viborc.com

The new viborc.com: what changed, what survived, and why

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:00:00 +0000

I think that the oldest dataset on this site starts in March 2015: fifty-six months of approval polling for a Croatian president, collected while I was learning what data could do in a browser.

The oldest article still standing is younger, from January 2018, and even that is not the true beginning: there was a viborc.com before this one, and some iterations before that. Across those years this domain has been a Croatian-language blog, a bilingual blog, a data-visualization playground, an election-night dashboard, and, for long stretches, a site I quietly avoided.

A lot of publishing ceremony, and honestly, me trying to figure out the next direction. More on that a little bit later.

But that avoidance had reasons, and recently it became total: the last article on the old site went up in January 2025, and then I simply stopped posting. Publishing had stopped feeling like writing. I was spending more time updating WordPress plugins, keeping the theme in check, and watching the server than actually writing, sharing what I was thinking, doing research.

New work took the rest of me: I have spent these past years inside the AI wave, at GPT Engineer, which turned into a stellar Lovable, Zencoder, and then Daydream, watching the field remake itself week by week. And Russia’s brutal aggression against Ukraine pulled my older passions, OSINT and open-source research among them, back to the center of my attention.

The old site is where I learned the craft: collecting data, drawing maps, checking claims against their sources.

But the subjects in front of me now are heavier than the ones I practiced on, and some of them I understand from the inside in a way I couldn’t have a decade or just a few years ago. I wanted a place to write that down, in public, while these things are still being decided.

Today, viborc.com becomes something else: an English-language publication about intelligence work, artificial intelligence, information warfare, quantum computing, geopolitics, and the systems underneath all of them. The name on the header is the same name. But almost everything beneath it was rebuilt from the ground up.

The logo is now more meaningful

The four overlapping circles predate this redesign; if you’ve been here before, you’ve seen them. What’s new is that I’ve decided to explain what they mean.

Each circle is a meta-domain of this publication’s work:

Magenta, human judgment: intelligence tradecraft, cognition, analysis
Amber, the developing edge: quantum computing, work still forming
Teal, systems and data: built systems, infrastructure, data work
Violet, power and synthesis: geopolitics, information warfare

Every piece on the site lights the circles its topics touch, so the little mark beside a title is a classification, and not just eye candy.

Two rules:

work spanning three or more domains lights the violet synthesis circle automatically, and
research still in progress carries amber until it ships.

The mark literally changes when a piece is finished.

The center changed too: the old mark filled its middle; the new one cuts the central flower out entirely, down to the page itself.

I left the middle empty on purpose: the overlap, the intersection of those four domains is where the work happens, and the mark keeps that space open.

The mark and wordmark: the center is cut to the page itself, and ".com" is now an even clearer part of the identity.

The wordmark is simply the domain, lowercase: viborc.com. After a decade of iterations, the most honest name of this place is its address.

Type with roles

I spent time redesigning the typographic scale and now three typefaces run the site, and each has a job.

Newsreader speaks. It carries titles, standfirsts, and the occasional pull quote, with real optical sizing so display cuts stay sharp and text cuts stay sturdy.

Libre Franklin works. Body text, navigation, labels, the interface.

IBM Plex Mono offers facts. It appears only where a fact’s paperwork appears: dates, routes, reading times, measurements. When you see monospace on this site, you are looking at evidence.

The three roles, set in the site's own faces: Newsreader speaks, Libre Franklin works, IBM Plex Mono offers facts and evidence.

All three families are self-hosted, subset to the characters actually used, and served from this domain. There is no font CDN, and there are no third-party requests. Prose gets oldstyle figures that sit inside sentences; tables get tabular lining figures that align in columns. There might be some slippage here, but I’m working on fixing it.

Every established article address survived

Since the old website has been around for a while, the links are promises. People spent roughly a decade linking to this domain from forums, papers, Reddit threads, and bookmarks. This rebuild changed almost everything else about the site, which made those promises more work to keep, not less binding.

So the migration ran under one non-negotiable rule: established article URLs do not change. Not one of the 81 migrated archive article addresses did.

The archive holds 81 preserved articles - 42 in English, 39 in Croatian - each at its original address. What that means for you: if you bookmarked something here in 2019, the bookmark still works. If an old forum thread or a search result points at a piece, the link lands where it always did. The old work is not showcased on the homepage; it lives in the archive, at its own addresses, and pieces that still earn attention can get promoted into the new publication without ever changing address.

Behind all of it sits a migration pipeline (and hours of architectural rework) that verified every article and every image against the original site before anything shipped, and a pretty strict build contract that refuses to publish if a preserved page ever changes unexpectedly. Two old articles embedded charts whose data vanished with a third-party service years ago; sadly, nothing could bring them back, so those pages now say so instead of pretending the charts never existed.

The interactive work got the deepest treatment.

Some five application families I built over the years were rebuilt rather than preserved as-is: presidential approval, the Moody’s credit map, presidential election results, candidate polling, and parliamentary switching.

Their obsolete third-party runtimes, remote fonts, and analytics loaders were not carried over.

Instead, their complete datasets are now rendered into the pages at build time: real tables, readable by anyone, including readers with JavaScript switched off, screen readers, and search engines. A small first-party script adds the interactive layer on top when it can.

As a result, the data no longer depends on any company’s continued existence to remain visible.

Croatian readers keep their archive too. Nothing was retroactively translated, nothing was moved, and the historical pieces remain exactly as written, at their original /hr/ addresses, inside the new shell.

Boring on purpose

Now, I think that boring can be good. Hear me out.

I spend my working days in the fastest-moving corner of tech/software, where the tools reinvent themselves between one project and the next (or even faster than that). I needed this site to act almost as a counterweight: I built it to be the slowest-moving thing I own.

It has promises to keep (your 2019 bookmark, an archive that must still resolve in 2035), and excitement is the enemy of that kind of promise.

So the publication itself is plain files. No CMS, no PHP, no plugins: every page is a text file under version control, compiled ahead of time into static HTML. What the server does is very simple: it hands you files. It does a little more around the edges (the contact form and newsletter live in a small separate service), but files are the essence, and the attack surface is deliberately small: small enough for one person to reason about, and rebuildable from source if anything ever goes wrong.

The rule I am proudest of: the build refuses any script that lacks an exact, per-page, human-approved fingerprint - including mine. I build with AI every day and I know how easily code slips into places it shouldn’t. Here, every inline script is hashed and registered against the specific pages allowed to carry it; change one byte without a matching approval and the site will not build at all.

On ordinary editorial pages, JavaScript stays small and first-party: it handles reading aids, navigation behavior, and a few decorative details. The restored interactive applications add their own reviewed first-party code. Everything a page argues - text, tables, figures, footnotes - is present in the HTML before any script runs. Turn JavaScript off and you lose enhancements, not the argument or its evidence. You can still use the website normally.

Audience measurement is designed around PostHog Cloud EU with a cookieless baseline and a separate enhanced mode that recognizes returning readers and connects their sessions.

The analytics code passes through the same fingerprint gate as everything else, and the privacy policy describes the bounded data contract and its choices in plain language. Before public activation, that contract gets proven on the protected preview: what the browser sends, what the relay passes on, what gets stored, and what the payloads contain.

The editorial position

While rebuilding this, I thought about the mission first: I want to explain and document, with evidence a reader can check, how machine intelligence, information warfare, tech, and the contest for power are changing the ground we all stand on.

The website itself, data viz, code… everything below is machinery in service of that.

Also, this is where the publication stands at launch, not where it will end. It will evolve, and several months or a year from now it will not look exactly like this. What I intend to hold constant are the fundamentals: the subjects, the evidence discipline, and the promise that established addresses do not change.

