Local elections were held in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) for the first time since 2008. IRI's Beacon project, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), monitored online media and social media coverage of topics and actors in the run up to elections on December 20.
NEW LITHUANIAN GOVERNMENT
Parliamentary elections took place in Romania on 6 December 2020. The Bucharest-based Global Focus Center, in cooperation with IRI’s Beacon Project, monitored online and social media to examine the prevalence of toxic narratives in the political discourse in the election period. Using the Pulsar media monitoring tool, researchers followed dozens of outlets as well as social media pages of prominent political players over the course of several weeks.
The Prague Security Studies Institute (PSSI) has completed a study of the effects of COVID-19 on the disinformation ecosystem in the Czech Republic using the >versus< tool. PSSI studied the ways in which COVID-19 has been used to drive certain conspiracy theories and false narratives on different social media platforms. The results of the study can be found in the attached document.
The second round of the Lithuanian general election concluded this past Oct 25th, 2020 resulting in the center-right Homeland Union- Lithuanian Christian Democrats (TS-LKD) returning to power after 8 years. In the run-up to the elections, the Vilnius Institute for Policy Analysis, with support from the International Republican Institute’s Beacon Project, conducted media monitoring of online news portals to identify potentially disruptive narratives being spread in the media environment.