Troll of the Month: Dario Vraneš – President of the Municipality of Pljevlja

The Balkan Troll of the Month is an individual, a group of individuals or a media outlet that spreads hate based on gender, ethnicity, religion, or other diversity categories. The Balkan Troll is selected based on hate speech incidents identified across the Western Balkan region.da

On December 6, 2025, Milka Tadić Mijović, an investigative journalist and director of the Center for Investigative Journalism of Montenegro, an RDN partner organisation, was publicly attacked through offensive and sexist remarks made by Dario Vraneš, President of the Municipality of Pljevlja. Insults followed Tadić’s public criticism of the Chetnik ideology and nationalist narratives that Vraneš is widely associated with.

The Chetniks were a Yugoslav royalist and Serbian nationalist movement and guerrilla force in the Axis-occupied Yugoslavia who used terror tactics against Croats, the Muslim population of Bosnia and against Yugoslav Partisans. This year, RDN recorded several cases in Montenegro of harmful narratives based on historical revisionism, where religious figures and public officials used their authority to promote nationalist reinterpretations of history, including the glorification of WWII war criminals, as a means of political mobilisation, further fueling ethnic polarisation in the country.

As a result to Tadić’s reaction, Vraneš responded by publicly insulting her and calling her a witch and old hag leading to a strong reaction from civil society organisations, journalists, and politicians. All condemned the remarks as an unacceptable attempt to intimidate and discredit a woman for her outspoken opposition to extremist ideology. 

Despite Vraneš later issued a general apology, the incident reignited a broader debate on hate speech, misogyny, and accountability of public officials.

Ad hominem attacks on journalists refers to the personal attack against a journalist on a personal level to discredit and expose them, rather than addressing their reporting, evidence or argument. It involves the deliberate targeting of an individual. Most often, in the media sphere, we see ad hominem attacks on female journalists. According to a report by UN Women from this year looking at online violence against women human rights defenders, activists and journalists, it was found that “70% of surveyed women have experienced online violence in the course of their work”. For women journalists, online and offline abuse is deeply concerning. It has been shown that in the past five years alone, the link between online abuse and offline harm against women journalists has intensified significantly, with the proportion of those who associate offline attacks with online violence more than doubling from 20 per cent in 2020 to 42 per cent in 2025.

If we narrow down to the country context of Montenegro, according to the Safe Journalist Network, 32 attacks on women journalists have been reported in 4 years alone. Between 2021 and 2024, the Trade Union of Media of Montenegro (TUMM) recorded ‘32 incidents in which the victims were women journalists, including 11 attacks in 2024 alone’. The author of the research and TUMM Vice President, Marijana Camović-Veličković, noted that online harassment is the most common form of abuse faced by women journalists, with insult, death and rape threats frequently going unpunished.The need to address attacks on journalists is becoming increasingly urgent. As the online digital space continues to expand, attacks on journalists are growing, particularly in the form of sexist and offensive remarks that mainly target women. These attacks are not about challenging journalism but about silencing it. Journalists must be protected and allowed to carry out their work without fear of personal harassment or intimidation.