 protests and sought to impersonate Serbian citizens by listing their reported locations in cities such as Belgrade or Novi Sad and co-opted the ‘One of five million’ hashtag to share pro-government content.