"If you ever see me giving an interview to a television station, know that I've sold myself", the influencer Bogdan Ilić, better known as Granny Pig. And then on Monday, February 23, he appeared on Telcast, the podcast of Minja Miletić, the director of Juronjuz, which in the last year has become a par excellence of pro-regime television, proving to be more loyal than many of the louder and more tabloid ones. Namely, Juronujz fired people who were not "on the line". Before that, a certain Bogdan appeared for the first time in the history of the Serbian President's Tiktok Live Aleksandar Vučić.
photo: dejan dimic...
If there was ever an illusion that influencers can and should remain "out of politics", it was finally shattered in Serbia the moment a canopy fell in Novi Sad, killing sixteen people. And many really decided then to risk the sponsorships they live on and to express their position not only on corruption but also on student blockades. But not the greatest among them, Granny Pig, the man who had a YouTube channel with two million followers (so he is permanently removed from this platform); still has 1.700.000 followers on Instagram and 828.600 followers on Tiktok. All this makes him the most followed influencer in the Balkans. But, even though the word "influence" is literally "influence", Bogdan Ilic can hardly be said to be the most influential because his audience is mostly aged between 10 and 14.
The news that Bogdan Ilić is announcing his presidential candidacy, although he later decided to be the mayor, was all the more surprising. At first glance, it seems that this is another circus performer who would do anything for a bit of attention. However, right between his guest appearance at Vučić's and the interview with Minja Miletić, Ilić's 500.000 euro car was set on fire (which was not insured, which speaks volumes about the false brilliance of the Serbian influencer scene).
Without intending to make insinuations, experience teaches that in Serbia cars don't just burn like that, and that there is probably some secret connection between the burning of the car and the association with the Serbian Progressive Party. And although this thirty-year-old who - as we saw with Minja Miletić - still thinks he is young, declares himself to be apolitical, this is not his first outing: he also had his moments with Leviathan when in October 2019 he was hosted on the YouTube channel by the founders of this movement, Pavle Bihali and Aleksandar Buhanac. And why? To defend it from foreign powers, specifically, from the German Deutsche Welle Academy. But more will be said about that later.
WHO IS BOGDAN ILIĆ?
Baka Prase was born in 1996 in Belgrade. He graduated from high school of music, and then tried to enter the music academy, majoring in piano, but, by his own admission, he was the worst in his generation at the entrance exam. In the middle of the last decade, he became active in the gaming community, and then he started a trend in Serbia that was already widespread in the world: he films himself playing a video game.
Elem, he started with gaming content, but quickly turned to vlogs, challenges, "reactions" and live streams, formats that allowed him direct and unfiltered contact with the audience. It is precisely because of the "reactions" that he becomes the most popular and notorious domestic YouTuber. From the first day, Ilic took good care of who could threaten him on the throne and filmed mocking reactions to other people's videos, targeting them, insulting without a filter and commanding his followers to harass his current target in the comments.
Some of his most famous victims are the popular YouTuber Jaserštejn, a guy who developed a huge platform by being the complete opposite of Grandma Praset, Vojaž, who we know today as a famous musician and opponent of the regime, but also Kristina Đukić Kika, a gamer who committed suicide in 2021. Then many people remembered how Granny Pig terrorized her, and tried to push the thesis that he was directly responsible for her death. The thesis is very far-fetched and it is shameless to accuse anyone, including Baku Praset, of being the cause of someone's suicide, but the fact is that part of the public still remembers him for that.
Ilić went from scandal to scandal, as it were, he deliberately created them. In the middle of 2018, he clashed with the entire Serbian YouTube scene, because in cooperation with the Deutsche Welle Academy (DVA), a group of YouTube creators produced a song Clickbait, which indicated negative phenomena on this platform. Ilić shouted, unaware that his time was yet to come. A year later, DVA collaborates again with the Serbian YouTube scene to create a song Drama, criticism of both real and fake fights on the Internet, the purpose of which is for the parties in the conflict to "ram" each other's reviews, and therefore earnings.
Then Ilić bursts at the seams: Drama becomes popular among his target group. Even though he was not mentioned anywhere, he felt called out and then embarked on a fierce offensive to "unmask" the participants in this project. It is about something that still exists: since 2017, the Deutsche Welle Academy in Serbia has had a "Youth and Media" project, in which young journalists, content creators, influencers and youth media participate. To tell the truth, at one point he, as the "greatest", was invited to participate, but he never answered the invitations. However, he did publish personal information, as well as the phone numbers of the people running the project, which leads to a bizarre and funny interaction between DVA and the Serbian MUP. Then Ilić records the famous live with Leviathan, in which it looks as if he was kidnapped (maybe he was), and for an hour and a half the threats of two people with a violent past and thick records, who, according to Bihali himself, are kept in a drawer so that the authorities can keep them in their hands. But in order to have a complete picture of him and the whole mess, we have to go back a month earlier from October 2019: to April of the same year.
A SERVICE VISITED HIM
In April 2019, the "One in five million" protests were in full swing. The opposition, then united in the Alliance for Serbia, organizes a large rally in front of the House of the National Assembly. The speakers line up, and at one point the presenter announces Anastasija-Vesna Ilić, who is to read a letter from her husband, priest Nenad Ilić, who is currently serving in Germany. However, the presenter adds that it is about the mother of our famous YouTuber Baka Praset. Ilić remains mute and indifferent to this, and his content is still conspicuously aggressive and offensive.
