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RADAR is a regional project examining the early dynamics of online youth radicalisation on TikTok across Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia, three countries where a shared linguistic space and interconnected digital environments allow extremist narratives to spread quickly across borders. The project responds to a specific gap: despite the region’s post-conflict legacy, persistent foreign disinformation efforts, and the platform’s outsized influence among young users, no up-to-date, TikTok-specific study of how such content circulates and resonates had existed. This report presents the Serbian findings, drawing on a purposive sample of 334 TikTok posts, coded for stage of radicalisation, dominant narrative, target and emotional tone, alongside two focus groups held in Belgrade in July 2026 that tested how young people from different backgrounds read the same material. The findings arrive at a moment of unusual political intensity in Serbia, one in which questions of accountability, corruption and the limits of legitimate dissent have moved to the centre of public life, a backdrop against which the patterns identified below take on particular significance.
The central finding is that the antagonism in the Serbian sample is directed inward rather than outward. Authoritarian and anti-democratic narratives form the largest category (43.1%), narrowly ahead of ethno-nationalist and identitarian content (38.6%); political opponents framed as “traitors” are the most common target, ahead of ethnic groups. Ethno-nationalist material is less frequent, but it is not lesser in consequence, since a larger share of it sits at the radicalising or mobilising end of the continuum. On the surface, moreover, little of this content appears overtly propagandistic. Radicalising ideas are conveyed through humour, lifestyle advice, calm “explanatory” videos, television and podcast clips, and short montages built around music and archival footage, formats designed to entertain or inform, not to provoke. The underlying intention, however, is often precisely to make hierarchy, hostility or distrust look ordinary: something to laugh at, something to admire, or simply something “everyone knows”. The Serbian digital landscape captured here is therefore shaped by two overlapping fault lines: a present-day struggle over who counts as a legitimate political actor and an older one over war, nationhood and historical memory, delivered in forms that rarely announce themselves as political at all.
It is this ordinariness, more than any single extreme post, that makes the Serbian sample difficult to police through conventional content moderation, and it is also what the two focus groups found hardest to see consistently. Participants active in civil society organisations tended to decode framing, aesthetics and manipulation almost on sight, while participants from the general youth population more often engaged with the surface topic and treated the content as harmless, silly, or relevant only to “other” people, usually older or less educated audiences. Neither group is simply resilient or simply vulnerable; the difference lies in what each was trained, by circumstance or exposure, to notice. It is this gap, and not a lack of scepticism as such, that media literacy programmes will need to close.
The findings of this report speak directly to Serbia’s European path. Legitimate opposition, independent media and a functioning space for public disagreement are among the political conditions the process is designed to build and protect. A digital environment in which everyday disagreement is routinely recast as betrayal works against exactly that objective, regardless of who currently benefits from it politically. For policymakers and practitioners working on Serbia’s EU path, this report’s findings suggest that resilience to digital radicalisation deserves the same sustained attention as the rule-of-law reforms it is meant to accompany.
