North Macedonia Archives

Turning data into stories – Digital Rights and Freedoms at the Crossroads in the Western Balkans and Turkey

From November 24 to 26, 2025, BIRN welcomed some 120 participants – journalists, civil society activists, tech experts, academia, relevant institutions’ representatives and citizens at large – in Prishtina (Kosovo) for a regional annual conference and the Internet Freedom Meet event on digital rights and freedoms.

What unfolded was more than a presentation of cold statistical data. We witnessed a collective reckoning with how rapidly emerging technologies are advancing, and with how weak oversight and shrinking civic spaces are reshaping – and often endangering – people’s everyday lives across the Western Balkans and beyond.

From Project Roots to Regional Reality

The third and final annual conference is built on BIRN’s three-years project, Reporting Digital Rights and Freedoms, funded by the European Union and implemented by BIRN Kosovo and its regional partners BIRN Hub, BIRN Albania, BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina, BIRN Macedonia, BIRN Montenegro and BIRN Serbia in the Western Balkans region and Turkey. The project aimed at strengthening media and civil society capacity to document and report digital rights and freedoms violations. Through training, capacity building online and offline events, fellowships, subgranting as well as editorial and other technical support, the project equipped newsrooms and individuals, journalists and activists with tools to first and foremost understand and then monitor and report about issues such as online abuse, to challenge disinformation, and bring somewhat hidden digital violations into public debate and for institutional reaction.

BIRN Kosovo director Jeta Xharra opened the conference and noted that there was very little knowledge about digital rights and that the project has contributed to educating both journalists to report on and the public to understand digital rights.

In a high-level speech, Kosovo’s President, Vjosa Osmani, sent a strong message of support towards the internet as a free space, and on the importance of exposing tech-facilitated abuse, be it online manipulation, promotion of hatred, violence against women or harassment of children.

The Deputy Head of the EU Office in Kosovo, Eva Palatova, emphasised the EU’s commitment to a human-centric digital environment, noting recent key policy instruments, the Digital Services Act, the AI Act and the European Democracy Shield, aimed at protecting users.

The work done throughout the project pointed to the importance of addressing internet governance-related topics systematically. The latest BIRN regional report, launched at the opening of the conference, documented 1,440 violations from September 2024 to August 2025. Over the three years of the project, based on BIRN’s monitoring methodology, we captured over 4,000 cases of digital rights and violations mapped.

From September 2024 to August 2025, the most frequent types of trending violations include misuse of artificial intelligence (AI) to facilitate sexual, gender-based violence and fraud, threats to the freedom and pluralism of information, attacks on digital assets and economic rights and harmful and threatening online behaviour.

The conference was attended by around 120 participants including 30 Internet Freedom Meet fellows from the Western Balkans region selected following a public call for participation.

Throughout the three-day event, the fellows played a dual role. They followed conference panels on the main stage, bringing sharp questions and contextual knowledge; and in parallel, they immersed themselves in dedicated workshops with international trainers, diving deeper into some of the most urgent challenges shaping the digital landscape.

In these workshops, fellows confronted real-world dilemmas: how to investigate online harassment while keeping victims safe; how to trace disinformation networks across borders; how AI-generated deepfakes and algorithmic bias threaten vulnerable groups; and how online/street surveillance erodes civic freedom. Fellows additionally enriched the discussion with local knowledge and lived experiences.

Humans Behind the Numbers

The conference focused heavily on the human impact behind the numbers – giving a platform to stories of and about real people – journalists, activists, citizens’ – whose lives were impacted and shaken by digital abuse, such as threats, surveillance or disinformation.

Participants heard worrying testimonies: journalists recounting smear online campaigns after exposing corruption, activists exposed to harassment and doxxing following their online advocacy, and citizens becoming victims of AI-driven scams, identity theft or deepface-based abuse.

Speakers emphasized a critical truth: digital rights violations are rarely isolated incidents. They are more often than not entwined with inequalities – especially in terms of gender, LGBTIQ+ persons, minorities, people with disabilities and other vulnerable groups. As Albanian technology policy expert Alba Brojka noted on the panel about gender-based violence, “It is a mirror of what is happening in the society and is amplified online.”

New Technologies, Same and Worse Dangers

Emerging technologies, such as generative Artificial Intelligence, are accelerating threats, while legislation and institutional oversight – and to a valuable extent also the media and civil society pace of understanding technological changes – lag dangerously behind.

Experts on the panels warned of AI-facilitated fraud, voice-cloning scams, deepfakes and more – noting that they are all increasingly used to exploit individuals’ vulnerabilities, especially women, young people and children. We heard how deepfakes have become so realistic that more and more people, especially with the information overload, cannot differentiate between real news, manipulated content or disinformation – which directly leads to undermining public trust and discourse influencing democratic and public informed participation.

