Facebook page “Minuti Newspaper" published a content titled yesterday "Exclusive | Feride Rushiti was a US request for President, Kurti accepted the proposal."
In the comments section of this post, this site has also included a link to an article published by the website "nminut.info".
What was claimed?
The introduction to the article published by the website "nminut.info" states: "Sources from Gazeta Minuti report that Feride Rushiti's name as a presidential candidate also came as a request from the United States Embassy in Kosovo, a proposal that, according to these sources, was accepted by Prime Minister Albin Kurti."
About the “Gazeta Minuti” Facebook page
Hibrid.info has addressed some content published by this page on Facebook. Also, a deeper analysis of this page shows that “Gazeta Minuti” publishes content on Facebook and on the website “nminut.info” and “gazetaminuti.info” without providing transparency about ownership or contacts; although “About Us” mentions Arbnor Buzhala as the founder, this data is not verified, the declared domain does not match the content and does not appear as a business registered with ARBK, raising doubts about its reliability.
Lexo here full analysis about the "Gazeta Minuti" website.
So, the claim about the "US request" for president originates from the website "nminut.info", which is characterized by a lack of transparency and questionable credibility.
Hibrid.info has conducted Google searches regarding this claim, but has not found any reporting published by credible media that supports it (see here).
Research shows that the content published by "Gazeta Minuti" was distributed by various Facebook pages such as, "Gazetavip.com","Post News","News","Albanews24"and "M1-TV".
A little context
Speaker of the Assembly of Kosovo, Albulena Haxhiu, on Monday (April 27th) officially announced that the Parliamentary Group of the Vetevendosje Movement (LVV) has processed the request to call an extraordinary session to elect the country's president.
Within the framework of this request, two candidacies for President have been proposed: Feride Rushiti and Hatixhe Hoxha.
In the first round, Feride Rushiti received 63 votes, while one vote was declared invalid. Hatixhe Hoxha received no votes.
The Speaker of the Parliament, Albulena Haxhiu, after the end of the first round of voting, said that the session will continue on Tuesday (see here Radio Free Europe article).
Analyze
The claim that Feride Rushiti was proposed as a presidential candidate after the "request of the US" was published by a website with a lack of transparency and questionable credibility, without being supported by any credible media.
After verifying the facts, no credible sources were found to confirm this claim, while the content was also shared by several Facebook pages, increasing the spread of unverified information.
Based on its work methodology, hibrid.info assesses this content as "Disinformation".
rationale
"Disinformation" is defined as information content that contains a "mix" of inaccurate sources or even half-truthful attributes, and that is created and/or distributed with the deliberate intention of causing harm. The motive behind the producers/distributors of disinformation content lies in achieving a political, financial, psychological or social goal.