From Parent Viber Groups to Tabloids: How Messages Supporting Protests End Up in the Media and with the Police

(Source: BIRN)”I’m afraid my husband was followed after the Parent Council meeting,” wrote Nada* (name changed) in the Viber group of parents from a primary school in Serbia.

Another father in the group confirmed Nada’s suspicions and shared the names of two men who followed her husband after the Parent Council meeting at their children’s school.

After the father named the two men, the police contacted him and summoned him for questioning. Nada accompanied him in solidarity.

It turned out that one of the named men was a businessman close to the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, who filed a police report claiming his safety was endangered because his name had been shared in a group of about 500 members.

This is just one of several cases in recent months where citizens have been questioned by the police over Viber messages, as protests have spread across the country demanding, among other things, accountability for the deaths of 16 people who died when a newly renovated canopy collapsed at the Novi Sad train station on November 1.

Viber groups have become a popular communication channel for protest supporters—used to organize meetings or actions supporting striking teachers and students in campus blockades. But these conversations have not only ended up with the police—in several cases, they were also leaked to tabloids.

When Police Start Reading Viber Messages

Nada told BIRN that the Parent Council meeting at her child’s school was about whether to support the striking teachers. She said she’d heard beforehand that at least two members of the Serbian Progressive Party would attend.

“Since the Parent Council is mostly made up of women, I told my husband he had to go [to the meeting],” Nada said, adding that the presence of people close to the government made the atmosphere “very unpleasant.”

“They came in with the attitude that they were there to tell us what we should and shouldn’t do,” she said. Her husband left the meeting before it ended—alone. One of the two men followed him.

“When he got home, he told me: ‘Where did you send me, for God’s sake—they now know where we live’,” she recalled.

That night, as she went to bed, messages began pouring into the Viber group. One said: “They [the two men] were at the meeting. Your husband got into an argument with them.”

After Nada posted that she was worried because her husband had been followed, another father shared the men’s names.

As of the time of publication, the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs had not responded to BIRN’s inquiries about the police summons or the criminal complaint filed by one of the named individuals.

In another case on April 24, a resident of Novi Sad posted a message in a local Viber group that, according to a judge, “endangered the safety of President Aleksandar Vučić.”

Reportedly, the person shared a video clip of Vučić speaking, along with the comment: “Look at how many lies our dear president has spewed in just this short clip. He doesn’t need prison, he needs the electric chair.”

Soon after, the police arrived, detained him, and questioned him on suspicion of endangering the president’s safety. He was placed under house arrest for one month with electronic monitoring and banned from using a phone or the internet.

How Parents’ and Teachers’ Viber Chats End Up in Tabloids

Since students began blocking universities to demand accountability for the Novi Sad tragedy—and teachers went on strike in solidarity—supporting citizens organized into informal groups, often using Viber as their primary communication tool.

Neighbors, volunteers cooking for students, and parents all coordinated through Viber.

However, messages from these Viber groups frequently ended up in tabloid newspapers, serving as the foundation for smear campaigns.

In January, a pro-government site from Novi Sad, NS Uživo, published an article titled:
“IT’S SHAKY, THERE ARE A LOT MORE KIDS IN SCHOOL TODAY!” – Panic Among the Chaos Creators! Opposition Calls on VIBER and Social Media for Reinforcements!”

The article included Viber messages in which group members urged others to support teachers, along with a message from a mother calling for people to attend a gathering in support of striking teachers.

A month earlier, Informer, another tabloid, published a chat between primary school parents and their child’s teacher.

The messages show parents asking the teacher whether children were being pulled from class to block intersections as part of the protest. The teacher responded that she had no such information.

Nonetheless, Informer published the messages under the headline:
“Scandal Rocks Serbia: Teacher Forces Kids to Protest.”

The same tabloid published another article titled:
“Teacher Incites Students to Violence!”

This time, the Viber chat included a message from a teacher saying: “It wouldn’t be bad if we united and, if possible, got rid of the villain”—referring to President Vučić.

The message was also posted on the Facebook page of Zaječar’s mayor, Boško Ničić, who questioned whether “a call to eliminate the villain” constituted abuse of children for political purposes and whether this was acceptable in a democratic state.

In a follow-up post, Ničić called the Viber exchange a “public correspondence,” saying he received it from parents and students in the group.

