For Cheese, the ban on “appropriation” of the Classical Hellenic emblem with its distinctive pointy rays was the latest act of surrender in a bitter fight over Macedonian identity.

It was part of a historic deal with Greece to end a 30-year dispute over his country’s use of the name “Macedonia” – which Athens argued implied territorial ambitions over a northern Greek province of the same name and its ancient legacy of Alexander the Great.

Under the deal signed in July 2018, the former Yugoslav republic had to change maps and textbooks, abandon all use of the Vergina Sun and – the ultimate betrayal, in Cheese’s view – rechristen itself “North Macedonia”.

Sitting in an outdoor cafe as dusk descended, he vowed never to sully his lips with the new name.

“I’m a patriot, and I just don’t want my country’s name to be changed,” he told BIRN.

Few people know Cheese’s true identity, though many are familiar with his nationalist views. He is, in fact, Goran Kostovski, a 38-year-old marketing company worker from the capital, Skopje.

With almost 10,000 Twitter followers on three continents, Kostovski led a social media campaign in 2018 urging Macedonians to boycott a referendum on implementing the name-change deal, known as the Prespa agreement after the lake near which it was signed.

While the Prespa deal promised to unblock Greek opposition to the country’s hopes of joining NATO and the EU, critics saw it as a compromise too far. They hoped a low turnout in the September 2018 referendum would invalidate the result.

“It made no sense to tell the world to vote no in the referendum because we feared the government would distort the results,” Kostovski said. “We had to boycott the referendum first.”

Prompting street protests at home and drumming up diaspora dollars abroad, the “#boycott” campaign was a runaway success.

While 95 per cent of those who voted in the referendum were in favour of the name-change deal, turnout was only 37 per cent – well short of the 50 per cent minimum threshold.

Though parliament later ratified the Prespa agreement anyway, experts say the victory for voter suppression was due in part to a new type of information warfare increasingly seen in nationalist circles.

Known as “computation propaganda”, it is what the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University calls “the interaction of algorithms, automation and politics”.

Few have mastered the art better than Kostovski, though he is cagey about the methods he uses.

“You can say we’re bots, but that doesn’t mean it’s true,” he said, referring to the new foot soldiers of the online propaganda war: bogus Twitter accounts programmed to behave like humans.

“We’ve blurred your thinking so you don’t know where our campaign is coming from, and you don’t know where to look first.”

While much has been said of Balkan troll farms and fake news factories, less is known about the impact of computational propaganda on the workings of democracy in the region.

A BIRN investigation into nationalist networks on both sides of the name dispute lifts the lid on the online tricks employed to amplify political messages and distort public opinion.

It is a journey into an underworld of computer code and conspiracy theories, where “ghost users” and “Twitterbots” meet far-right extremism in a digital hall of mirrors.

As much fake buzz as fake news, the activity is designed to create the false impression of a giant online conversation so opinion-makers such as journalists and activists sit up and take notice.

In this way, experts say a small group of geeks with laptops can exert an influence way out of whack with their actual numbers, with worrying implications for democratic discourse.

Disinformation ‘spin cycle’

At the government headquarters in Skopje, the country’s new official name – Republic of North Macedonia – greets visitors as they approach the Ionic columns of the building, renovated five years ago to look like the White House in Washington, DC.

It is a stone’s throw from the city’s main square, where a statue of Alexander the Great on a stallion looms over a Classical-style fountain – the result of a taxpayer-funded makeover of Skopje to give it a more antiquarian feel.

Many saw the revamp announced in 2010 as an architectural thumbing of the nose at Greece by the government of then Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski after Athens vetoed his country’s accession to NATO in 2008.

Inside government headquarters, Demijan Hadzi-Angelovski, a 28-year-old social media expert at the information ministry, recalled how 10 or so influential Twitter accounts sought to dominate the news agenda in the run-up to the Prespa referendum.

Every day, three times a day, a different user would send one or two provocative tweets, which would then be liked and retweeted by an army of automated accounts, he said.

The idea was to “trend” on Twitter and get picked up by big news aggregators like Time.mk.

“Their goal was to have the news sites view and reproduce these tweets, to make the information more credible,” he said. “They then re-posted the news in a washing machine news cycle.”

Their goal was to have the news sites view and reproduce these tweets, to make the information more credible. They then re-posted the news in a washing machine news cycle. Demijan Hadzi-Angelovski, government social media expert

According to Information Minister Damjan Manchevski, who oversaw the government’s pro-Prespa referendum campaign, much of the recycled content was fake news designed to discredit the agreement.

“More than 10 per cent of articles in that period were pure misinformation,” Manchevski told BIRN in an interview. “The bots on Twitter were the main source of fake news.”