Several Kosovo news portals published an article yesterday (April 18) with a photograph claiming that the Speaker of the Kosovo Assembly, Glauk Konjufca, violated anti-Covid measures after having dinner with militants of the Vetëvendosje Movement.
Konjufca, through his Facebook profile, immediately denied this news, calling it false, as according to him, the photo was dated February 17, at a time when there were no restrictive measures, and that, as he says, some portals have tried to attribute this dinner to him, which did not happen.
"Last night I was the target of an attack by several portals (Metro, Periskopi, Insajderi, Infokus and Lajmi.net) through a fake news story. A photo from February 17 was deliberately misused to accuse me of a dinner that wasn't there," Konjufca wrote, among other things.
Hibrid.info, through the Google search engine, found the article published on these portals, although some of them have already deleted it from their websites.
Links to the article published on several portals:
Below you can find the link to Konjufca's Facebook post, which denied the writings of several media outlets.
https://www.facebook.com/GlaukKonjufca1981/posts/1677760215744496
Despite denying the claim made in the media on this topic, Konjufca in his denial did not provide facts proving the authenticity of this photo, such as the date of its posting on social networks. Hibrid.info has not been able to find this photo to verify the time of publication and posting, as it appears to have been removed from social networks.
Analyze:
Several portals shared this article claiming that Konjufca violated anti-Covid measures by dining with his party's militants. However, none of these articles have been able to substantiate this claim, as they have not provided any facts proving the time of publication of this photo.
The photograph shows the inscription "Thank you to the Speaker of the Parliament for the dinner." However, this raises doubts about the date this photo was taken, as he took up the position of Speaker of the Parliament on March 22.
The reference to “Speaker of Parliament” in the caption of this photo can only be justified by the fact that the Vetëvendosje Movement has entrusted this position to Konjufca since before the February 14 elections. However, since neither party (the media nor Konjufca) has managed to publish the authentic post of the photo, hibrid.info is unable to assess which of the claims is true. What is known for sure is that, both in the media article and in Konjufca’s reaction (denial), there are no facts for the claims made. For this reason, hibrid.info, based on its work methodology, assesses both claims as “Unverified Content”.
Reasoning:
The “Unverified” rating is given to those media reports that do not provide sufficient information to confirm the claims made in the report, and which have not been able to confirm the same due to the lack or non-possession of reliable sources.