Imagine it is 2027, and you are scrolling through your phone on the night of the general elections. In one WhatsApp group, a video is moving around: an INEC official, looking perfectly official, announces that a candidate has won a crucial state. In another group, there is a voice note in which a well-known politician seems to admit that a rival has already bought off electoral officers. Your heart races, and you share it. You are not careless; it just looks and sounds real. But none of it is true. According to a report by LEADERSHIP Weekend, this is exactly…

Three weeks have passed since the announcement of parliamentary elections in Serbia, and the campaign has already produced a striking amount of misinformation. In the messy, fast-moving world of an election season, falsehoods and half-truths can easily outpace the facts, shaping how voters see candidates, parties, and even the electoral process itself. The team at FakeNews Tragač, a Serbian fact-checking project, has been closely watching the media and social networks since the campaign began, systematically recording cases of disinformation. What they found is both revealing and worrying. In the first three weeks of monitoring, they confirmed 23 distinct cases of…