Informer also ran an article in January titled:
“Ecological Taliban Bojan Simišić Urges Parents to Keep Kids Home: Opposition Continues to Exploit Minors.”

The article claimed that “Bojan Simišić of the NGO Eko Straža is persuading parents not to send kids to school,” alongside screenshots of Viber messages where Simišić suggested a poll for parents to vote on whether to support keeping kids out of school.

He also proposed organizing a day when children wouldn’t attend school as a sign of support for teachers.

Unlike many others whose private messages were leaked, Simišić said he knew how he became a target, noting that his son is in the same class as “one of the hardest-core SNS supporters on Twitter.”

“What kind of person sends private group chats to tabloids? Who labels a fellow parent as an ‘Ecological Taliban’?” he wrote on Twitter.

Srđan Kovačević, a lawyer from Novi Sad, has also been repeatedly targeted by tabloids over Viber chats.

On March 20, NS Uživo published an article titled:
“Now It’s All Clear! Leaked Messages: Đilas’s Lawyer Controls the Students, Wants to Incite Chaos via Assemblies (PHOTO).”

The article claimed that a Viber chat shared on TikTok shows Kovačević “controlling” student protesters, implying that Dragan Đilas (opposition leader) is trying to position himself as the opposition leader through Kovačević and the students.

Informer published multiple articles based on Kovačević’s Viber group messages.

Kovačević told BIRN: “No reasonable citizen would expect their private messages to appear in tabloids.”

“Privacy is a constitutional and legal right that must be respected and protected. But this regime has long created a parallel reality where they believe anything is allowed—even leaking private conversations to the media. So nothing surprises me anymore,” he said.

Still, Kovačević did not report the privacy violation to the prosecutor or the Press Council.

“This is not a time for long court battles. It’s time to fight for freedom,” he said.

Are Viber Conversations Private?

Ana Toskić Cvetinović from Partners Serbia, an organization focused on privacy protection, explains that the level of privacy in group chats depends on the number of members.

“The more members there are, the less private it becomes. When a Viber group exceeds 250 users, it’s considered a ‘community,’ which is essentially a public channel with limited privacy,” she said.

Toskić Cvetinović warns users not to assume they’re in a private setting.

“In a group… we may believe we’re in a somewhat protected environment and expect our messages to remain confidential—but that’s not always the case,” she added.

She noted that people whose messages are published out of context can seek legal recourse and contact the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection.

Are Journalists Allowed to Publish Viber Messages?

Gordana Novaković from the Press Council raised questions about how journalists obtained the Viber messages.

“Were they members of the group? If so, did they identify themselves as journalists—or were they in the group as parents? … Or did they get the content from a third party?” she asked.

“Each of these scenarios raises concerns related to what the journalism code of ethics defines as ‘honest means of gathering information.’”

“The code also forbids secret recording or eavesdropping. While this situation isn’t exactly the same, it could still be considered similar, especially if people aren’t aware that what they’re saying will become public.”

Novaković noted that the Press Council has not received any complaints about tabloids publishing private messages.

BIRN contacted the tabloids that published the Viber messages, but none responded by the time of publication.

Viber Groups: Easy Targets

Viber’s settings also contribute to the issue—it’s easy to join a group, phone numbers of members are visible, and screenshots can be taken without notifying others.

Bojan Perkov, a researcher with the SHARE Foundation, which focuses on digital rights and cybersecurity, explained that although Viber claims to use end-to-end encryption, it is a private company and its operations are not open-source.

“We cannot independently verify the app’s security since its code is not publicly available,” he said.

“When someone is added to a Viber group, their phone number becomes visible to all other members—even those who don’t have them in their contacts. This exposes private information to strangers who may have various intentions,” Perkov explained.

He added that police examining Viber messages doesn’t necessarily mean surveillance—anyone can join a group, take screenshots, and forward them to the police or politicians.

Viber does not notify users when screenshots are taken.

“You should enable disappearing messages, setting them to delete after a certain time,” he advised.

“This can prevent screenshots in some phones or send a black screen, or notify members who took the screenshot.”

Still, “none of this stops someone from photographing the screen with another phone.”

Perkov concluded that there are better apps: “Free, open-source applications that use end-to-end encryption protect privacy more effectively. Some allow you to use a username instead of a phone number and let you hide your number so it’s only visible to saved contacts.”

Author: Dragana Prica Kovačević