North Macedonia

Open call for project applications

Reporting Diversity Network 2.0 have opened the call for project applications aiming to counter hate speech and improve representation of diversity. The call is opened as part of the Reporting Diversity Network 2.0 project and is established with the objective to effectively influence media representation of ethnicity, religion and gender in the Western Balkans. RDN …

Balkan Troll of the Year

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

HOMOPHOBIA AND SEXISM IN THE WESTERN BALKANS: December monthly monitoring highlight

Throughout the month of December, the RDN monitoring team has detected a range of hateful narratives and discourse. During this month there has been a rise in hate speech including homophobia, ethnic discrimination and sexism across the Western Balkan. Homophobia A member of the opposition PDP party in Republika Srpska, Ivan Begić, resigned following the …

There is no such thing as transgender ideology

Transgender people in Macedonia are effectively second-class citizens. The most important thing to remember is that transphobic narratives in North Macedonia are completely wrong. Inaccurate and transphobic narratives about trans people are spreading globally and locally in our country (these are people with different gender identity than the gender assigned to them at birth). The …

HATE SPEECH BASED ON ETHNICITY AND SEXISM IN THE WESTERN BALKANS: November onthly monitoring highlight

Throughout the month of November, the RDN monitoring team has detected a range of hateful narratives and discourse. During this month there has been a rise in hate speech including sensationalism, ethnic discrimination and sexism across the Western Balkans. Insensitive reporting in Albania Recently a headline emerged in Shiqiptarja.com reading “Horror in Fier/A 38-year-old kidnaps …

TROLL OF THE MONTH: Member of the Parliament of Montenegro, Slaven Radunović

Public Room: How the Macedonian Media Missed the Opportunity to Shed Light on Gender-based Violence

As the “Public Room” case remained unsolved for two years after its discovery, media coverage led the public in N. Macedonia to mistrust the country’s authorities. Gender-based violence is one of the several forms of violence where victims are often blamed. In other words, girls and women who are often the victims of gender-based violence …

THE PASSIVITY OF THE INSTITUTIONS TOWARDS THE (RESURRECTION OF) THE PUBLIC ROOMS

It looks like the Macedonian society as a whole has been turned into a large public room, into a voyeuristic chamber in which everyone caresses to peek into the intimacy of a stranger and to appropriate a part of the privacy of the other. This, coupled with the slow or non-existent reaction and the absence …