Panelists looked into [weak] legal frameworks and selective enforcement, which make digital space a fertile ground for censorship, repression, threats and surveillance. We heard from several speakers sharing stories from Serbia or Turkey of unlawful surveillance, spyware deployment and non-transparent use of digital technologies and tools to intimidate critical voices of activists, journalists or even whistleblowers. While on one side, we see an “implementation gap” of those appropriate laws that exist, on the other side, in many places, we encounter outdated institutional settings, limited resources or political pressure, which stays unbothered while critical voices under attack stay unprotected and often with severe online or offline consequences.

Digital Rights are Human Rights – Not Optional Extras

One underlying message seconded by all participants – and participation was truly multistakeholder – is that digital rights are human rights, and are not marginal issues for tech-savvy urbanities but fundamental rights, deeply tied to dignity, security and democratic participation. Beyond the number of captured digital rights violations, those numbers represent people. At least one person per case. At least one more friend or family member was affected by it. And often entire communities.

Numbers cannot tell the whole story. Data reveals patterns to which the BIRN team, together with our partners, fellows, subgrantees, gave context. Living in the online space is not abstract – it shapes people’s safety, identity and freedom. Every violation is a life interrupted, a voice shaken, a right diminished. By documenting abuses, amplifying testimonies and exposing the systems that allow them to keep happening, the project brought human stories back to the centre.

From Talk to Action: What Needs to Happen Now

By the end of the conference, participants agreed on several urgent and concrete steps for the region:

Update and enforce legislation regionally, looking into good practice, to keep pace with technological change: laws should address AI-driven abuse, data protection, online harassment and digital surveillance
Support for victims/survivors, ensuring accessible reporting mechanisms, provide legal, psychological and social support, including protecting anonymity whenever needed
Empower independent media and civil society, including sustained grants, training and mentorship, so that civil society and journalists (media) can continue documenting abuses safely and effectively
Promote digital literacy and public awareness, as a necessary continued effort to educate citizens at large about ever-evolving online risks and understanding their rights
Fostering regional cooperation, as digital threats do not respect borders – cooperation among media, civil society, institutions, technical community and academia across countries is essential.

Why This Matters and Appreciation Words

For many years we have lived in a world where technology evolves fast – outpacing our social, legal and institutional capacity to adapt. As the closing conference in Prishtina underscored, these are not abstract policy questions. They are about people’s lives, freedom, trust, safety and dignity. They are about our future.

By bringing together journalists, experts from different fields and policymakers, over the three-year project we jointly took responsibility for protecting digital rights not as a niche project but as a core human-rights obligation that shapes people’s realities in the digital age. The Reporting Digital Rights and Freedoms initiative proved that when knowledge, evidence and human stories are brought together, digital rights can no longer be dismissed as technical issues “in the cloud”. They become what they truly are – essential rights that protect the very fabric of democratic society.

BIRN Kosovo wishes to extend its gratitude to project partners, coordinators, editors, monitors, journalists, researchers and authors, subgrantees, fellows, participants of physical and online training and community meetings, and the colleagues and individuals who contributed to the project’s delivery and success.

The Annual conference and Internet Freedom Meet were organised within the framework of the Reporting Digital Rights and Freedoms project, implemented by BIRN Kosovo and supported by the European Union.

BIRN Macedonia Holds Third Training for Young Journalists

Twelve young journalists participated in the third training of the 2024-2025 series of investigative journalism training courses.

The three-day course was held on February 21 to 23 in Shtip, North Macedonia.

In the previous training, in November 2024, the BIRN team guided the young journalists on finding and developing story ideas through checking public records, formulating access to information requests and identifying sources.

During the past three months, the participants made progress in researching and gathering information about the story ideas agreed in November.

The focus of the third training was improving journalists’ skills in storytelling and preparing them for the final presentations of their stories, expected in the coming period.

The participants learned from the BIRN team how to develop a good story lead that grabs the attention of the audience and how to build the structure of a story from the beginning to the end, inserting different types of information in each section of the structure.

The young journalists practised their newly developed skills directly on the stories they are working on as a part of the 2024-2025 training courses.

The importance of field research was highlighted during the training. As most of the participants have already done some field work on their stories, in the training session they had the opportunity to practice how to better describe what they’ve seen and experienced in the field, how to filter important from unimportant field information, how to pay attention to details and how to observe not only what’s there but also what’s missing.

The complexity of describing big data and providing context was also addressed during the training. Participants were shown examples of how to use analogies in presenting big numbers to make them more comprehensible for the audience, as well as how to use charts and graphs to better present complex data.

