Croatian fact-checker Faktograf.hr has reported a large-scale cyberattack against its website and an increase in death threats against its journalists. All this after a local businessman, Nenad Bakić, made various accusations against the outlet and invited people on social media to file class-action lawsuits against Faktograf that “would not be very complicated to finance.”
Since the pandemic began, Faktograf says it has reported more than 40 threats of violence against its journalists to the Croatian authorities, but that no one has been arrested. Those threats have intensified over the past week, including some that contain explicit references to the murder of two workers at a social center in Croatia in 2019.
At the same time, the website www.faktograf.hr has suffered a cyberattack known as a Denial of Service attack or DDOS. Over the course of three days, attempts were made to block their website by overwhelming it with more than 100 million connections. Those visits, equivalent to more than six times the total population of Croatia, came, according to Faktograf, mainly from servers in Russia and Indonesia.
“A loud and aggressive minority will not intimidate us”
Faktograf’s response to these attacks is an article in which it says that it “will not allow a loud and aggressive minority” to intimidate them and that “each attack, each insult and threat, is only an additional reason to be even better at our work.” Faktograf, like Maldita.es, is a signatory of the Code of Principles of the International Fact-checking Network (IFCN).
The organization has also recalled that planned lawsuits to silence media outlets, such as those proposed by the businessman in his post, are a common tool of pressure in the country: “according to a survey by the Croatian Journalists’ Association, in 2021 there were at least 924 lawsuits against journalists and media outlets. Croatia is at the top of the EU ranking.”