Original title: PLOMP IS LEAVING: Is the Dutch Ambassador in Macedonia leaving due to his involvement in the “Racket” affair?
The portal infomax published a text with a headline in a form of a question that misleads the readers, implying that the Dutch Ambassador in the Republic of North Macedonia, Wouter Plomp is involved in the “Racket” affair. It is interesting that within this text the portal also claims that the post of the Ambassador finishes and he is leaving by the end of this week.
In order to spicy up the text and to increase the dose of speculations, the portal uses a tweet from Arsim Zekoli, a regular criticizer of the Government, frequently broadcasted by a group of portals as a relevant source of information. In his tweet Zekoli is calling on EU and OLAF (EU agency for fighting financial crime) to open an investigation on, as he claims, involvement of the Ambassador Plomp in the affair.
Besides the obvious clickbait, through the speculative and misleading headline, the portal makes an attempt to discredit the Ambassador, there is a segment in the text that claims that the Ambassador is leaving North Macedonia due to the end of his post. However, the portal also refers to the tweet of Arsim Zekoli, and by doing it so, discreetly speculates that the Ambassador leaves because of his involvement in the “Racket” affair.
By doing that, the portal makes publishes a direct and open disinformation, thus debunking it at the same time within its text. In order to be consistent, we would mention that the text does not offer statement from the other side in the content, the question whether there was an attempt to reach out to the Ambassador remains unasnwered in the text.
The usage of posts on social media in order to argument some sort of information, under no circumstances should be considered as truthful, without checking them first.
Having said the above, this text is disinformation.
