Stanojevic: Social media know more about us than any domestic service

Zoran Stanojevic, editor and journalist at Radio Television of Serbia, tells Kosovo Online that while the phenomenon of social media has its positive aspects, it primarily carries a huge potential for information manipulation. He also warns of security issues such as the collection of personal data, noting that these platforms know much more about us than any domestic service does.

Stanojevic highlights that social media are dominant among the youth, who almost do not follow traditional information sources.

“I think that young people do not follow other media besides social media. This includes communication apps like WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram... All the information that reaches them comes from someone, meaning through some filter, someone from their environment who sent it, and they tend to trust it a lot. So, since it came from a trusted source, it must be accurate,” Stanojevic explains.

He emphasizes that there is a positive side to this phenomenon, but that this method of information transmission primarily carries a great potential for manipulation.

“The possibility of manipulation in such a way is enormous, as is the possibility to prevent some information from being heard. On one hand, we have this good thing, you can no longer stop a piece of news. If something happened, it will reach people. But, what is dangerous is that you cannot prevent inaccurate or partial information from also forming an opinion, especially if the news travels along with some attitude that should put the news in context,” our interlocutor warns.

Zoran Stanojevic adds that political manipulations on social networks are not a new phenomenon.

"Political risks are, of course, present if someone skillfully uses them for political influence. These can even be legal campaigns. Specifically, in America, it is known that there are legal campaigns that candidates have and utilize on social media, and everything there is transparent. What is bad is when some other agent, let's call them that, who intends to push their own agenda influencing people, convinces them that they are reading something correct," explains Stanojevic.

From a security perspective, he warns of a serious problem: the collection of personal data.

"The biggest security risk is the collection of our information that we leave when we connect to networks, the possibility that they track where we move, watch our habits, and then use them either for commercial purposes—to sell us something based on our behavior—or for other purposes, to determine where we are easy targets and then hit us there when they want to achieve any kind of goal," he emphasizes.

Commenting on the attempt to ban TikTok in America, he notes that it is purely a matter of state security.

"That is, the belief that another country, China, is massively collecting data on American citizens and will therefore be at a certain advantage, while social networks in China, like Facebook and Twitter, are under great control, meaning they cannot be used. Therefore, there is no reciprocity and for that reason, there is a need to ban TikTok," he says.

However, he expresses doubt that bans are feasible because, as he assesses, there will likely be various legal analyses on how to avoid them while ensuring that the data does not go where it shouldn't.

He also warns that social media legally registered in America collect data on users worldwide.

"That means about us too. So, someone in America, at Meta, i.e., Facebook, or Twitter, or Google through Instagram..., they already know much, much more about us than any domestic service does. They simply know things about us that we don't even know ourselves. That is a certain danger that I think governments around the world, Serbia included, have naively handed over to social media," says Stanojevic.