A network of fake accounts artificially created the impression of support for Milorad Dodik's party during the recent election campaign in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Will the same scenario be applied in Serbia to faking support for Aleksandar Vučić on social networks?
Citizens Of Bosnia and Herzegovina voted on October 4th elections which are presented as the most technically safe in its history. Thanks to fingerprint readers and optical scanners, manipulation of the vote count has become more difficult than ever before.
However, the campaign leading up to the vote had no such protection. The Balkan Media Freedom Initiative (BFMI), in cooperation with the Center for Media Forensics at Clemson University in South Carolina, produced the report "False Chorus", which documents a coordinated network of fake accounts.
During the campaign, that network artificially created the impression of support in Bosnia and Herzegovina Union of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) Milorad Dodika, the party that has dominated the political scene of Republika Srpska for the past two decades.
It included about twenty accounts on the X platform, organized into ten separate groups, as well as another 49 corresponding profiles on Facebook. The network was not large, but its effectiveness did not stem from its size, but from the choice of place of action.
Instead of building an audience from scratch, they "borrowed" it by massively flooding the comment sections of established media, including broadcasters found to have ties to the ruling structure. Thus, a handful of operators were able to make the support for the SNSD seem massive and spontaneous, simultaneously discrediting political opponents and the very institutions in charge of conducting the elections.
"This small, cross-platform network of coordinated, inauthentic accounts seemed very targeted," said Patrick Warren, co-director of the Center for Media Forensics. "For months, they have intervened in numerous discussions in local news in Bosnia, and especially in Republika Srpska, making positions and narratives favorable to the SNSD appear more widespread and prominent than would otherwise be the case."
Account groups were separated from each other, but mirrored to different platforms, so the loss of one account did not threaten the rest of the network. The lesson for anyone looking to detect these operations is an unpleasant one: there is no single pattern or "signature" to look out for. Networks are adapting to the political environment, media landscape and scrutiny they expect to face.
The elections in Serbia take place on October 25, and the parallels between the two cases are hard to ignore. Clear similarities with operations that were previously linked to the ruling party in Serbia were observed.
In February 2023, the company "Meta" removed more than 6.000 accounts on Facebook and Instagram associated with the so-called "internet team" Serbian Progressive Party, which was stated to have been used to create an "impression of broad and authentic citizen support" for the President of Serbia Aleksandar Vučić and his party.
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Although BiH and Serbia have the status of candidate countries for membership in the European Union, and receive significant financial resources from the EU, nevertheless, in both countries the promise of accession has largely lost its appeal in the eyes of the public. Other narratives freely penetrate into that space, which are partly spread by the very networks whose activities are documented in the "False Chorus" report.
The regulatory framework further complicates the problem. As candidate countries, neither BiH nor Serbia fall under the provisions of the Law on Digital Services. No national authority in those countries has the authority to hold platforms accountable for systemic risks to the electoral process.
Neither X nor Meta have publicly reported on taking measures against coordinated inauthentic behavior related to the elections in BiH. On the other hand, in Bulgaria, Tiktok shut down 34 accounts after our tracking system flagged them as questionable.
The question now is whether Meta and X will react before Serbia goes to the polls, or whether the gap between documented evidence and platform reaction will once again prove to be a defining feature of the campaign.
Techniques that are perfected today in Banja Luka and Belgrade are not limited only to the Balkans. They spread, adapt and reappear, so it would be useful for Europe to study them while they are still small enough to be clearly seen.
"The elections in Bosnia must not be treated as a marginal event," said Antoineta Nikolova, director of the BFMI organization. "What is happening in the Western Balkans represents an early warning for Europe, and given that the elections in Serbia are held in less than three weeks, it is necessary that EU platforms and institutions immediately pay attention to that situation."
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