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This report examines the early dynamics of online radicalisation on TikTok among young people in Montenegro. It draws on a purposive sample of 332 TikTok posts encountered in the country between March and September 2026, each coded for stage of radicalisation, dominant narrative, target, emotional tone and conspiratorial framing, and on two focus groups held in Podgorica in July 2026, where young people from different backgrounds discussed the same videos. It is part of RADAR, a regional project examining early-stage digital radicalisation across Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, three countries that occupy the same linguistic space and thus share a closely interwoven digital space in which radicalising narratives move easily from one to the next.
The findings arrive at a particular moment in Montenegro’s political life. The country is the most advanced candidate in the EU enlargement process, twenty years after an independence referendum whose outcome remains settled in law yet still contested in everyday political culture. Questions of nationhood, language and church continue to shape public debate, and accession itself presupposes a public sphere in which such disputes can be argued without sliding into accusations of betrayal.
Three themes run through the sample. The first is a substantial body of content that commemorates and glorifies individuals convicted of war crimes from the 1990s, delivered through funeral footage, tribute songs and archival imagery rather than explicit argument. The second concerns Montenegro’s own statehood, as content denies or ridicules a distinct Montenegrin identity, recasts independence as betrayal and revives historical labels for internal enemies. The third is a substantial strand on gender and sexuality, in which more than a fifth of all posts target women, feminists or LGBTIQ persons in the name of a “natural order.” Across all three, the material rarely presents itself as an argument that could be answered: it works through memory, humour and belonging rather than through claims that invite rebuttal.
The two focus groups recognised manipulation readily but responded to it in markedly different ways. Participants working in civil society organisations weighed each video against the limits of free expression, drew a clear line at explicit threats, and could name concrete channels for reporting hate speech to the police or state institutions. Participants from the general youth population were no less critical of individual claims, yet knew of no protective channel beyond the platform’s own reporting button, and described nationalist content as background noise they had grown numb to. Both groups tended to scroll past rather than report.
For Montenegro’s European path, these findings pointless to a need for new restrictions than to consistent enforcement of the rules already in place, and to building the procedural knowledge and media literacy that young people currently acquire only if they happen to work in civil society. A public sphere in which identity disputes are conducted without recourse to betrayal, and in which existing protections are known and used, is not incidental to accession; it is among the conditions the process itself depends on.
