Networks are surrounded by presidents, prime ministers' profiles

“Albin Kurti prime minister”, “Enver Hoxhaj Prime Minister”, “Voisa Osmani President”, “Ramush Haradinaj President” and similar, are some of the accounts that have recently appeared on the social Facebook network.

Similar accounts have been opened in the name of certain parties or groups called followers of certain political parties.

Access to most of them is public, and there are also private groups in which access is required to join the group.

Hask: Calculations for Unofficial Fields

Dardan Hasku, social networking manager, tells Radio Free Europe that the opening of profiles, accounts on social networks and internet sites, by and large, is normal.

However, as he says, the creation of informal accounts and specific groups within social networks can also be part of the political parties' campaign to address the public as well as to infiltrate the measure.

Such accounts, according to him, are used in two ways. First, they can be opened spontaneously by certain people when thematics are created for certain individuals or parties and try to use them to obtain large numbers of preferences.

Then, says Hask, they try to sell those pages and change their name. Second, such accounts are used as a propaganda tool, but not directly, and it never becomes known that they may eventually be managed by different party structures or their candidate for prime minister or deputy.

But beyond that, the various unofficial sites that open are much easier to make attacks on others or propaganda and others. At the first moment that a media or anyone, an ordinary citizen, may feel frustrated by that attack or post, which is something that is not preferred to be done or to be an official part of the campaign, they can just distance themselves and say this is not an official site, we don't know who has opened it. So there is still no complete transparency to show who is behind the various pages. The only information Facebook offers us is that it tells him how many fans they are and countries where they're from, but it doesn't tell him the names”, Hask stressed.

Osmani: The suspicious “media” with false news

Shkelzen Osmani, director of the platform for the fight against disinformation “Hibrid.info”, in a conversation with Radio Free Europe explains that most of the new accounts opened in the names of candidates for prime minister or groups that follow political parties, do not rarely share similar news with those that are official. On certain occasions, though, he feels that they also share false news.

The impact of these accounts and profiles on social networks, according to him, is great because they also publish sensationalizations and tenderistic titles, as bait to attract large numbers of readers.

Osmani says the other additional problem is to create accounts on social media networks of so-called suspicious “”, in platform form or as known in public, as portals.

So these suspicious media create accounts, share false news, with a tendency or with no tendency to damage the particular side. So most of them have only intended benefits through these distributions. There are, however, other media that convey political agendas, whether domestic political or foreign developments. We can say that some of them also convey diplomatic agendas of Kosovo's foreign political factors. But part of them are those that convey the political agenda of internal factors, mainly in the pre-election period”, Osmani said.

Hate Language and Effects Beyond Social Networks

Both social networking connoisseurs estimate that the publications made through accounts opened to candidates for prime minister of the country, political parties and successive groups, but even in so-called suspicious media, often contain hate speech.

This, according to Dardan Hask, can be an issue of confrontations even outside social networks.

“ply a post that encourages people to comment or to experience confrontations can give rise to various comments where people even crash. Then, from comments, I'm hinting that there may be cases of all of this going beyond social networks, in real life, beatings or threats. Now threats to social networking have become very normal. Every day, there are numerous cases that are reported and that occur. It's not that I have information about any statistics, but I'm pretty sure that many of these cases go through beatings and like”, Hask told Radio Free Europe.

However, given the anonymity in front of the public of those who manage certain accounts and questionable social media, according to Osman, the public can only speculate on who might be the promoters of hate-language debates.

I don't know if they can be politicians or someone who's acting in that direction, whether they're related to politics or someone else who makes it absolutely exclusively for material gain. However, it is a very important phenomenon to use hate speech between parties, among supporters of different parties. The competent organs should deal seriously with this phenomenon because it is a social phenomenon that is happening, not only in our country, but mainly in our country, with the aim of differences among political parties”, Osmani praised.

Government officials for cyber security have no access to the answers if they have initiated addressing concerns about hate speech on social networks and so-called suspicious media.

Early parliamentary elections in Kosovo will be held on February 14th.

As the Central Election Commission has said, political parties will have ten days available to campaign from 3 February to 12 February.

However, political parties have already unofficially launched their campaigns with gatherings with activists and their followers, while even in local media pre-election debates among representatives of political parties have already begun.