Developing specific writing techniques was also a part of the training, with participants having the opportunity to learn and practice how to best structure their sentences to make them easy to read.

BIRN Macedonia Presents Findings on Digital Rights Violations

On December 23, BIRN Macedonia’s team met with experts and government representatives to discuss digital rights in the country.

At the consultative meeting, BIRN’s senior journalist, Goce Trpkovski, presented recommendations based on findings from a two-year monitoring period.

Trpkovski showcased the most significant violations of digital rights and the patterns that have emerged, noting that BIRN recorded 501 violations from 2022 until the end of 2024, including hate speech, crypto currency scams and misuse of AI to create fake sexual content of girls.

Trpkovski presented BIRN’s recommendations for improving the digital rights situation in three categories: urgent, medium-term and long-term recommendations.

BIRN received feedback from a number of experts from the non-governmental sector, including the Research Institute RESIS, Internet Governance Forum, Media Development Center, Helsinki Committee of Human Rights, Metamorphosis foundation, as well as from the Personal Data Protection Agency, the sector for cybercrime within the police.

BIRN Macedonia Holds the Second Training for Young Journalists

BIRN Macedonia held the second training in the 2024-2025 year-long series of investigative journalism training courses.

Thirteen young journalists participated in a three-day course from November 22 to 24 in Veles, North Macedonia.

BIRN journalists guided the participants on where and how to find story ideas, shared how big stories can be uncovered from simple checks of publicly available records, how to develop the idea into a reporting plan, where to look for data, as well as how to identify sources.

In a newsroom editorial meeting simulation, the participants divided into teams were given the opportunity to pitch stories. BIRN journalists, together with the participants, discussed the proposed topics, assessed their viability and gave advice about how the stories could be produced. As a result, five stories were selected that will be produced in the upcoming months. BIRN’s senior journalists will provide mentoring support.

During the training, the participants were shown how to look for and obtain data in a dozen open-source databases that BIRN’s journalists regularly use to research and write their stories. With the mentors’ guidance, the participants applied these database searches to their chosen topics. The participants were also given an interview simulation with various sources relevant to their stories.

The young journalists will work on their stories under senior journalists’ mentorship until February 2025, when the next training will be organized.

BIRN Macedonia Starts Second Year of Investigative Journalism Training Program

BIRN Macedonia started a series of trainings for 14 young journalists with a three-day course on October 4-6 in Dojran, North Macedonia.

The course was the first in a series of five training modules that will take place over the next year. The next courses will be held in November, February and April and will end with a summer school in mid-2025 where the journalists attending can acquire skills and techniques that will prepare them for work in journalism. The programme also includes mentoring support.

The first training consisted of a mix of theoretical lectures and practical exercises. The idea was to introduce the participants to important journalistic concepts, while allowing them to apply that knowledge in a practical way.

The first session focused on understanding investigative journalism, the concept of public interest, and the key ethical values of the profession. Through discussions and interactive activities, guided by experienced BIRN editors and journalists, participants in teams went through the initial stages of the investigative process – learning how to find stories, define a story pitch and where and how to identify credible sources and documents.

Young journalists showed great interest throughout the training and actively applied what they learned in practical exercises. Between now and June 2025, they will attend four additional training sessions covering different aspects of investigative journalism.

BIRN Macedonia Holds Fourth Training for Young Journalists

The fourth in a year-long series of training courses for a dozen young journalists took place from April 12-14 in Strumica, North Macedonia.

A new round of training sessions on investigative journalism basics was held in Strumica, North Macedonia, with a focus on writing and storytelling.

The course titled “Weaving a Story” began with the young journalists’ reflections on the stories they’d worked on over the last two months with their BIRN Macedonia mentors.

They presented how their stories advanced and discussed their experiences in contacting sources, communication with state and local institutions, data selection, as well as difficulties encountered while working on the stories.

The day continued with sessions on the importance of observation and on how to make use of photos and videos, including basic editing tips and tricks.

On the second day, participants put into practice what they learned the previous day during a visit to the Smolare waterfalls, where they were tasked to write an intro for a feature story and put together a short video. These texts and videos were later presented and jointly discussed with BIRN’s mentors, who gave constructive feedback.

The final day was dedicated to sessions about storytelling where participants were presented with different case studies to illustrate the various ways and approaches they can use to “hook” audiences to their stories.

They were also given a puzzle exercise: they got nine paragraphs of a BIRN article, without the lead, that they had to rearrange logically and write their own lead.

The final event part of the year-long training series for investigative journalism will take place in June.

BIRN Macedonia Holds Third Training for Young Journalists

The third in a year-long series of training courses for a dozen young journalists took place from February 23-25 in Berovo, North Macedonia.

