site.btaCC-DB Deplores Fearmongering over School Platform Sale, Disinformation Scale in Bulgaria

The power-sharing Continue the Change – Democratic Bulgaria (CC-DB) Friday deplored the fearmongering over the recent sale of a popular school platform and said it exposed “the monstrous scale” of disinformation in Bulgaria. Reading out a declaration to that effect in the plenary hall of Parliament, MP Iskren Mitev said, “From a well-known political instrument for dividing and manipulating, disinformation has acquired monstrous proportions.”

The declaration was prompted by a massive scare among parents on social media for a possible leak of children's personal data following the acquisition of Shkolo.bg by the UK company Juniper Education earlier in January. The company explained that the personal data of students is owned by the schools – not by them, and that the fears for data leak are groundless. That was confirmed by the personal data protection watchdog. 

Shkolo.bg was set up in 2016 and became popular when the Education Ministry ordered schools to replace the conventional paper grading and assessment registers by online records from the 2022/2023 school year. It is used by 1,800 schools in Bulgaria and has 2 million users, including educators, pupils and parents.

The CC-DB declaration said that disinformation has targeted Bulgarian children, the social networks and older people, and several days ago it sought to instill fears in Bulgarian parents.

Mitev reiterated the position of the personal data protection regulator that the acquisition of the platform by the UK company does not affect the personal data and that the UK company has no access to them and that they have acquired the business in order to use it in the EK. In Mitev’s words, Shkolo is an example of a private Bulgarian initiative that has produced good results and is something to take pride in. “We have to be proud that such successful companies are created and develop in Bulgaria. That is what we ought to feel – not fear.”

He also said that disinformation seeks to create fear or anger, hate, insecurity, panic or division, and works best with vulnerable groups. There is data showing that Bulgaria is among the EU countries that are most vulnerable to disinformation and this countries scored only 31 out of 100 points for media literacy.

“Rumours, speculations, libel and imprecise information have put out deep roots in the Bulgarian media outlets and social media. They use one part of the truth and ‘embellish’ it with untruths, simplistic explanations and mantras,” said Mitov.

He went on to mention some popular conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns in Bulgaria: “The vaccines proved to be without chips, The Norway-bound trains with Bulgarian children are empty. The logo with the frog on foods is not a danger warning. Electric cars work even in the cold and so do solar panels. We are not sending soldiers to Ukraine. The law against domestic violence did not usher in a third gender. Bulgaria is not taking back 6,000 refugees from anywhere and we have survived without Russian gas this winter. And no, we will not remove the [classic poem] "I am Bulgarian, I love our green mountains" from schoolbooks, nor will Shipka monument be dismantled. All that has been disinformation and their goal is to make Bulgarian people take decisions out of fear.” 

Mitev stressed the importance of schools and education in the fight against disinformation. “An educated person questions easy explanations, asks questions, checks, thinks critically. For this very reason, the masters of disinformation attack the youngest, the most inexperienced, attack every progress, every innovation in education, in schools,” the MP said.