Terrifying Twitter: Slovenia’s Marshall Twito and his ‘Fake’ Friends

Jansa might use the disclaimer 'retweets are not endorsements', but politicians like him "use fake profiles as a proxy," said Strok, "to spread information or words that they know would put them in more trouble if they tweeted it themselves."

"He retweets more than 100 tweets a day," Strok said. "Of course they're endorsements."

Trump tactics

A mobile phone displays the suspended status of the Twitter account of former US President Donald J. Trump. Photo: EPA-EFE/MICHAEL REYNOLDS.

Marko Milosavljevic, a professor of journalism and media policy at the University of Ljubljana, says that, in a way, "Twitter has become the Official Gazette in Slovenia."

The social media platform, used by roughly 100,000 of Slovenia's two million people, shows "what the prime minister thinks, what he will do and what moves he will make, who are his enemies, what is his attitude towards different political actors," Milosavljevic told BIRN.

And Jansa takes no prisoners.

In mid-March, five international media watchdogs wrote to the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, to warn of what they called Jansa's "Trumpian style tactics" of attacking journalists on Twitter and dismissing critical reporting as "fake news".

Sixty-two year-old Jansa, a fixture on the Slovenian political scene since independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, is currently involved in a defamation case stemming from a tweet he posted in 2016 calling two public television journalists "washed-up prostitutes". He was given a three-month suspended prison sentence in November 2018 but a higher court ordered a retrial in 2019, which is ongoing.

Political analysts, public figures, protesters and those who challenge the...

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