On 20 June in Skopje, the Metamorphosis Foundation organized a Conference: "Building societal resilience to the harmful influence of misinformation in North Macedonia". The conference was opened by Key Note addresses of the President of North Macedonia Stevo Pendarovski, the Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands Dirk Jan Kop and the Executive Director of the Metamorphosis Foundation Bardyl Jashari.
Ms. Aleksoska was speaker on the session titled "Solutions and next steps - Recommendations for joint action". Within this session also, Ms. Svetlana Siljanovska - Cabinet of Prime Minister of North Macedonia, Elida Zulbeari - Project Manager in Metamorphosis Foundation and Petra Balazic from the Centre for European Perspectives from Slovenia.
Ms. Aleksoska gave a brief overview on the ways of Russian influence and propaganda with emphasis on the goals that such disinformation and propaganda have.
The aim is to create distortions, the aim is to create divisions, the aim is to undermine the trust in the institutions, in the media, in the CSO’s, in our allies is one, but, another more important aim is to flood the information space with so much different data so at one point the audience gets confused and does not know what to believe in.
Rosana Aleksoska - FN Program Manager
Furthermore, Aleksoska spoke about the broadcasting of Russian officials, underlining the fact that the messages sent by those officials aim at disinforming while the hyper-production of headlines broadcasting Lavrov, Zakharova and Medvedev distort the online space and sow additional confusion among the citizens.
What I am trying to point out is that the real professional journalistic standard should be respected and observed, yet, when the context changes then all of us as actors should adjust to the new situation. If the Russian officials lie, and I do not have a problem to publicly say it ‘loud and clear’ then we should find a mechanism and model to tell our citizens that they are lying.
Rosana Aleksoska - FN Program Manager
The event was organized in cooperation with the Presidential centre for Political education, and took place in the Hotel Limak, Skopje.