I was also rethinking the reading model and landed on two forms and six topics.

Essays are the default form: writing that argues, explains, or explores, at any length.

Research is the deeper content. Pieces there typically carry a declared question, a method, and evidence a reader can inspect; sometimes they are broader syntheses, work first published in other venues, or investigations still under way.

This is not an academic journal, and it does not aim to be one. There are places where I can publish that kind of work; this is likely not one of them.

It is simply where the heavier work lives, whether it grew up here or appeared in a peer-reviewed publication first.

So, when I’m in doubt, a piece ships as an essay. Maps, visualizations, and datasets are not a separate section anymore; they are vocabulary any piece may speak.

The six topics:

Intelligence and tradecraft: analysis, collection disciplines, judgment under uncertainty
Artificial intelligence
OSINT and information warfare
Quantum computing
Geopolitics
Systems and infrastructure: the substrate the other five run on

Every piece carries one form and one or more topics, and the archive keeps its own nine collection shelves for the historical work.

New publishing is English-only. The Croatian archive stays, preserved and respected, but this publication now writes in one language.

And a standing commitment is that the sources, dates, and data stay visible on the page. Where I am documenting, you will see the documents. When I am arguing or merely guessing, I will say so.

What happens next

The Research shelf opens with a revised web edition of peer-reviewed research I co-authored with my friend David Kirichenko on Russian influence operations in the Balkans. It was first published in the Georgetown Security Studies Review.

A report on the weaponization of large language models is still being written. And more essays will come steadily across all six topics.

If you want to follow along, the RSS feed carries every new essay and research piece. You can also subscribe to the viborc.com newsletter in the footer. It is email-only and double opt-in, built with the same small, careful machinery. The contact page reaches me directly.

As I type these final thoughts before a launch I’ve been postponing for days now, I am excited about this publication, and even more about what these topics will do to our work, our systems of power, and how we see both. I plan to write it down as it happens. Follow along, and let’s stay in touch.

Russian influence and disinformation operations in the Balkans

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 11:52:26 +0000

On 9 January 2023, a military-style parade rolled through East Sarajevo to mark the “Day of Republika Srpska,” a holiday the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina has ruled unconstitutional. Around 2,000 Bosnian Serb police officers marched. So did the Night Wolves, the Kremlin-funded Russian motorcycle club sanctioned by the United States since 2014 for its role in the occupation of Crimea. An announcer praised their mission: to “promote Orthodox Christianity and make the Republika Srpska as mighty and eternal as Mother Russia.” Bosnian intelligence later confirmed that members of the Wagner mercenary group and the Ravnogorski Chetnik movement attended the celebrations, where flags of the so-called “People’s Republic of Donetsk” were displayed.¹

None of that assembled itself.

The bikers, the flags, the talk of brotherhood, the local officials on the reviewing stand: each is a component of a system Russia has spent two decades building in the Western Balkans. This research maps that system: the ground it stands on, the rails it runs on (narratives, clients, media), and what it produces in public opinion, elections, policy, and the region’s path toward the European Union. It closes with what counters it, which is not what is usually recommended.

About this edition. This research was first published, under peer review, in the Georgetown Security Studies Review, Volume 11, Issue 2 (February 2024), pp. 65–85, co-authored by Vibor Cipan (lead author) and David Kirichenko. The Balkans did not stand still after publication: Milorad Dodik was convicted and banned from office, RT Balkan got its television channel, the United States lifted sanctions on Dodik, and Serbia entered its deepest political crisis since the Milošević era. This is the authors’ revised and updated web edition, current to July 2026; the changes are summarized at the end.

Why the ground is receptive

The Balkans sit on one of Europe’s oldest civilizational seams, and the seam still organizes the region’s politics. Croatia and Slovenia aligned with the West early and durably: the Croats accepted Western Christianity in the early medieval period, and Rome recognized Duke Branimir’s Croatia in 879. Eleven centuries later the same two countries are members of the European Union, NATO, the Eurozone, and Schengen.² Serbia and Montenegro inherited the other side of the seam: Orthodox Christianity, the Cyrillic script, and a long habit of looking east for patronage.³

Centuries of Ottoman rule reshaped the religious composition of Bosnia and Herzegovina, leaving it the mixed Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic society it remains. Ottoman decline brought Austro-Hungarian expansion into conflict with a Russian-backed independent Serbia, and the region supplied the sparks for the Balkan Wars and the First World War.⁴

After 1945, Tito’s Yugoslavia balanced between the blocs and co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement, developing its industry and living standards faster than most socialist states.⁵ It still could not suppress the national questions underneath. When the federation broke apart in the 1990s, the Yugoslav People’s Army attacked Slovenia briefly, then Croatia, where the Homeland War devastated Vukovar and shelled Dubrovnik, and then Bosnia. The Bosnian war, marked by ethnic cleansing and the Srebrenica genocide of more than 8,000 Bosniaks, was the deadliest European conflict between 1945 and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.⁶ The Dayton settlement froze Bosnia into two entities, Republika Srpska and the Bosniak-Croat Federation, plus the Brčko District. The structure preserved peace by institutionalizing the divide.⁷ Kosovo followed at the decade’s end: Serbian repression, NATO intervention, the 1999 bombing of Serbia that remains a foundational grievance in Serbian political memory, and a 2008 declaration of independence that Serbia and several other states still do not recognize.⁸

That history produces today’s map. Most of the region is in NATO, some of it in the EU, and Serbia, officially neutral and practically leaning toward Moscow, sits at the center of the space in between. Russian influence operates in that space.

What Moscow wants

As the EU and NATO absorbed most of Central and Eastern Europe, the Western Balkans became a frontier: the last European region where East and West still visibly compete for alignment.⁹ Russia’s interest is not sentimental. Keeping the region unsettled serves three purposes at once: it blocks or slows the completion of Euro-Atlantic integration, ties down Western diplomatic attention and resources, and maintains a pressure point Russia can squeeze whenever it needs leverage elsewhere. Since 2022 that has meant, above all, Ukraine.¹⁰

The doctrine behind this is usually filed under the name of Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s Chief of the General Staff. But the canonical text is Gerasimov’s 2013 article on the blurring line between war and peace, and “the Gerasimov doctrine” is a name Western commentary attached to it afterwards, a shorthand its own popularizer later called misleading.¹¹ The substance still matters. Gerasimov argued that the informational dimension would move from supporting warfare to constituting it, with information technology “becoming one of the most promising types of weapons,” and his March 2019 address to the Russian Academy of Military Sciences reaffirmed non-military means as central to strategic competition.¹² Under Putin, the practice looks less like a doctrine and more like opportunism with a doctrine’s vocabulary: create and exploit disorder, probe for openings, and treat every local grievance as a potential instrument.¹³

In the Western Balkans, that practice runs on three rails: narratives, clients, and media.

The machinery

The system, end to end: the ground it stands on, the three rails it runs on, and the four places the output shows up. The sections below follow this map.

Soft-power narratives

Russia’s primary narrative in the region is civilizational: Orthodox brotherhood, pan-Slavic solidarity, and the framing of European integration as moral decadence imposed from outside. The Russian Orthodox Church supplies much of the vocabulary, and the message lands where Orthodox identity and the historical memory of Western intervention give it resonance: in Serbia, in Montenegro, and in Bosnia’s Republika Srpska.¹⁴

The second narrative is Kosovo. Russia positions itself as the defender of Serbian interests on “the Serb question,” vetoing recognition at the UN and amplifying every crisis. The utility is mutual: Serbia’s leadership turns to Moscow for backing on Kosovo, and Moscow converts that dependence into standing influence.¹⁵

Political clients

Narratives need carriers, and Russia’s carriers in the region hold real power.

In Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik spent years openly aligning the entity with Moscow: advocating closer ties, opposing NATO, and hosting the symbolic apparatus of Russian nationalism, from the Night Wolves to RS Day. In January 2023 he awarded Vladimir Putin the entity’s highest medal of honor, in absentia, for his “patriotic concern and love” for Republika Srpska.¹⁶ The United States first sanctioned Dodik in 2017 and again in 2022; the United Kingdom followed in April 2022.¹⁷ What has happened to him since is covered below; nothing else in the region changed as much between the two editions.

In Serbia, the pro-Russian orientation ran through the security apparatus itself. Aleksandar Vulin, sanctioned by the US in July 2023 for corruption and for facilitating Russian influence while directing Serbia’s BIA intelligence agency, met Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow in August 2022 and received honors from the Russian Ministry of Defense. He resigned from the BIA in November 2023, citing Western pressure.¹⁸ Serbia and Russia signed a foreign-policy consultation agreement in September 2022, seven months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a gesture of synchronized positions made while the rest of Europe was sanctioning Moscow.¹⁹

In Montenegro, Russian influence survived the country’s NATO accession, which Moscow had tried to prevent; Russian agents were implicated in an attempted coup in 2016.²⁰ It resurfaced in coalition politics: the government formed in October 2023 under Milojko Spajić depended on the pro-Serbian and pro-Russian For the Future of Montenegro bloc, whose leader Andrija Mandić became speaker of parliament.²¹

The media machine

The infrastructure that moves the narratives is concrete and, for the most part, legal.

Russia established a regional base for Sputnik in Belgrade in 2015: web and radio, staffed locally, publishing in Serbian. Sputnik Serbia presents itself not as a conduit of Russian state media but as a Serbian outlet, which makes its framing (the EU as weak, fragmented, and aggressive; integration as a trap) far more digestible locally.²² The language is the force multiplier: Serbian is official in Serbia, co-official in Montenegro, and widely understood in Bosnia, so a single newsroom’s output travels the whole region while reading as domestic.²³

RT followed. Despite the EU ban on RT and Sputnik imposed in March 2022 for their role in justifying the war against Ukraine,²⁴ RT launched its Serbian-language online platform, RT Balkan, in Belgrade in November 2022.²⁵ In the February 2024 original, RT Balkan was “planning” television broadcasting. It is no longer a plan: RT Balkan began 24-hour television broadcasting from Belgrade in late December 2024, distributed through cable operators in Serbia and Republika Srpska.²⁶ Both operations run openly. In 2025–26, when the EU pressed Belgrade to close the offices of Sputnik and RT Balkan as part of accession alignment, Serbia’s information minister rejected the demand as “censorship.”²⁷

A wider structure surrounds the flagship outlets. AidData’s mapping of media ownership in Serbia and Montenegro identifies ownership as a standing entry point for foreign influence through elites and media owners, and the republication of Russian-favorable content by local outlets is a tactic observed across the region.²⁸ In Republika Srpska, the mechanism is political rather than proprietary: the entity’s most influential outlet, RTRS, is close to the RS government, and the government has maintained loyalty through selective public funding and politically motivated legal pressure on critical outlets, a pattern documented since at least 2012.²⁹

The war in Ukraine as accelerant

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 forced every government in the region to show its cards, and it sharpened every dynamic described so far.

In Serbia and Republika Srpska, the invasion strengthened already strong pro-Russian sentiment; Belgrade saw public rallies supporting Russia’s war, and pro-war symbols became a normal sight in the city.³⁰ In the rest of the region it revived the memory of the 1990s. Underneath was the fear that a Russian victory would embolden Serbian nationalists to reopen the outcomes of the wars over Bosnia and Kosovo.³¹ The EU reinforced its EUFOR peacekeeping force in Bosnia with roughly 500 reserve troops the day the invasion began.³²

The war also moved people. More than 300,000 Russian citizens have entered visa-free Serbia since February 2022, though far fewer stayed: roughly 50,000 hold residence permits, and estimates of the community actually living in the country range from about 80,000 to 110,000.³³ The émigré wave is economically visible and politically ambiguous: many left Russia to escape mobilization rather than to oppose the regime. The long-term effect on Serbia’s orientation is an open question.

Serbia’s official posture through it all has been an exercise in strategic ambiguity. President Aleksandar Vučić committed to the European path while refusing, year after year, to join EU sanctions against Russia.³⁴ In May 2022, while the rest of Europe was scrambling away from Russian energy, he secured what he called an “extremely favorable” gas deal with Moscow.³⁵ The European Union, needing Serbia inside its orbit, has mostly responded with accommodation, a conciliatory approach critics call appeasement.³⁶

Since 2024, the hedging has come under strain from both directions:

Vučić attended Moscow’s Victory Day parade on 9 May 2025 over explicit EU warnings, and a Serbian military unit marched on Red Square.³⁷
Weeks later, Russia’s foreign intelligence service publicly accused Serbia of “stabbing Moscow in the back” by supplying ammunition to Ukraine through Czech and Bulgarian intermediaries. Vučić halted ammunition exports in June 2025, then reversed course in November, offering to sell ammunition to European buyers who “can do whatever they want with it.”³⁸
US sanctions on NIS, Serbia’s Gazprom-controlled oil company, took effect in October 2025 and shut the country’s only refinery within weeks; Gazprom agreed to negotiate selling its stake, and Serbia signed only a short-term extension of its Russian gas arrangement.³⁹
The European Parliament resolved in October 2025 that Serbia’s accession cannot advance without alignment on sanctions.⁴⁰

Meanwhile Serbia’s domestic ground shifted in a way no foreign actor scripted. The collapse of the Novi Sad railway station canopy on 1 November 2024, which killed 16 people, ignited the largest protest movement since the fall of Milošević: student-led, anti-corruption, and sustained. Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned in January 2025. On 27 June 2026, Vučić announced that he would resign the presidency and call early elections; as of this writing he has not yet formally stepped down, and analysts widely expect him to attempt to govern from another seat.⁴¹ Whatever follows, the Vučić era of consolidated, personalized balancing is ending on terms set by domestic accountability politics, not by either geopolitical patron.

The Srebrenica inversion

Since the invasion, the Russian Embassy in Bosnia has used social media to defend Russia’s war and to draw parallels between eastern Ukraine and Srebrenica, recycling a comparison Putin himself made in 2017, when he warned that Ukrainian actions in Donbas could exceed the Srebrenica massacre.⁴² At the same time, Russia has consistently denied the Srebrenica genocide itself. As Harun Karčić, a Sarajevo-based analyst of Russian influence in the region, has documented, the genocide Russia denies at home is the same one it invokes abroad to rationalize its incursions.⁴³ The narrative is a tool, detached from any factual commitment.

James Rubin, then coordinator of the US State Department’s Global Engagement Center, put the regional mechanics plainly:

"The main source of the threat in this part of the world is Russian-generated disinformation, often repeated and acting as a hub through Serbian media platforms and then repeated and promulgated here in the Western Balkans."

The hub-and-spoke structure is the point: content originates with Russian state media, gains local legitimacy through Serbian platforms, and arrives across borders pre-translated and pre-trusted.⁴⁴

The hub and its spokes: Moscow-origin content gains local legitimacy in Belgrade, then travels the region in one shared language.

