BB: Media Pluralism and Disinformation Amid the Autocratic Turn: The Case of Serbia

The lecture questions the extraterritorial reach of the EU’s regulatory agenda aiming to strengthen media pluralism and combat disinformation. In this discussion, Serbia is taken as a case study, because of a specific position of this EU candidate country regarding its political system and its current internet governance. The challenge is marked by a structural paradox: the state actors are both regulators and key disseminators of disinformation. The discussion leans on the V-Dem Democracy reports, which have defined Serbia as an electoral autocracy. There the information disorder and political system have functioned as a mutually reinforcing dynamic: disinformation has consolidated the political system that was deteriorating the media pluralism and freedom, while information disorder strengthening itself through the autocratization process. Meanwhile, Serbia has kept low risks for freedom of speech on the Internet, on the contrary to the legacy media, and despite persistent disinformation challenges. 

The aim of the discussion is to examine the potential benefits and risks for media pluralism and freedom in Serbia, from the forthcoming harmonization with the new EU media regulatory framework. The discussion points out that the democratic "health" of a political system correlates with the candidate’s capacity to implement the new EU media regulatory agenda without jeopardizing fundamental rights. The EU legal and regulatory instruments risk proving either symbolic or as tools of political misuse in a candidate country where the rule of law, institutional checks and balances, and genuine media pluralism are subdued. In such a context, it could mean doing more harm than good, by deteriorating already achieved rights.

Dr. Irina Milutinović is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute of European Studies in Belgrade, Serbia. She obtained a PhD degree from the Faculty of Political Sciences, University in Belgrade (2012) and her scholarly expertise spans Media Studies, European Studies, and Democracy Studies. For the past five years, Dr Milutinović has been an external collaborator of the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom (European University Institute) in Florence, Italy. She leads a country team for Serbia on the “Monitoring Media Pluralism in the digital era” (MPM) project.