Presented on March 27 in Pristina under the Media Integrity and Disinformation Watch project, supported by the British Embassy in Kosovo, the conference brought together policymakers, media professionals and researchers to confront the scale and complexity of the issue.
At the centre of the event were two reports: Mapping Disinformation: Russian and Serbian Narratives in the Media and Social Networks in Kosovo and The Unstandardized Fight Against Disinformation: A Needs Analysis for Legal and Strategic Changes. Together, their key findings show that disinformation targeting Kosovo is not random, but structured, persistent, and strategically driven.
The Mapping Disinformation report finds that misleading narratives, largely originating from Russian and Serbian sources, are designed to exploit interethnic tensions, fuel insecurity and gradually undermine social cohesion. These narratives circulate across television, online media and platforms like Telegram, increasingly powered by artificial intelligence to scale their reach and adapt across languages. Global crises are routinely repurposed to reinforce false claims, while parts of the local media amplify the problem by republishing questionable sources. The influence landscape is also widening, with actors like China stepping in through Albanian-language content. All of this is compounded by structural weaknesses, limited transparency in media funding, weak editorial controls, and low institutional capacity, creating fertile ground for disinformation to spread.
The legal analysis shows that while Kosovo’s legislation was once aligned with EU standards, it has since fallen behind, particularly in regulating digital platforms and ensuring media accountability. The absence of a national strategy, combined with poor institutional coordination, has resulted in a reactive rather than preventive approach. Public officials and media professionals often lack the tools and clarity needed to respond effectively, while opaque media ownership and weak cooperation with global platforms further delay action against harmful content.
The reports were presented by Kreshnik Gashi, editor-in-chief at Kallxo.com and Visar Prebeza, editor at Krypomerti who emphasized the cyclical nature of disinformation. Gashi noted that much of the content reaching Kosovo audiences originates from Russian state-linked media, only to be republished or adapted locally. Prebeza added that the Kremlin maintains a steady interest in daily developments in Kosovo, consistently reframing them through a disinformation lens.
Labinot Leposhtica, Head of the Legal Office and Court Monitoring Coordinator at BIRN Kosovo, stressed that transparency in media ownership, financing, and advertising is critical to safeguarding the integrity of public information, warning that without it, accountability remains largely superficial.
Addressing the conference, British Ambassador Jonathan Hargreaves highlighted how disinformation is becoming increasingly difficult to detect, particularly with the rise of AI-generated content. He warned that such narratives deliberately target social cohesion, interethnic relations, trust in elections and the credibility of Kosovo’s still-consolidating institutions, slowly eroding stability through continuous and subtle pressure.
Albulena Haxhiu, Speaker of the Kosovo Parliament, said that in today’s fragmented and often unregulated media environment, disinformation is no longer accidental but carefully planned and strategically distributed across multiple channels, frequently without clear authorship or accountability. In such conditions, she noted, institutional responses remain scattered, uncoordinated, and ultimately insufficient.
This conference gathered representatives from Kosovo’s parliament, legal officers, representatives from security and justice institutions, media and civil society. In total, there were 54 participants, 27 women and 27 men.