In Serbia itself, the predominant source of information about the war is pro-government mainstream media, which in the war’s first phase carried the Russian framing of Ukraine as a Nazi state Russia was liberating. Serbian users were saturated with viral posts about fabricated Nazi symbols among Ukrainian officials and the conspiracy theory of US bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine.⁴⁵ Other staple narratives track the official Russian line: Western sanctions as the EU “shooting itself in the foot,” and Serbia’s inability to sanction Russia because “China and Russia are our only friends.”⁴⁶

What it produces

Influence operations are measured by their outcomes; four are observable here.

The four outcomes up close, with the evidence each rests on. Where the case is argued rather than measured, the label says so.

Public perception

Despite the European Union being Serbia’s largest donor and investor by a wide margin, polling consistently shows many Serbians believing Russia and China are the country’s primary benefactors.⁴⁷ That gap between economic reality and public belief is not an accident of ignorance; it is the product of a media environment in which Russian-aligned framing dominates coverage of international affairs, with the old civilizational narratives as the amplifier.

Elections

In Montenegro, the political shift after 2020, from a traditionally Western-leaning orientation toward pro-Serbian and pro-Russian leadership, was prepared and accompanied by media narratives casting pro-Russian politicians as defenders of traditional Montenegrin and Serbian Orthodox values.⁴⁸ In Serbia, media monitoring shows government-aligned and Russian-backed outlets presenting pro-Russian politicians as champions of national interest against Western pressure.⁴⁹ The precise electoral weight of that coverage cannot be isolated from the other advantages of incumbency - this is an argued interpretation, not a measured effect - but the direction of the pressure is not in doubt, and the pattern of politicians who align with Russian positions benefiting from favorable coverage recurs across both countries.

Policy

The clearest policy imprint is Serbia’s sustained refusal to join EU sanctions against Russia, a position that isolates it among EU candidate states and that the strong pro-Russian public sentiment - itself partly manufactured - makes domestically rational.⁵⁰ In Republika Srpska, the entity’s blocking stance on NATO echoes the Kremlin’s position and is reinforced by the entity’s Russian-friendly media environment.⁵¹ In both cases the causality runs the same way: disinformation did not create these policies, but it built and maintains the public opinion that makes them cheap for politicians to hold.

Regional stability and EU integration

The strategic effect is drag: sustained distrust toward the EU and NATO slows enlargement, deepens internal divisions in multi-ethnic societies, and gives non-EU actors room to maneuver.⁵² Bosnia and Herzegovina illustrates the cost: the EU decided in March 2024 to open accession negotiations, but the process has since stalled, with no negotiating framework adopted and no intergovernmental conference held. The Dodik crisis consumed the political year, and the Commission’s 2025 report scored Bosnia’s progress lowest in the Western Balkans.⁵³

Montenegro complicates the story. The same country whose governing coalition includes openly pro-Russian parties has become the EU’s fastest-moving candidate: sixteen of thirty-three negotiating chapters closed by June 2026, with a declared target of concluding negotiations by the end of 2026 and joining in 2028.⁵⁴ Russian influence in Montenegro is real, and it has not been sufficient to stop a determined accession process backed by public opinion and EU-side momentum. Influence buys friction, not vetoes.

Republika Srpska: Dodik after the verdict

The starkest development since publication tests the thesis directly. In February 2025, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina convicted Milorad Dodik of defying the decisions of the international High Representative, sentencing him to one year in prison, later commuted to a fine, and banning him from the RS presidency for six years. The verdict was confirmed on appeal in August 2025; the Central Election Commission revoked his mandate; the Constitutional Court rejected his final domestic appeal in November.⁵⁵ The crisis triggered another EUFOR reinforcement: roughly 400 additional troops in March 2025, bringing the force to about 1,500.⁵⁶

Then came the twist. In October 2025, the United States lifted its sanctions on Dodik and dozens of associated persons and entities, following RS de-escalation steps and lobbying directed at the new US administration. The reversal undid nearly nine years of American policy toward him.⁵⁷ In the snap election for his vacated seat, Dodik’s hand-picked candidate Siniša Karan won narrowly, a result confirmed in a partial repeat vote in February 2026.⁵⁸ Dodik remains president of his party, SNSD, and, as Balkan Insight put it, the new president is in office while “the old one’s still in control.”⁵⁹

For Moscow’s purposes, the episode cuts both ways. Its most reliable client in the region lost his office and his ability to stand in the October 2026 elections. But the network he built absorbed the blow, and the Western front against him cracked. The influence infrastructure proved more durable than the individual, which is what infrastructure is for.

What counters it, and what only appears to

The counter-disinformation literature converges on two prescriptions: regulatory frameworks and media literacy. Both matter, and neither works the way the standard recommendations imply; this region shows why.

Regulation, and its jurisdictional limits

The EU’s own analysis is the right starting point. A study commissioned by the European Parliament’s foreign-affairs committee concluded that disinformation in the Western Balkans is not the root cause but a symptom of poor governance, geopolitical exposure, and deep internal enmities, and that the effective policy responses lie less in the media and security domains than in governance, public engagement, and diplomacy.⁶⁰ The EUvsDisinfo initiative’s regional work reaches the same structural conclusion.⁶¹

The EU’s regulatory instruments have hardened since early 2024. The 2018 Code of Practice on Disinformation and its 2022 Strengthened successor⁶² were voluntary self-regulation, and their assessed weaknesses (undefined key concepts, missing performance indicators) reflected that. In February 2025 the Code was formally integrated into the Digital Services Act framework as the Code of Conduct on Disinformation, effective 1 July 2025: for the largest platforms, adherence to its commitments on demonetization, political advertising, and fact-checking now counts as an auditable risk-mitigation benchmark rather than a promise.⁶³ That is a real improvement, with two limits. X, one of the region’s most consequential platforms for viral disinformation, withdrew from the Code in 2023. And the DSA binds platforms, not governments: none of it reaches RTRS’s relationship with the RS government, Serbia’s tabloid ecosystem, or a cable package carrying RT Balkan.

Behind that limit is the real problem with regulatory prescriptions for this region: regulation assumes a good-faith regulator. In Serbia and Republika Srpska, the state is not a neutral referee facing disinformation from outside; the governing apparatus is itself the largest amplifier of the narratives in question, funds the loyal outlets, and harasses the critical ones. Recommending that such governments implement EU-style disinformation frameworks is recommending that the operator of the machine regulate the machine. Adaptation of the EU acquis through the accession process⁶⁴ remains the one regulatory channel with real force: it attaches conditions to something these governments want instead of relying on their goodwill.

Media literacy, and its trust prerequisite

Finland is the standard citation, and deservedly: media education across all levels of schooling, broad institutional participation, and a top ranking on the European Media Literacy Index.⁶⁵ But Finland’s model rests on a prerequisite the citation usually omits: high public trust in institutions, schools, and independent public media. Media literacy education works when the school and the public broadcaster are themselves trusted. In societies where institutional trust is low and the public broadcaster is a party instrument, “critical thinking about media” can just as easily turn into generalized cynicism: distrust of everything, which serves the disinformer fine. Adapting Finnish-style programs to the Balkans is therefore a sequencing problem, not a translation problem. Partnership-driven programs through schools, NGOs, and communities are worth building,⁶⁶ but they are a decade-scale investment that depends on the governance improvements the EU study identified, not a substitute for them.

What that leaves

Stripped of the boilerplate, the levers that plausibly move outcomes in this region are: EU accession conditionality applied without the appeasement discount; sustained funding and protection for the independent local journalism that contests these narratives; transparency of media ownership, where AidData’s mapping shows the entry points; and the unglamorous work of governance reform that removes the grievances disinformation feeds on. None of this is quick, and the interested parties will resist every step: Moscow above all, but also the local incumbents whose power the ambiguity sustains.

Where this leaves the region

Viewed from mid-2026, the picture has moved a long way from the one we described in early 2024, and the direction of the movement is itself evidence.

