The F2N2 team carries out daily monitoring of the media in North Macedonia. The monitoring often shows trends that spread from the media on social networks that are worth dedicating media space to.
The trend of spreading news that Zaev and DUI agreed to redefine the state at a meeting in Tetovo has attracted our attention. The publishing of this disinformation was recorded on 10.06.2019 for the first time, and the last published text related to this disinformation is on 18.06.2019.
During this period, our team monitored 2839 texts/articles, of which 2651 are correct texts and 188 incorrect texts (texts/articles containing disinformation).
Top 5 media according to the number of correctly/incorrectly transmitted texts are:
Out of 188 disinformative texts, 53 contain the disinformative narrative of the alleged redefinition of the state. Miskoski’s statement was transmitted 28 times by 19 media. The “Tirana Platform” and the secret meeting of Zaev and Ahmeti was again on top of the VMRO-DPMNE press on June 15 and 17. This statement is shared by 21 media (23 times).
In the spreading of this narrative, the portal Javno.mk plays a significant role, through sharing Mickoski’s statement four times with a different title within 24 hours.
Each of these different titles is shared on social networks by 5 facebook pages, where only from the portal Javno.mk, the news is shared 16 times.
It can be seen on the chart that these 5 facebook groups together have a total of 137,178 followers. The news reached up to 2,743 to 8,916 followers/users on the social networks.
(Please see the note at the end of the text for the Facebook algorithm, about the calculation of the Organic reach)
This is just one of the many examples of how one news with a disinformative narrative is shared on social networks, in order to reach a larger number of readers.
Sharing of the same news several times with different titles is practiced by several portals. Besides javno.mk, the same news, but with different titles was shared by the following portals: kurir.mk, vesnik.com, vecer.mk, infomax.mk, ekonomski.mk and lider.com.mk.
This is just one segment of the more comprehensive analysis that will follow.
Note: The Facebook algorithm, the research related to the Organic reach, shows a percentage of 2% (for groups greater than 500,000 followers up to 6.5% for groups with less than 500,000 followers). For the purposes of this analysis, the range from 2% to 6.5% was taken. Considering the popularity of Facebook in the Republic of North Macedonia as well as the number of profiles registered on this social network, it can be confirmed that the above percentage is much closer to 6.5% than to the minimum of 2%.
The CrowdTangle tool was used to determine the range.
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This project was funded in part through a U.S. Embassy grant. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those of the implementers/authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Government.
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