‘This Web Page Should Not Exist’

As the number of migrants crossing Slovenia on their way towards central Europe rose dramatically in 2015, social media were commonly used to express fear and hatred towards the migrants. Zlovenija, a Tumblr page with a wordplay on “evil” and “Slovenia”, collected and re-published individual Facebook posts, their authors’ names and profile pictures, thus exposing their brutality in an attempt to condemn such discourse. Some of the posts were even printed and disseminated across the capital. The authors of the Facebook posts could request to be removed from Zlovenija, as long as they deleted their original post and briefly explained why they changed their mind. Many did so. Their explanations, sincere or insincere, substituted the original posts and Zlovenija stopped actively posting in 2016, which also coincided with the end of the acute phase of the migrant crisis. The response of the public was quick, but far from uniform with some praising the page and others strongly condemning it. Zlovenija’s approach was controversial and it immediately raised questions of both its legality as well as its legitimacy. In this chapter, we aim to explore Zlovenija's repercussions for the Slovenian public. We thus firstly analyse the original posts published on Zlovenija, the explanations that substituted the original posts. We explore Zlovenija’s motivation and logic through an interview with the author(s) of Zlovenija, and its impact through an analysis of the response of the wider public online. We then juxtapose these findings to the legal framework of the phenomena and critically assess the assertion that Zlovenija was no better than the original wrongdoers it was trying to expose. In fact, we discuss how by exposing and denouncing the evil in the original posts Zlovenija motivated responsibility and fostered public debate; however, the method it used was extreme and its use seems tremendously problematic in a modern democratic society.