Two years of movement since the original research, on two tracks. Amber marks what is still in motion as of this edition.

Russia’s investment in the Western Balkans has not purchased control. Its main client is banned from office, reduced to governing through a proxy, and dependent on an American policy reversal for relief. Serbia’s balancing president announced his own exit under pressure from a domestic accountability movement that no foreign narrative created or could redirect. Montenegro is moving fast toward EU membership with pro-Russian parties inside its governing coalition. Influence, again, buys friction rather than vetoes.

But friction was always the product. The operation costs little, lasts, and speaks the region’s own language; it lives inside local media and local politics rather than arriving from outside. It has no victory condition. What it needs is a region whose European future stays contested, whose societies keep distrusting their institutions and each other, and where a crisis is always on hand when Moscow wants one. The returns compound quietly, in years of delayed enlargement, in elections fought over identity instead of governance, in young people who emigrate because the ambiguity offered nothing worth staying for.

The conclusion we reached in 2024 stands, sharpened: treating disinformation as the disease mistakes the symptom for the cause. The disease is the combination of unresolved governance and elites for whom ambiguity is a business model. Moscow supplies the narratives; the demand side is local. Any serious Western strategy has to work both sides of that market. The two years since publication suggest the region’s own societies, from Belgrade’s streets to Podgorica’s negotiating chapters, are currently doing more of that work than the strategies written for them.

About this research

This piece is the authors’ revised and updated edition of research first published, under peer review, as: Vibor Cipan and David Kirichenko, “Russian Influence and Disinformation Operations in the Balkans,” Georgetown Security Studies Review, Volume 11, Issue 2 (February 2024), pp. 65–85; the original is archived in DigitalGeorgetown. Vibor Cipan is the lead author. David Kirichenko is a researcher on Eastern Europe whose analysis appears in publications including the Center for European Policy Analysis, the Atlantic Council, and The Hill.

What changed in this edition. The argument, structure, and evidence of the original are preserved; the prose has been rewritten for this publication. Factual updates, each verified against primary reporting in July 2026: Dodik’s conviction, removal from office, and replacement by his hand-picked successor Siniša Karan, alongside the US sanctions reversal; RT Balkan’s television launch; Vulin’s exit from government; corrected figures for the Russian émigré population in Serbia; Serbia’s 2025–26 balancing record (Victory Day parade, ammunition exports, NIS sanctions) and the protest movement through Vučić’s June 2026 resignation announcement; Montenegro’s accession acceleration; the EUFOR reinforcement of March 2025; and the EU Code of Practice’s conversion into the DSA Code of Conduct. The assessment of counter-disinformation policy has been substantially rewritten; its conclusions are the authors’ own.

