Trending: Serbia’s real life ‘bots’
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 7 February 2024
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Over the summer, a mysterious Twitter persona published details of over 14,500 social media accounts - all of them controlled by real-life Serbian citizens, it's claimed. They stand accused of posting… whatever the President’s party tells them to.
It’s long been rumoured that Serbia’s ruling SNS party commands the online activity of a small army of citizens, dubbed ‘bots’ by the opposition. But this kind of list, naming and shaming thousands of ordinary Serbians, is unprecedented.
If true, their activity represents a form of political corruption according to Serbia’s public prosecutor. The government’s response has alarmed observers - it shrugged off the story, publishing instead a veiled tongue-in-cheek ‘admission’.
But who is behind the list, and can it be trusted? BBC Trending has analysed the data in an attempt to establish if the ‘bots’ are indeed real people. And whether their accounts show evidence of co-ordinated activity.
Featuring interviews gathered on the ground in Belgrade, we hear from opposition politicians, pro-democracy activists and a self-professed real-life ‘bot’. She tells us she trolled the President’s opponents under threat of losing her job – as a receptionist at a state-controlled electricity company in a small Serbian town.
Reporter: Sam Judah
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In 1969, a plan to show support for an anti-racism protest turned the lives of 14 promising |
| 0:07.0 | black student athletes upside down. |
| 0:09.8 | Amazing sport stories from the BBC World Service tells their story. |
| 0:14.0 | Search for Amazing Sports Stories, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. We're in Serbia driving south from Belgrade. |
| 0:34.0 | Peeling off the motorway, we wind our way into the mountain town of Sir Delitsa. So this is the town centre? |
| 0:47.0 | Yes. You can see the cars are older and rustier compared to Belgrade especially. |
| 0:57.0 | That's Grutza from the BBC Serbian Bureau. We're working on this story together. |
| 1:04.0 | Across the snow we trudge towards a block of grey flats where someone is waiting for us. |
| 1:09.0 | Hi, I'm Sam. |
| 1:12.0 | Yawana. |
| 1:13.0 | Great to meet you. |
| 1:14.0 | Yavana Bryevich meets us in a track suit and trainers, |
| 1:18.0 | blonde hair tied up in a bun, |
| 1:20.0 | and walks us up to an apartment. |
| 1:22.0 | Not hers, she tells. and walks us up to an apartment. |
| 1:23.0 | Not hers, she tells us. |
| 1:25.0 | She's using it for the interview, |
| 1:27.0 | so her neighbors wouldn't see us coming. |
| 1:30.0 | She starts by telling us about life in Sir de Litzer. |
| 1:34.0 | This is a small town, we have a tough life. |
| 1:40.0 | We have jobs with low salaries and temporary contracts and even those are hard to get. |
| 1:46.0 | Over the next two hours Yevana tells us about her job, a strange one as it turned out. You thought you were getting a job as a technician, |
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