Building on the previous training sessions, the third course, which took place in Berovo, aimed to help a dozen young journalists begin work on stories that will be published by BIRN Macedonia’s publication, Prizma.

During the three-day course, BIRN journalists explained to the participants where and how to find stories, how big stories can be uncovered from simple checks, how to develop a story idea into a reporting plan, where to look for data and how to identify sources.

In a simulation of a newsroom editorial meeting, trainees pitched stories in teams and were assigned senior journalists as mentors to develop stories. Together with the participants, BIRN’s team discussed the topics, assessed their viability and gave advice about how the stories could be executed. Five topics were chosen as a result of the stories that were pitched.

During the training, the participants were shown how to look for and obtain data in dozen different open-source databases that BIRN’s journalists regularly use in researching and writing their own stories. With the mentors’ guidance, the participants then applied these databases to their chosen topics.

The participants were also given an interview simulation, as well as a presentation on storytelling.

By the end of the training course, each team presented the work they had done on their stories together with their mentors over the course of the weekend and gave an estimated timeline by which they would be finished. The stories should be published in the coming months.

Meet the People Behind BIRN: Tamara Chausidis

Each month, BIRN introduces you to a different member of its team. For February, meet Tamara Chausidis, editor-in-chief of BIRN’s publication Prizma.

Tamara Chausidis, 57, comes from North Macedonia, and has been editor-in-chief of BIRN’s publication Prizma since 2014. She studied philosophy but journalism won her heart.

She participated in the founding of the Independent Union of Journalists of North Macedonia and was the chairperson for a long time, and a strong advocate for journalists’ rights and freedom of expression.

What do you like the most in your work?

“On our local media scene Prizma is seen a symbol of free and credible journalism. Therefore it is very important to me that I’m a leading part of it.

But most of all I’m happy that I share the same values and the same ambitions with literally everyone in our team in Skopje, regardless of their position or role in Prizma. There’s good synergy between us, good teamwork, and a friendly and supportive atmosphere in the office.”

Tamara and her team published “Media Uncovered” a long-term project which collected, filtered and presented data on the media scene, which is publicly available, but rarely gets in the spotlight and is therefore often forgotten or ignored.

What is ‘Media Uncovered’?

“Media Uncovered is a database portraying all relevant media in the country – television, radio, newspapers and online media outlets. In addition to basic data like dates of establishment, ownership, teams, contact details, it reveals the ‘character’ of every media outlet, by describing its role in the media scene and by pointing out events or developments inside it, and its relations with other stakeholders in politics, business and society.”

Why did Prizma publish ‘Media Uncovered’? What impact did you wish to make?

“BIRN and Prizma have been pioneers in producing complex databases on different topics, from the cost of the ‘Skopje 2014’ project to foreign investments, or municipal elections. Given the declining trust of the public in media and the noise created by thousands of sources online that make it hard to distinguish facts from falsehoods, we wanted to create a credible source of information where people could see who they are getting their news from.

The media influence various decisions impacting the individual and the entire society, so we thought it important to reveal whose interests might be lying behind the news and stories that are published daily. This is why we put the media ‘under the spotlight’.

We believe that issues of direct or covert influence, the integrity and independence of editorial policy, as well as funding, are important topics. It is necessary to research and discuss the responsibility of those who have power to influence and shape public opinion, because with that privilege comes responsibility.”

How many people have worked for this project and for how long? Was it easy?

“Working on this database was not an easy task. We worked together for months with my colleagues Ana Petrusheva, Goce Trpkovski, Vlado Apostolov and Vasko Magleshov. It was not the research and the verification of data that we found most difficult but the resistance of some colleagues and people in the industry. Raising issues about the media – who they are, what they do, who is behind them, is often seen as an act of provocation, as opening up a conflict, as media usually tend not to report on the media industry.

We don’t really understand those reactions. Those with power to put others in the spotlight shouldn’t mind when that same spotlight is put on them.

However, it turned out that the media moguls that have obtained the right to call others to account are not very comfortable with being held accountable. Media freedom is too often understood as ‘the freedom for the fox in the coop’, which we found disappointing.

The database reveals an open secret that we have had for a long time in our country – that media owners have for a long time enjoyed the comfortable status of never coming under critical scrutiny. This status even politicians can envy. We revealed also that we have media with problematic ownerships, with off-shore companies behind them, who go in and out of politics, or who were appointed directors of public enterprises.”

Do you believe the media can regain public trust?

This is a very important question that every media outlet must answer for itself. This is the question on which their survival depends. Unfortunately, I have the impression that only a few of them understand the urgency and importance of restoring and maintaining the trust of the audience.

How can journalists gain readers’ trust?

By being professional, no other way