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“Bosnian Serbs Award Putin with Medal of Honor," AP News, January 8, 2023; “Bosnian Serbs award Putin with medal of honour," Al Jazeera, January 9, 2023. ↩︎
US Department of the Treasury, designation of Milorad Dodik under E.O. 14033, January 5, 2022 (first designation January 2017); “UK Sanctions Bosnian Serb Leaders," Balkan Insight, April 11, 2022. On the October 2025 lifting of US sanctions, see below. ↩︎
“Serbia’s pro-Russia Intelligence Chief Sanctioned by the US Has Resigned Citing Western Pressure," AP News, November 3, 2023. ↩︎
“EU Candidate Serbia and Russia Sign Foreign Policy Agreement," AP News, September 24, 2022. ↩︎
Bajrović, Reuf, Vesko Garčević, and Richard Kraemer, “Russia’s Strategy of Destabilization in Montenegro: Hanging by a Thread," Russian Foreign Policy Papers, Foreign Policy Research Institute, June 2018. ↩︎
“Pro-Russian Politician Elected Speaker as Montenegro Gets New Government," RFE/RL, October 31, 2023; Chastand, Jean-Baptiste, “Unlikely Pro-Russian and pro-EU Coalition Forms in Montenegro," Le Monde, November 2, 2023. The coalition deepened in July 2024, when a cabinet reshuffle brought the pro-Serbian bloc directly into the executive: “Spajić Reshuffles Cabinet to Include Pro-Serbian Coalition and Bosniak Party," European Western Balkans, July 24, 2024. ↩︎
A. Wemer, David, “The Western Balkans: A Growing Disinformation Battleground," Atlantic Council, March 7, 2019; Panasytska, Oleksandra, “Propaganda for the ‘Younger Slavic Brother’ in the Balkans: How Russia Promotes a Disinformation Campaign in Serbia," Vox Ukraine, December 23, 2022. ↩︎
“Final Report on Media Monitoring," Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, Western Balkan, June 2022. ↩︎
Yun Chee, Foo, “EU Bans RT, Sputnik over Ukraine Disinformation," Reuters, March 2, 2022. ↩︎
HINA, “Russia Today Launches Website in Serbian, Defying EU Sanctions," N1, November 15, 2022; “RT Launches Local Hub in Serbia," The Moscow Times, November 15, 2022. ↩︎
“RT Balkan Launches a New Kremlin Propaganda Channel in the Balkans," The Geopost, December 28, 2024; Reporters Without Borders, “Russia-Serbia: How RT Spreads the Kremlin’s Propaganda in the Balkans Despite EU Sanctions." ↩︎
“Serbia Defies Brussels: Belgrade Rejects EU Demands to Silence Russian Media," EUalive; on Sputnik’s Belgrade operation since 2015: “Russia’s International Broadcasters: Turning the Serbian Media into a Disinformation Hub," StopFake. ↩︎
Dumont, Emily, Jonathan Solis, and Lincoln Zaleski, “Serbia: Media Ownership and Potential Foreign Influence Channels," AidData, April 11, 2023. ↩︎
“Government Millions for Private News Outlets in the RS," CIN, February 22, 2012; “Bosnia of Two Persuasions and Russian Influence through Republika Srpska," The Geopost, December 28, 2021. ↩︎
Saric, Dejana, and Pierre Morcos, “The War in Ukraine: Aftershocks in the Balkans," Center for Strategic and International Studies, April 15, 2022; Reuters reporting from Belgrade, August 28, 2022. ↩︎
“The Effects of the War in Ukraine on the Western Balkans," Strategic Comments 28, no. 4 (August 5, 2022): 10–12. ↩︎
Sito-Sucic, Daria, “EU Boosts Bosnia Force after Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine," Reuters, February 24, 2022. ↩︎
Interior-ministry figures and residence-permit data via RFE/RL’s freedom-of-information reporting (48,000+ temporary residents as of January 2025); community-size estimates in the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung’s mapping of the Russian diaspora in Serbia. Earlier reporting on the influx: Rossig, Rüdiger, “A One-Way Ticket from Moscow to Belgrade," Deutsche Welle, August 13, 2022; Ernst, Andreas, “Serbs Welcome Russian Refugees for the Wrong Reasons," Neue Zürcher Zeitung, April 21, 2023. ↩︎
Stojanovic, Dušan, “Serb President Pledges EU Course, Hints Russia Sanctions," AP News, May 31, 2022; Dettmer, Jamie, “Serbia’s Vučić Faces a Tough Choice," Politico, March 1, 2023; “Serbian President Rejects Calls for Sanctions Against Russia," AP News, January 4, 2023. ↩︎
Stojanović, Dušan, “Serbia Ignores EU Sanctions, Secures Gas Deal with Putin," AP News, May 29, 2022. ↩︎
Edwards, Christian, “US & EU Appeasement of Serbia Risks Balkan Security," Genocide Watch, August 22, 2023; Bechev, Dimitar, “Hedging Its Bets: Serbia Between Russia and the EU," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 19, 2023. ↩︎
“Vučić Attends Moscow Victory Parade amid Barrage of EU Criticism," Balkan Insight, May 9, 2025. ↩︎
“Russia Accuses Serbia of Arming Ukraine and Stabbing Moscow in the Back," Euronews, May 30, 2025; “Vučić Halts Serbian Ammunition Exports," RFE/RL, June 2025; “Serbia’s Vučić Angers Russia with Comments about Selling Ammo to EU," Al Jazeera, November 7, 2025. ↩︎
“Russians Agree to Quit Serbian Oil Company as US Sanctions Bite," Al Jazeera, November 11, 2025; “Serbia Signs Short-Term Gas Deal with Russia," The Moscow Times, December 23, 2025. ↩︎
European Parliament resolution on Serbia, October 22, 2025, as reported in regional coverage of the enlargement debate. ↩︎
Novi Sad railway station canopy collapse, overview with sourcing; “Vučić Says He Will Resign and Call Early Elections," RFE/RL, June 27, 2026; “Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić Says He Will Resign within Weeks," Al Jazeera, June 27, 2026. ↩︎
Pekmez, Irvin, “Russia Targets Bosnia With Disinformation About Ukrainian War," Balkan Insight, May 9, 2022; International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Appeal Judgement Summary for Popović et al., January 2015. ↩︎
Karčić, Harun, and Peter Mandaville, “Dislodging Putin’s Foothold in the Balkans," United States Institute of Peace, June 1, 2023. ↩︎
Simeonova, Elitsa, “U.S. Envoy Warns About Russian Efforts To Use Disinformation To Divide U.S. Allies In Balkans," RFE/RL, June 2, 2023; “US Envoy: Balkans ‘Poisoned’ by Russian Disinformation," AP News, April 12, 2023. ↩︎
“Nothing Is True, and Everything Is Possible," CRTA, March 1, 2023. ↩︎
“Regional Analysis of Narrative ‘Kremlin and Pro-Kremlin False Narratives Regarding the Ukraine War’ in the Western Balkans," International and Security Affairs Centre, November 22, 2022. ↩︎
“EU Largest Donor to Serbia," N1, March 27, 2020; Samorukov, Maxim, “Surviving the War: Russia-Western Balkan Ties After the Invasion of Ukraine," Carnegie Endowment for Peace, April 25, 2023. ↩︎
Anderson, Liz, “Kremlin Watch Report: Vulnerabilities to Russian Influence in Montenegro," European Values, 2019; Filipović, Ljubomir, “Confluence of Influence: Russo-Serbian Influence Operation(s) in Montenegro,” National Security and the Future 24, no. 3 (2023): 67–81. ↩︎
“Final Report on Media Monitoring," Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, Western Balkan, June 2022. ↩︎
“Serbian President Rejects Calls for Sanctions Against Russia," AP News, January 4, 2023. ↩︎
Pekmez, “Russia Targets Bosnia With Disinformation About Ukrainian War.” ↩︎
Stanicek, Branislav, and Anna Caprile, “Russia and the Western Balkans - Geopolitical Confrontation, Economic Influence and Political Interference," European Parliamentary Research Service, PE 747.096, April 2023. ↩︎
Council of the EU, Bosnia and Herzegovina policy overview (candidate status December 2022; decision to open negotiations March 21, 2024); “Bosnia and the EU Enlargement Report: A Non-Event in a Non-Process," European Western Balkans, November 7, 2025. ↩︎
“EU and Montenegro Provisionally Close Another Five Chapters in Accession Negotiations," Council of the EU, December 16, 2025; “Montenegro Closes Two More EU Accession Chapters," Balkan Insight, June 15, 2026. ↩︎
“Bosnia Court Sentences Serb Leader Dodik to One Year in Jail," Al Jazeera, February 26, 2025; “Bosnia’s Top Court Confirms Serb Leader Dodik’s One-Year Prison Sentence," Balkan Insight, August 1, 2025; “Bosnian Court Commutes Milorad Dodik’s Jail Sentence to a Fine," Balkan Insight, August 12, 2025; “Separatist Bosnian Serb Leader Dodik Sacked from Office," Al Jazeera, August 6, 2025; “Bosnia’s Top Court Upholds Political Ban on Bosnian Serb Leader Dodik," Al Jazeera, November 4, 2025. ↩︎
“Additional EUFOR Peacekeeper Troops Arrive in Bosnia amid Rising Tensions," Euronews, March 12, 2025; UN Security Council Resolution 2795 renewing the EUFOR Althea mandate, October 31, 2025. ↩︎
“US Suddenly Lifts Sanctions on Bosnian Serb Leader Dodik," Balkan Insight, October 29, 2025; CNN reporting, October 30, 2025. ↩︎
“Barred Bosnian Serb Leader Dodik’s Party Wins Presidential Election," Al Jazeera, November 23, 2025; “Siniša Karan Wins the Repeat Vote," European Western Balkans, February 9, 2026. ↩︎
“Republika Srpska Has a New President, But the Old One’s Still in Control," Balkan Insight, February 24, 2026. ↩︎
Greene, Samuel, Gregory Asmolov, Adam Fagan, Ofer Fridman, and Borjan Gjuzelov, “Mapping Fake News and Disinformation in the Western Balkans and Identifying Ways to Effectively Counter Them," European Parliament, February 23, 2021. ↩︎
EUvsDisinfo regional analyses of disinformation in the Western Balkans, EEAS East StratCom Task Force. ↩︎
European Commission, 2018 Code of Practice on Disinformation; 2022 Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation. ↩︎
European Commission, “Commission and Board Endorse Integration of the Code of Practice on Disinformation into the DSA Framework," February 13, 2025; Code of Conduct on Disinformation, effective July 1, 2025. ↩︎
European Commission, the EU acquis, enlargement-policy glossary. ↩︎
J. Cord, David, “Educated Decisions: Finnish Media Literacy Deters Disinformation," This is Finland, August 2022; Lessenski, Marin, “Media Literacy Index 2022: Main Findings and Possible Implications," Open Society Institute Sofia, December 6, 2022; Jolls, Tessa, and Michele Johnsen, “Media Literacy: A Foundational Skill for Democracy in the 21st Century,” Hastings Law Journal 69 (2017): 1379. ↩︎
On localization requirements for media-literacy programming in the region, see Greene et al., “Mapping Fake News and Disinformation in the Western Balkans.” ↩︎

Ethics in data visualization: how charts deceive, and how to read them like an analyst

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Most people will question a sentence before they’ll question a chart. A sentence is obviously somebody’s opinion. A chart looks like measurement: axes, gridlines, a source line in small print, numbers with decimal points. Somebody counted something, the format says, so there’s nothing left to argue about.

That trust is mostly reasonable. Nobody has time to verify everything, and charts really are how honest people communicate data. The problem is that the trust attaches to the format, not to the content, and the format is easy to fake. A wrong number in prose invites checking. The same wrong number drawn as a bar mostly doesn’t.

I wrote the first version of this guide in 2023, as a set of ethical principles for people who make charts. Rewriting it in 2026, that framing feels too polite. Since then, deceptive charts have become something you can generate with software, in volume, aimed at specific audiences. So this version treats a chart the way an analyst treats any incoming report: possibly true, possibly crafted, and not to be trusted on presentation alone. The known techniques come first, with documented cases; then what changed now that the work is automated, how to read charts, and how to make them honestly.

Why charts get believed

The persuasive power of a chart doesn’t come from its data. It comes from the signs of rigor around the data. Axes, gridlines, source lines, and precise-looking numbers all suggest that someone did the work, so the reader doesn’t have to. That’s a shortcut, and usually a sensible one.

