At UN, Albania's Rama Blames AI-Fuelled Fabrications for 'Flamingo Revolution'
Albania's PM Edi Rama told the UN that AI-driven disinformation, including a fabricated Israeli invasion narrative, fuelled protests and spread anti-Semitic rhetoric.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has warned that artificial intelligence, operating beyond accountability, can collapse the distance between a falsehood and the human mind, pointing to the protests his country witnessed as evidence of that danger.
Addressing the United Nations, Rama referred to what has been called the "flamingo revolution" — a wave of demonstrations that he said was partly driven by a fabricated narrative of an Israeli invasion of the Albanian coast. The invasion, he said, never occurred, but the story was manufactured, personalised and delivered through voices, pages and channels that citizens already trusted.
Rama said the fabrications were tailored to different emotional worlds while serving a single strategic lie. While citizens had their own genuine reasons to protest, he said, they also began demonstrating against a phantom enemy, and anti-Semitic tropes entered Albanian public discourse for the first time. He noted that Albania is the only country in Europe that ended the Second World War with more Jews than it had at the start.
Describing the sequence, Rama said fear turned into anger, anger into mobilisation, and fabrication into political reality. He stressed that the episode was not a laboratory experiment or a science-fiction scenario but unfolded on an ordinary Tuesday in Tirana. The algorithm, he argued, did not invent the objective or develop hatred — a human actor set the goal, and the algorithm found how to activate existing resentments.
Turning to elections, Rama said interference no longer requires a single television station or one piece of propaganda repeated to an entire population. It can now operate at the resolution of each individual voter, he said, with two neighbours on the same street voting in the same election while inhabiting entirely different manufactured realities. When that happens, democracy loses not just a debate or an election, but the common ground on which debate is possible.
He concluded that security no longer erodes only at a country's borders — it erodes in the feed.