Honestly, for what Bogdan Ilić is like as a public figure, it is absolutely irrelevant who his parents are. Even today, Nenad Ilić is on the side of the rebellious citizens and his support seems unquestionable and pure as a tear. Something else is important: right at the time of these protests, Leviathan is running through Serbia, but not only them, but also the Detective and Security Agency DBA connected to them, a strange organization whose work stopped when they realized that following and filming people (they were catching adulterers) could be classified as persecution.
But those strange DBA people were carrying with them some kind of identification that irresistibly resembled the badges of policemen from American movies. At that time, this journalist is engaged in media literacy training for high school students, some of whom are influencers. Then a rumor spread in those circles that "DB visited Baku", that he was told "not to mention politics, otherwise, the channel will go away". An adult must ask himself how and why teenagers speak DB and not BIA. If we connect the dots, but we have no evidence, only an assumption remains: Bogdan Ilić was caught by the team Levijatan-Miša Vacić-DBA. Allegedly.
His style - loud confidence, swearing, irony and a "no hair on the tongue" approach - divided the public, but it was precisely this polarization that became the engine of growth. Granny Pig was one of the first to understand the power of continuity, conflict and virality in the algorithmic economy of attention.
SCANDAL BELOW
In July 2020, a series of allegations surfaced against Baka Praset regarding his relationships with persons who the public claimed were minors. Ilić himself responded to the accusations by explaining how he had sexual relations with a person who told him she was 18 years old, and who turned out to be a minor. He defended himself that "he cannot ask anyone for an identity card". There is nothing illegal in all of this, but some of the sponsors stopped working with him after the affair broke out.
In one of the most bizarre domestic internet dramas from 2022, Baka Prase and Željko Mitrović got into an open, public and very sharp conflict that attracted a lot of media and public attention. It all started when Baka Prase stated in a live that Mitrović owed him money and mentioned him by name with insults, criticizing his business and stating that he "stole his idea for influencer television" (RED TV). While the accusations in the mutual public showdown have grown to grotesque levels, with allegations of rape, criminal connections and investigations, none of this has resulted in any criminal charges, investigations or, God forbid, convictions. The only thing that happened was Mitrović's "documentary" about Grandma Praset.
Finally, in 2022, YouTube shuts down not one, but all of Grandma Pig's channels, with a permanent ban on creating new ones. Shutting down, or permanently removing the Baka Praseta channel, was not a sudden act or the result of a specific scandal, but the result of a long-term process in which violations of the platform's rules accumulated over the years. Over the years, his channel has been demonetized, reprimanded, and temporarily restricted multiple times. Instead of adapting, Ilić often used those punishments as inspiration for additional content, presenting himself as someone who is "suffocated by the system", thereby further fueling the conflict with the platform.
Particularly problematic for YouTube was that most of the contentious situations occurred in live streams, where content control is weaker and the risk is higher. YouTube is particularly sensitive in such cases when the channel has a large reach, because the reputational damage comes not only from the content itself, but also from the message that such behavior is tolerated by the most visible creators.
AND THEN HE WENT TO THE BETTING ROOM
Ilić was thus left without a basic source of income. Today, he is most active on Tiktok, which has much more flexible rules of use, so he advertises bookmakers, that is, he gambles and broadcasts it live. He even suggested to Vučić that they put the entire budget of Serbia "in the red" and try to double it. But, as Minja Miletić said, he says all the time "don't gamble, don't be like me". And why did he decide to advertise betting shops? "Because all the sponsors freaked me out," said Ilic, who understands that 250.000 euros per month is a normal salary and adds that one night he lost 200.000 euros gambling. Allegedly.
Now, where did such and such come from with Vučić on Tiktok? Media theory says that in the digital age, politics no longer needs to speak in order to act, but it is enough to appear. The appearance of the president of the country in a format that is dominantly consumed by teenagers, on a platform like Tiktok, alongside one of their most popular "idols", is not accidental, but it is meaningless. The intention of whoever came up with it was to send a message that the government is "close", "normal", "part of the team", and that political power is compatible with entertainment. And Baka Prase persistently insists that he is an "entertainment program" and that everything he does, he does in order to have content for social networks, and so is this with Vučić. He is, he says, just an influencer, an entertainer, someone who "talks to everyone". This "defense" only works if we ignore that visibility is power. When someone with a reach of millions legitimizes a political figure by his very presence, it is not neutrality but participation.
EVERYTHING IS AS IT SHOULD BE
There is no room for panic, because even if she is running for something, Baka Prase cannot be the new Beli Preletacevic, since she is not new to the media scene. And even those who would vote for him do not have the right to vote and will not have it for a few more years. Bringing Grandma Pig live on Tiktok says more about Vučić and the team around him. Poor people, they really thought that they would attract young voters. It is the move of the desperate, because young people are on the street, their heads are smashed, they are dragged around in the dark, while children even in kindergartens say: "When I grow up, I will be a student". Vučić lost the youth of this country forever and will never be able to get it back. There is no Granny Pig who can help.
In the end, everything is as it should be, the two are the same: they have a god complex, a vanity bigger than the universe and an insatiable hunger for money and followers. And in the whole combination, only Bogdan Ilić is naive because he thinks that he can outwit the other one, as he once did with his fellow influencers. That occupation is new, and politics is a much older game.
