Dragana Obradovic, Director of BIRN Serbia and Hamdi Firat Buyuk, an editor with BIRN’s flagship publication in English, Balkan Insight, attended the Media Freedom Rapid Response, MFRR Summit 2025 in Brussels on October 13.
Obradovic told a panel entitled “Spoofing, Surveillance, Spyware. Journalists against Digital Threats” about BIRN’s own experience of digital threats. “We have seen it all. We have decided to fight back. We decided not to be victims,” Obradovic said.
She underlined that digital autocracy came to Serbia some 10 years ago. “Digital tech, including spyware, were misused in Serbia, including those that were bought by the government or bought by international donations,” Obradovic said.
She said the digital threats had escalated since 2023, “when Serbia entered a political crisis, and even more in the last year, when major public demonstrations started all over the country.
“Most of the targeted people are students, journalists and activists. Journalists are not the only target, but journalists are more resilient because they are more prepared, and citizens and activists are more prone to digital threats,” she added, recalling BIRN’s programme and projects on digital rights.
“[At BIRN], we followed digital rights violations very closely with monitoring tools, as well as public procurement monitoring,” she said.
Another speaker from BIRN, Buyuk, presented the grim media situation in Turkey.
“Attacks on journalists come with an advance tactic that includes multiple tools, including arrests, judicial harassment, access blocks and digital violence” Buyuk told a panel entitled “Unsafe to Report. Why Journalists Keep Looking Over Their Shoulders”.
Buyuk underlined that the online attacks in Turkey against journalists are unprecedented.
“More than a million online content items were blocked in Turkey in 2024. This includes 5,740 that were news content or media houses’ websites. Big tech companies increasingly yield to the demands of the Turkish government, eyeing profit rather than press freedom and freedom of speech,” Buyuk said.
The Media Freedom Rapid Response, MFRR, is a Europe-wide mechanism, which tracks, monitors and reacts to violations of press and media freedom in EU Member States and Candidate Countries.
The MFRR Summit 2025 brings together journalists, policymakers, and civil society to address the urgent challenges facing press freedom in Europe.
This year’s summit feeds into EU Democracy Shield policy discussions, and highlights journalism as vital democratic infrastructure.