But the shortcut fires whether or not the work was honest. The visual grammar of evidence is trivial to imitate, and imitation is enough, because readers almost never recompute what a chart claims.

Two findings frame the catalog below.

First, bad charts are not a fringe problem. When researchers audited pandemic-era news charts, roughly a third of the bar charts and over 40% of the pictorial charts they examined qualified as misleading. This wasn’t enemy propaganda. It was the everyday output of newsrooms and agencies working under deadline.

Second, and more uncomfortable: the most effective deceptive charts are often technically correct. In 2021, MIT researchers studied hundreds of thousands of coronavirus-skeptic posts and found that the skeptics were not making crude, error-ridden graphics. They were producing polished, data-rich visualizations built with orthodox methods, real government data, correctly plotted, framed to argue the crisis was over. A study from the University of Utah’s visualization lab reached the same conclusion from the other direction: when people lie with charts in the wild, they mostly don’t violate design guidelines at all. They plot faithful data and let the title, the cropping, and the annotation do the lying.

So the catalog below matters, but spotting broken technique is not the whole defense. The sharpest deception passes every design check and fails only the questions a chart can’t answer about itself: who made this, what was left out, and what am I being led to conclude?

The deception techniques

These are the recurring mechanisms. Each one comes with a documented case, because none of them are hypothetical.

The manipulated axis

The vertical axis states the chart’s scale, which makes it the most-tampered component. Three variants cover most of what you’ll run into.

An inverted axis turns a trend upside down. After Florida enacted its “Stand Your Ground” law, a widely shared chart appeared to show gun deaths falling, until you notice that the y-axis runs top-down, with zero at the top. Read against the actual axis, gun deaths rose.

Gun deaths in Florida. The y-axis is inverted: the line goes down, the deaths go up.

The designer, Christine Chan, defended the inversion as a stylistic preference, showing deaths “in negative terms (inverted),” and there’s no reason to assume she meant to mislead anyone. It doesn’t matter. The first impression is the message, most readers never study the axis, and the damage doesn’t depend on her intentions.

A missing axis removes the scale entirely, so the bars can exaggerate freely. A chart comparing Americans “on welfare” with Americans holding full-time jobs drew the welfare bar several times taller, with no y-axis, no baseline, and category definitions that quietly overlapped. Redraw it with a labeled axis starting at zero and the story shrinks to something far less alarming.

No axis, no baseline, no scale. The bars are free to say anything.

A truncated axis is the subtler version: the axis exists but starts just below the smallest value, so trivial differences tower over each other. CNN aired presidential approval bars whose visual gaps were several times the actual percentage-point differences (spotted, as such things often are, by the r/dataisugly community). Truncation has legitimate uses in fine-grained technical charts. In a persuasive context, though, a bar chart that doesn’t start at zero is an argument, not a measurement.

Truncated axis: the visual differences are several times the numeric ones.

The impossible pie

This pie chart of “biggest COVID worries” fails arithmetic before anything else: the slices add up to well over 100%. Respondents could pick several answers, which is exactly the situation a pie chart can’t represent. The one promise the form makes is that the slices sum to a whole. Here they don’t, and the legend doesn’t even match the slice order.

Multiple-response data in a pie chart: the slices total far more than 100%.

Chart-type mismatch is a deception vector of its own. Every chart form promises something: pies that the parts make a whole, line charts that the data is continuous, maps that geography matters. Break the promise and the reader walks away with a false belief without a single number being wrong.

Cherry-picking and the vanishing context

Choose the right start date and almost any trend will say what you want. A decade of decline turns into “three months of recovery” if the window opens at the bottom. A warming trend disappears if the series starts in an unusually hot year. Nothing is fabricated here. The deception is done entirely by cropping, which is why an honest chart discloses its window and an honest reader asks what the line looked like before the left edge.

The same move works on populations (show only the subgroup where your claim holds), on denominators (report absolute counts where rates would deflate the story, or the reverse), and on aggregation (pick the weekly, monthly, or yearly bucket that produces the pattern you need). Any one of those choices can be defended in isolation. What gives the game away is the pattern: every choice, every time, breaking toward the same conclusion.

Geometry that lies: area, radius, and 3D

Human perception compares areas, but charting tools often scale circles by radius. A circle with twice the radius has four times the area, so a bubble chart scaled by radius squares every difference: a country with double the population reads as quadruple. The same math corrupts pictogram charts (a coin drawn twice as tall is four times as large on the page) and every 3D chart, where perspective adds distortion no data justifies and the front series physically hides the back ones.

Geometry problems are quieter than axis problems because they look like aesthetic choices when they’re really measurement choices.

Uncertainty, laundered

Every serious estimate carries uncertainty: margins of error, confidence intervals, model assumptions. Charts routinely strip all of it out, and the stripped version reads as more precise than the science it summarizes. Election forecasts drawn as clean lines invite overconfidence in outcomes that were always probabilistic. Climate and medical findings presented without error bands set readers up to treat every later revision as betrayal (“they keep changing the numbers”) instead of what it is, which is uncertainty behaving normally.

Stripping uncertainty rarely gets called deception. It should be. It transfers false confidence from the chart to the reader, and false confidence is the product being sold.

The honest chart with a hostile frame

The technique that ties the catalog together has no visual signature at all. Take faithful data, plot it by the book, and do the work in the surroundings instead: a title that asserts what the data merely permits, an annotation that supplies the causal story, a comparison chosen to flatter, and a crop that removes whatever would hurt. The MIT coronavirus study found exactly this pattern. Those communities celebrated rigor, mistrusted mediated conclusions, demanded raw data, and then framed competent charts into conclusions the data didn’t support.

This is why chart-literacy advice that stops at “check the axes” produces false security: the axes can be perfect while the lie lives entirely in what the chart is for.

2026: deception at machine scale

Everything above predates the current tools. The grammar of chart deception is the same. What changed is the cost, the volume, and the targeting.

The techniques are now automated

Deceptive charts used to require a motivated human with tooling skills. They no longer do. ChartAttack, a 2026 study, showed that large language models can be prompted to mass-produce misleading charts using the same catalog you just read (inverted axes, inappropriate log scales, 3D distortion, misrepresented data), and that the machine-generated versions cut human reading accuracy by roughly 20%. In effect, the techniques have been compiled into software. Anyone who can write a prompt can now emit endless plausible chart variants and A/B test which deception spreads best.

Detection research is racing in the same direction, with automated systems that grade charts for misleading design. For now the asymmetry favors the attacker. A chart is an image, and an image arrives with no provenance. Generated text at least lives in a medium where provenance tooling is maturing. A chart screenshot three reposts deep carries nothing but its own pixels.

Charts are now a payload in influence operations

This stopped being a hypothetical about lone bad actors. The European Union’s foreign-interference monitoring found that 27% of documented information-manipulation attempts in 2025 involved AI, roughly triple the share of 2024, and researchers tracking the 2026 election cycle expect unprecedented volumes of AI-generated political misinformation. The chart-specific arm of this is now being traced academically: a 2025 study in the ACM’s human-computer interaction proceedings followed data visualizations circulating as propaganda in anti-immigrant discourse, watching the same charts mutate, lose their sources, and pick up new captions as they moved between communities.

Influence operations work by handing communities ammunition that feels self-verified, and a chart is ideal for that: it compresses a claim into one shareable image, survives translation, sheds its source in a single screenshot, and lets the person sharing it say “look at the data” instead of “trust my source.” The Wisconsin turnout claims I fact-checked in November 2020 ran on exactly this fuel: numbers arranged to look like arithmetic proof of fraud, spreading faster than anyone could recompute a denominator.

