Digital propaganda and voting behavior in the case of Albania

Renis Jakini

Bachelor's thesis

Abstract:

Albania, part of the Western Balkan countries, has been continuously manifested with various types of digital propaganda over the course of several years. The citizens of Albania stand on different viewpoints of the present propaganda in their country whether they agree that this phenomenon is a problem, or whether it is not even happening in their daily life and processes. This study aims to examine the perception and awareness of the citizens of Albania by various methodologies such as an anonymous survey concerning the level of propaganda topic in their homeland, by statistical analysis approach through the formulation of hypothesis from the data of the survey, by sentiment analysis approach of the comments of Albanian citizens in social media apps. At the same time, individual anonymous interviews with real-life experiences of digital propaganda, voting processes and corruption were conducted as well, to cement the main objective of the study. In conclusion, the implementation of the methodologies above show a really important result of how residents of Albania, in respect to the selected sample of the study, view their country and the propaganda present there and at the same time, show how these citizens are deciding to leave the country and have a better life, in most of the cases in European countries, rather than tackling these problems in the country they are born.

Keywords

Albania, Elections, Sentiment Analysis, Statistics, Social Media, Interviews, Computational Propaganda

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 13. 3. 2024

Thesis defence

• Date of defence: 22. 5. 2024
• Supervisor: Věra Motyčková, MA
• Reader: Stipan Čupić, Ing.

Czech University of Life Sciences Prague

Faculty of Economics and Management

Bachelor programme:
Informatics