Conducted from 11 April to 11 May 2025, the monitoring covered the official campaign period, the electoral silence, and the days immediately after the vote. The research assessed the activity of over 500 Facebook and Instagram accounts of parliamentary candidates, third-party pages, and political advertisers across Meta and Google platforms. It relied on a multi-layered methodology combining social media analytics, Meta Ad Library tracking, Google Trends data, and manual review of campaign content.
The findings reveal a highly personalised and male-dominated digital campaign space, widespread infractions of the voluntary Code of Conduct on Digital Campaigns, and increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI), bots, and untraceable ads to shape public narratives. BIRN also documented 349 violations of the Code by registered candidates and identified 58 suspicious third-party pages — many of which used paid advertising and coordinated inauthentic behaviour to boost political messaging.
Published in both Albanian and English, the report offers data-driven insights and targeted recommendations for political actors, electoral authorities, online platforms, and civil society. It calls for stronger oversight mechanisms, improved ad transparency, and clear standards on AI-generated political content to safeguard democratic integrity in the digital age.
This monitoring was conducted as part of the regional project “Integrity and Trust in Albanian and Kosovo Elections: Fostering Political Finance Transparency and the Safe Use of Information and Communication Technologies, Phase II,” implemented by International IDEA and the Rule of Law Centre at the University of Helsinki.
Read the full report: