“The findings paint a concerning picture, underscoring the urgent need for continuous, independent monitoring of digital rights violations in a region that remains highly vulnerable,” the report says.
It is based on 1,440 incidents registered by BIRN’s monitoring team from September 2024 to August 2025 in ten countries – Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Turkey.
One of the most concerning developments highlighted by the report is the rapid rise of AI-driven harm, which is fuelling sexual and gender-based violence, as well as enabling new forms of fraud and manipulation.
Deepfakes, voice cloning and other generative AI tools are now routinely used to impersonate public figures or institutions, enabling phishing schemes, investment scams and emergency-related fraud. At the same time, AI is increasingly weaponised to facilitate sexual and gender-based violence, disproportionately targeting women and children through the non-consensual creation and circulation of intimate images. These technological threats are unfolding in a region where major platforms continue to operate largely unregulated and with opaque systems.
“Across the region, some governments have taken aggressive steps to control digital spaces, often citing national security, public order, child safety, or moral concerns, while online platforms remain largely unregulated, opaque in their operations and vulnerable to pressure,” the report says.
“Platforms are caught between protecting users and appeasing governments, some of which are adopting more authoritarian approaches. This clash has exposed users to both state overreach and insufficient protection from tech companies,” it adds.
Globally, experts warn that such dynamics reflect a broader drift toward techno-authoritarianism, where state and corporate power increasingly merge to shape, and sometimes constrain, public discourse.
Parallel to this, civic digital spaces are shrinking across Southeast Europe, mirroring offline realities. What once appeared as isolated incidents now forms a coherent pattern of hybrid repression. Journalists, activists, fact-checkers and civil society organisations face escalating harassment, coordinated smear campaigns, doxxing, digital attacks on content and online presence, legal intimidation and surveillance.
Pro-government media and far-right groups have weaponised narratives such as “foreign agent”, “traitor” and “mercenary,” particularly against LGBTQ+ organisations, and NGOs affected by cuts to USAID funding. Civil society and independent media increasingly find themselves silenced through a steady erosion of legitimacy and safety, compounded by growing financial precarity and personal risk. The report also documents the expansion of state surveillance, often enabled through opaque procurement processes. Through the latter, the region has imported controversial technologies from foreign companies and governments with poor human rights records, often under international sanctions. Governments across the region are acquiring facial recognition systems, digital forensics tools and other intrusive technologies with minimal transparency.
Several of these tools – already used to target journalists and civic actors, including BIRN staff – have drawn scrutiny from digital rights advocates and the European Parliament, prompting calls for stronger accountability mechanisms and the exclusion of spyware vendors from public funding.
Some of the tech companies involved have also raised global concerns for their role in surveillance in the occupied Palestinian territories, where they have been accused of testing systems on the Palestinian population before exporting them abroad.
These findings, together with cases of illegal wiretapping, politically motivated monitoring and abuse by senior officials of surveillance powers across the region, highlight systemic institutional vulnerabilities and weak oversight.
Finally, the 2024-2025 election cycle underscored how vulnerable democratic processes have become to digital interference. AI-generated disinformation, data protection breaches, cyberattacks and unregulated platform behaviour all contributed to an environment in which electoral fairness and transparency were increasingly undermined, culminating in the unprecedented cancellation of election results in Romania.
As governments, tech companies and societies grapple with these challenges, the region’s ability to uphold democratic integrity in the digital age remains a critical test for its political future. The report’s ten country chapters contextualise these regional trends within specific national political and legal environments. They analyse key cases, highlight gaps in governance and institutional capacity, and provide targeted recommendations.
A broader look across the region shows that rapid digitalisation is unfolding in contexts marked by weak rule of law and wide disparities in digital literacy. While some countries have digitalised more than 90% of their public services, this transformation has often taken place without adequate safeguards, oversight or support for citizens.
In Albania, an artificial intelligence system has been appointed as the world’s first AI government ‘minister’, despite the absence of a legal framework, while in North Macedonia digital healthcare platforms now provide public services.
But large segments of the population in these countries still lack reliable digital access, with rural and remote communities disproportionately affected. Across the Western Balkans and Turkey, digital literacy levels remain well below the EU average, heightening the risk of exclusion, unequal access to services and new forms of discrimination. Among EU member states, Romania, Croatia and Hungary have made several legislative strides but, in some cases, also face criticism for delayed implementation, weak independence of oversight bodies, or outright violations of EU standards – particularly in Hungary, in areas such as biometric surveillance and media freedom.
Meanwhile, ongoing EU-level discussions on deregulation have sparked concerns about the future of digital legislation and the protection of digital rights, creating uncertainty for both member states and candidate countries. Proposals to ease compliance burdens risk weakening hard-won safeguards in areas such as platform accountability, algorithmic transparency, and user privacy.
