Jovanovic-Harrington, A., & Cornia, A. (2026). Beyond detection: How Serbia’s SNS party mimics authentic support through coordinated inauthentic behaviour. European Journal of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1177/02673231261422076
Summary
This paper examines coordinated inauthentic behaviour (CIB) linked to Serbia’s ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), arguing that its digital manipulation tactics constitute a more subtle and harder-to-detect variant of digital authoritarianism than the centralised bot farms characteristic of other autocratic regimes. Rather than relying on overtly automated accounts, SNS-connected networks convincingly simulate authentic grassroots citizen support — a mimetic strategy that allows them to evade standard detection methods and persist longer than comparable operations elsewhere. Drawing on largely non-English secondary sources, the authors present Serbia as an under-examined but instructive case and call for new analytical frameworks suited to these evolving strategies.
Key Contributions
- Offers an in-depth case study of CIB in Serbia, a context under-represented in the digital authoritarianism literature.
- Foregrounds the methodological value of non-English secondary sources for studying online manipulation overlooked by mainstream English-language scholarship.
- Advances conceptual understanding of how authoritarian-leaning parties evade CIB detection through authenticity mimicry.
- Argues for the development of new analytical tools capable of capturing subtler, decentralised forms of coordinated manipulation.
Methods
The study is a longitudinal qualitative analysis of secondary sources documenting CIB activity tied to the SNS, deliberately incorporating materials rarely translated into English and at risk of being overlooked. The authors frame their analysis comparatively, contrasting SNS tactics against the centralised bot-farm models common in other autocratic regimes to isolate what is distinctive about the Serbian case.
Findings
- SNS-linked networks engage in coordinated inauthentic behaviour that simulates authentic grassroots support rather than deploying obvious automation.
- These networks evade detection more effectively and for longer than centralised bot-farm operations.
- The Serbian case exemplifies a distinct mode of digital authoritarianism — decentralised and mimetic rather than overtly automated.
- Existing detection tools struggle to identify this evolving, subtler form of manipulation.
Connections
This paper contributes to the CIB detection literature by arguing that authenticity mimicry defeats standard methods, a concern that resonates with work developing and stress-testing detection approaches such as Luceri2025-tr and Kansaon2025-id, as well as the coordination-detection framework tradition represented by Giglietto2020-9d8acdd7 and Giglietto2022-0e951ac5. Its focus on electoral manipulation within a hybrid authoritarian regime links it to comparative studies of digital media in elections such as Kuznetsova2025-nu.