TIRANA, Sept 25 /ATA/- By Maela Marini/In his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Prime Minister Edi Rama drew attention to the role of algorithms in shaping what he described as Albania’s ‘flamingo revolution’.
Prime Minister Edi Rama told the United Nations General Assembly that Albania had faced a fabricated narrative of an alleged Israeli invasion of its coastline — an event that never occurred. He said the story was fabricated, personalised and disseminated through voices, pages and channels already trusted by citizens. One citizen heard a tale of religious provocation, while another absorbed a conspiracy of foreign occupation.
According to him, different fabrications tapped into distinct emotional worlds, all serving the same strategic falsehood — with real consequences. He stressed that while citizens had their own reasons to protest, they suddenly found themselves demonstrating against an imaginary enemy.
Rama told the United Nations General Assembly that antisemitic rhetoric had entered Albania’s public discourse for the first time. He recalled that Albania was the only European country to end the Second World War with more Jews than at its outset. He said fear turned into anger, anger into mobilisation, and fabrication into political reality — not as a laboratory experiment but as lived experience. Rama underlined that this was not science fiction, but simply a Tuesday in Tirana.
Rama said that the algorithm did not invent the target, nor did it create or ignite hatred, but revealed how to activate existing human hostility. He described this as ‘systematic deception offered as a service’. Rama added that election interference today no longer requires a television station or propaganda broadcast to an entire population.
Rama said that algorithms can now operate with the resolve of each individual voter. When this occurs, he warned, democracy does not merely lose a debate or an electoral cycle, but forfeits the shared ground that makes debate possible. Sovereignty, he said, is no longer eroded at borders. In the twentieth century it meant control over land, territorial waters and national airspace; today Europe pours ever greater sums into defending its soil and skies, while forgetting that sovereignty in this century must also mean the capacity of a free society to protect the conditions under which citizens form their opinions. Without that ability, Rama concluded, ‘sovereignty over land and skies becomes nothing more than an illusion’.”
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