The target is cognition, not the chart

The World Economic Forum’s 2026 analysis of disinformation names the shift plainly: the frontier is cognitive manipulation, content engineered for how particular audiences think, rather than broadcast lies hoping to find believers.

Charts suit that kind of engineering unusually well, because they exploit biases that operate before skepticism gets a chance. Charts anchor: the first magnitude you see calibrates every number after it. They also confirm: readers pull out the pattern they arrived expecting, and “do your own research” often means finding a chart that agrees with you. Fluency does its part too. Cleanly designed information feels truer than messy information, which is why the polished skeptic dashboards in the MIT study out-persuaded institutional graphics that looked worse. And precision bias closes the loop: 72.28% feels measured in a way “about seven in ten” never will, whether or not the denominator was right.

I’ve written before about how these same biases distort intelligence analysis: anchoring, confirmation, the pull of a coherent story. The overlap is not a coincidence. Intelligence analysts learned generations ago that the failure point is rarely the data. It’s the analyst’s untested assumptions meeting evidence shaped to exploit them. Now that generative models can shape that evidence per audience and per bias, everyone who reads charts has inherited the analyst’s problem. “Be skeptical” doesn’t survive contact with content engineered for your specific priors. A procedure does. That’s what the checklist is for.

How to read a chart like an analyst

Before a chart changes your mind, and especially before you share it, walk it through seven questions. With a little practice this takes under a minute.

Source: who counted, and where is the count? Not who posted the chart. Who produced the underlying data, and can you reach it? A chart that names no source has the evidentiary weight of a rumor. A chart that names one deserves thirty seconds of checking that the source actually says what the chart claims.
Axes: where does the scale start, and which way does it run? Zero baseline on bar charts. No inversions. Log scales only where orders of magnitude genuinely differ, and flagged when used.
Denominator: percentage of what? Rates, turnouts, and growth figures are fractions, and the fraud usually hides in the bottom half. The Wisconsin “89% turnout” claim died the moment the denominator was checked: votes divided by registered voters in one year, by eligible voters in the comparison years.
Window: what did the data look like before the left edge? Ask why the series starts where it starts, why this subgroup, why this aggregation bucket. If the honest answer is “because otherwise the story disappears,” you have your finding.
Geometry: does the visual encoding match the numbers? Areas scale with values, not radii. No 3D. Pies only where the parts genuinely sum to a whole.
Uncertainty: where did the error bars go? An estimate presented without its uncertainty is a claim presented without honesty. For polls and forecasts, the margin is the story.
Interest: who benefits if you believe this? The analyst’s closing question. It doesn’t decide truth, since honest people have interests too, but it decides how much of the previous six steps the chart has to survive. And reverse-search viral charts. Finding the original often turns up a crop, a re-caption, or a five-year-old graphic wearing this week’s news.

If a chart fails step 1, stop. There’s nothing to verify. If it passes all seven, it has earned some provisional trust, which is more than most charts ever actually earn.

The ethics of making them

Run the checklist in reverse and you have the maker’s obligations. Everything a careful reader has to verify, an honest visualizer supplies up front: named sources, truthful scales, the right denominator, the full window, geometry that matches the numbers, uncertainty on the page, and a framing the data can actually carry. Accessibility belongs on that list too. Color choices that survive color blindness and alt text that states what the chart shows are part of honesty, because a chart that only some readers can check is only partly checkable.

Two additions from hard experience. First, test the take-away, not the chart: show it to someone for ten seconds and ask what they learned. If their sentence isn’t supported by the data, the chart is misleading no matter how correct its construction, because first impressions don’t read footnotes. Second, your errors will be screenshotted without their corrections, so the standard has to be met before publication, not patched after. Even institutional cartography fails this way. The European Commission once published a children’s map of the EU that got borders and capitals wrong, and artifacts like that keep circulating long after anyone corrects them.

In 2011, Jason Moore proposed a Hippocratic Oath for visualization work, published by Robert Kosara. It has aged better than most advice in this field:

I shall not use visualization to intentionally hide or confuse the truth which it is intended to portray. I will respect the great power visualization has in garnering wisdom and misleading the uninformed. I accept this responsibility willfully and without reservation, and promise to defend this oath against all enemies, both domestic and foreign.

In 2011 that closing line read as professional etiquette. In 2026, now that the deceptive side is automated, it reads as a side to pick.

Fact check: Was there election fraud in Wisconsin in 2020?

Sat, 07 Nov 2020 13:06:29 +0000

The 2020 United States election produced a whole family of claims that the process failed. Claims like that deserve to be checked rather than shared, and the two loudest ones concern Wisconsin, where Joe Biden held the lead.

The two claims:

How could turnout in parts of Wisconsin exceed 90%, even 100%?
Why did Wisconsin’s turnout jump so drastically - by “up to five standard deviations” - compared with previous years?

Does turnout above 100% prove the election was stolen?

Mike Coudrey posted a tweet that read: “BREAKING: Wisconsin has more votes than people who are registered to vote. Total number of registered voters: 3,129,000. Total number of votes cast: 3,239,920. This is direct evidence of fraud.”

Coudrey claimed that Wisconsin recorded more votes than it had registered voters. He later deleted the tweet, but an archived copy is preserved here.

Two things about American elections matter here: most states require voters to register in advance, and Wisconsin also allows registration on election day itself.

The first number Coudrey relied on, 3,129,000 registered voters, is wrong. According to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the state had 3,684,726 registered voters as of 1 November 2020. That is 555,726 more than Coudrey claimed, and more than enough to cover the gap he was pointing at.

And that registration figure is itself only a snapshot from 1 November. Because Wisconsin offers same-day voter registration, anyone who had not registered by then could still do so at the polling place on 3 November. The final registration total was therefore higher still than the commission’s 1 November snapshot.

So the claim of election fraud is simply false. Basic arithmetic and a basic understanding of how Wisconsin’s registration system works are enough to show it.

How could the town of Russell report 101% turnout, and Sheboygan County over 90%?

The same explanation applies. The pre-election registration counts date from 1 November; on election day itself, many more voters registered on the spot, which can push turnout measured against the old registration snapshot past 90%, or past 100%.

Why did Wisconsin’s turnout deviate so sharply from previous years?

The president’s son, Eric Trump, amplified a series of posts, among them one from Harlan Hill, an adviser to President Trump (the tweet).

If the link no longer resolves, here is a screenshot:

Hill claims that the jump in turnout to 89.25% is evidence the election was stolen.

A jump to 89.25% turnout, when previous years hovered around 70%, does catch the eye.

But check the arithmetic before leaping to the conclusion that happens to support your side of the argument, left or right.

Turnout is calculated by dividing the number of people who actually voted by the number of people eligible to vote. The eligible population (broadly, everyone over 18) is always larger than the registered population. In Wisconsin, the eligible-voter population was 4,536,293 (election commission data, 2019). Of those, 3,684,726 had registered by 1 November, roughly 850,000 fewer than could have.

Turnout, then, is the votes cast (3,278,963 as counted on 5 November) divided by the eligible population (4,536,293):

3,278,963 / 4,536,293 = 0.7228. Wisconsin’s turnout was 72.28%, far lower than the 89.25% claimed by the president’s adviser.

And 72.28% is no meaningful deviation from earlier years. In fact, by Hill’s own figures, turnout in 2004 was higher: 73.24%.

Hill divided the wrong numbers. For previous years he used the eligible population as the denominator; for 2020 (deliberately or not) he used the registration snapshot instead, and the “anomaly” comes from that substitution.

This analysis was first published in Croatian on 7 November 2020, while the count was still under way. The Croatian original remains in the archive, preserved as written.