'Digital Violence Doesn't Exist in Our Legal System': Albania and Kosovo's Online Hate Problem
A regional roundtable this summer put a spotlight on how women and LGBTQ+ people across Albania and Kosovo are targeted by coordinated online abuse — with almost no legal framework to respond.
In June, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network’s Kosovo office brought together journalists, researchers, legal experts, and civil society groups from Kosovo and Albania for a regional roundtable on a problem regulators in both countries have barely begun to name: technology-facilitated violence against women and LGBTQ+ people. One line from the discussion, from a Kosovo lawyer, captured the core issue plainly: “The term ‘digital violence’ does not even exist in our legal system.”
The case that framed the discussion
The roundtable’s closing session centered on a case study from Balkan Insight journalist Xhorxhina Bami about AlbKings, a Telegram group that at its peak had more than 100,000 members sharing derogatory videos, AI-generated “deepfake” images, and women’s personal information without consent. Some of that same content migrated onto TikTok — BIRN’s monitors identified 427 videos posted between September 2020 and November 2023 designed to humiliate girls and women, spread across a platform with a far larger reach than the original Telegram channel ever had.
The AlbKings case isn’t isolated. BIRN’s ongoing Digital Rights Review, which tracks online abuse across Southeast Europe, has separately documented waves of hate-filled and misogynistic content on TikTok and Facebook targeting individual journalists and public figures, alongside a recurring pattern of threats specifically against LGBTQ+ groups and individuals — ranging from sexual abuse and AI-generated explicit imagery to coordinated anti-LGBTQ+ disinformation campaigns.
Where the two overlap
In Albania, one recent example of that overlap: online outlets circulated photos of rainbow-colored decorative lighting, framing it as evidence of a creeping “LGBTQ+ agenda,” a narrative that spread widely enough to provoke real online hostility directed at both LGBTQ+ activists and the broader women’s rights community that campaigners say increasingly gets targeted using the same tactics. It’s a reminder that in the Balkans, digital hate campaigns rarely stay confined to one target group — the infrastructure of harassment built for one gets reused against the next.
That overlap is part of why the roundtable brought both women’s rights and LGBTQ+ stakeholders into the same room. The tools — Telegram groups that migrate content onto more visible platforms, deepfakes, coordinated pile-ons — don’t discriminate by who’s on the receiving end, even when the specific narratives used to justify the harassment do.
The legal gap, and the slow signs of accountability
The core problem participants described isn’t just cultural, it’s structural: neither Albania nor Kosovo has a legal definition of digital violence, which means prosecutors and police are left trying to fit online harassment, deepfakes, and coordinated abuse campaigns into laws that were never written with those tools in mind. That gap makes prosecution inconsistent at best, and leaves victims — including LGBTQ+ activists targeted for their visibility — with few clear paths to recourse.
There has been some movement. Kosovo authorities arrested and eventually jailed the administrator of the AlbKings Telegram group, a rare instance of a concrete legal outcome in a space where accountability is otherwise scarce. But one prosecution against one group administrator doesn’t touch the broader ecosystem BIRN’s monitors keep documenting — new groups, new platforms, and the same underlying absence of a legal category to charge any of it under.
Why it matters for the region’s EU path
Both Albania and Kosovo have pointed to human rights and rule-of-law reforms as part of their respective paths toward EU integration, and digital rights — data protection, platform accountability, protections for vulnerable groups online — are increasingly part of what Brussels is watching. A legal system with no working definition of digital violence is a gap that’s hard to paper over in accession reports, and advocates at the roundtable made the case that closing it isn’t just about individual cases like AlbKings — it’s about building the basic legal vocabulary needed to prosecute online harassment at all, for women and LGBTQ+ people alike.
