MONITORING REPORT ON HATE SPEECH IN SERBIA 2025

This report presents the findings of media monitoring of hateful and discriminatory discourse (HDD) in Serbia from January 2024 to July 2025, highlighting the most common narratives and ways they operate, main sources of harmful content and main targeted groups. It also explores responses of institutions and civil society, as well as preventive measures taken to strengthen resilience to hate speech.

What truly shaped this monitoring period was the growing political crisis that hit Serbia in the aftermath of the Novi Sad railway station canopy collapse on November 1st, 2024, that left 16 dead, and one severely injured.

Throughout the year and a half of monitoring, a total of 102 cases of hate speech were recorded. In this period, a significant shift is noticeable in how HDD operates and how it’s used. We have seen a growing trend of hateful and harmful speech becoming more complex and layered, as cases intersectional in nature (42.2%) are prevalent for the first time since RDN started monitoring. Here, groups and individuals were targeted for multiple overlapping identities.

Gender remains the primary targeted identity (19.6%) when it comes to individual categories. However, ethnicity (9.8%), which was the second most targeted identity in previous monitoring periods, now takes third place, while sexual minorities (4.9%) move down to the fourth most targeted category.

Certainly, the most significant shift in this period is seen in politically motivated targeting (18.6%) due to the deepening political crisis and growing suppression of media freedom in Serbia, especially since November 2024, marked by the Novi Sad train station canopy collapse, leaving 16 dead, and leading to the formation of the biggest student-led movement the country has seen this century.

Media outlets and media professionals remain the main source of hateful and harmful speech in Serbia (41.5%), surpassing politicians, state officials, and political parties (21.5%). These two categories were tied in the previous monitoring periods, each making about a third of recorded cases. However, it is important to note that both media and political figures often overlap as sources of HDD. Media reports hateful and harmful messages made by politicians, often public officials, failing to provide context and even amplifying their messages by providing media space.

Out of the 102 recorded cases, 40 had at least some elements of gender-based hate. As sexist and misogynist narratives remain prevalent in the Serbian public sphere, RDN monitoring focused on the most common and visible cases. Harmful reporting on gender-based violence, especially femicide, but also victim-blaming narratives against women who went through obstetric violence and image-based sexual abuse, remains dominant.

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