The portal in4s.net published on April 19th a story about a tanker truck that overturned while taking exit from Mojkovac in the direction of Pljevlja, near the bridge on the Đurđevića Tara river, pointing out that it was a tanker truck that allegedly transported illegally produced cigarettes in a factory in Mojkovac, calling for unknown sources from the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
An article entitled “Overturned Tanker Truck Packed with Illegal Cigarettes from Mojkovac?” was followed by a blurry picture of the overturned tanker truck from which you can see the transported goods scattered around.
They stated that the goods allegedly had been collected after a couple of hours and that Veselin Veljovic, the Director of the Police Directorate, took care to hide the whole thing from the eyes of the public.
Since only this portal has transmitted this news – that it did not have an echo in the media in the following days – we decided to investigate its credibility.
Namely, by analyzing the picture, we found that it was not about cigarettes at all, but about orange crates.
The mentioned picture was taken from one of the portals (radiosarajevo.ba, telegraf.rs) that published the news in November 2017 in a completely different context.
In fact, it was a tanker truck that rolled over around Nis, and which transported legally produced oranges from Greece to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although the trend of spreading disinformation and propaganda in the media is very present, the trend of spreading fake news is not excluded, as we can see in this example. The display of such content aims to constantly deceive the public knowing how difficult it is today to differentiate fake news from credible ones, and that most of the individuals will not engage themselves in analyzing, but will believe the content during the first and probably the last reading of that news.