A handful of viral images emerged from Tirana this summer.
One of the most defining moments happened on July 4, when protesters hauled a bust of Prime Minister Edi Rama onto the main boulevard, tied a rope around its neck, and pulled it down Everyone watching understood the reference instantly. In 1991, Albanians toppled the statue of Enver Hoxha in Skanderbeg Square, ending four decades of one of the most repressive regimes in Europe. Thirty-five years later, a new generation was performing the same gesture, not against a communist regime, but against a democratically elected government it no longer trusts to tell the truth.
Protesters in front of Albania’s Prime Minister’s Office symbolically toppling a bust of Prime Minister Edi Rama, wearing a sign that reads “The last dictator”, comparing the act to the 1991 toppling of Enver Hoxha’s statue
Writing from Kosovo, I can see how local Albanians view the so-called “Flamingo Revolution”, with a mixture of pride and instant recognition. What began in late May as a local dispute in Zvërnec, a village on the Adriatic coast near the Narta Lagoon, has grown into the largest civic mobilisation Albania has seen since the fall of communism. The trigger was a luxury resort project linked to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, planned on the island of Sazan on a stretch of protected wetland where flamingos feed each year. Residents woke up to find barbed wire around their beach and construction machinery in a protected area. The government insisted there was no project, on the same day Ivanka Trump gave an interview describing her future private island in the Adriatic. When a farmer was dragged from his land by masked private security while police stood by, something in the country snapped.
More than a quarter of a million people filled the boulevard in Tirana. Albanians protested in Berlin, London, Rome, Paris and Prishtina. Pink flamingos became the symbol of a movement that is about far more than one resort: it is about unclear “strategic investor” laws, disputed permits, corruption, and a political class that treats public assets as private property.
At its core, the protests are a demand for accountability and for the right of citizens to decide what happens to their land. But there is a second story inside this one. It is about information, who controls it, who trusts it, and what happens when they don’t.
The country that wasn’t allowed to watch
To understand why the media question matters so much in Albania, we have to remember what total information control actually looked like. Under Hoxha’s regime, which began in 1944, Albania was the North Korea of Europe, with all the restrictions of the press that entailed. But foreign television pierced right through Albania’s strict isolation. By tuning into Italian and Yugoslav broadcasts, the Albanian people witnessed the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe and caught glimpses of Western life through shows like Dynasty. For a country sealed off from the rest of the continent, these TV signals were evidence that another reality existed, ultimately putting immense pressure on the regime to change.
When communism collapsed, the assumption was that free media would simply arrive with democracy. What arrived instead, over three decades, was something more complicated: dozens of channels, but concentrated ownership; formal press freedom, but deep self-censorship whenever a story touched oligarchs or politically connected business. A similar pattern has been suppressing news of the Albanian protests, where political influence over media outlets ensures that public unrest is either ignored or quietly swept aside.
Protestors hold banners to demonstrate against the construction of the luxury resort, June 10, 2026. (Adnan Beci / AFP via Getty Images)
When international outlets first reported on suspicious construction activity in Zvërnec back in April, almost none of the major Albanian broadcasters picked it up. Instead, outlets like the Associated Press, The Guardian, BBC, and Al Jazeera led coverage on the ground.
So, what took Albanian media outlets so long? Albanian journalists themselves have pointed to a familiar explanation for the delay: a handful of politically connected owners control much of the national television landscape, and stories that touch the government’s own investment deals are the ones editors are most reluctant to run.
The vacuum, and who filled it
The protests did not wait for television to notice them. In the first days, the movement’s real newsroom was made of phones: livestreams on TikTok from Zvërnec, videos of injured protesters on Youtube, drone shots of crowds that state-friendly channels were busy minimising. Mainstream broadcasters largely framed the project through jobs and tourism, and when the demonstrations became too big to ignore, parts of the public debate shifted from the substance of the protest to insinuations about the protesters, their motives, their identities, alleged foreign hands. Activists have said openly that social platforms did the work traditional media should have done from day one. One of the movement’s slogans is blunt: Bojkotoni mediat! (“Boycott the media”).
Here is where media literacy stops being a school subject and becomes a survival skill. For perhaps the first time in Albania’s democratic history, much of Generation Z is doing something its grandparents could never dare to do. They are producing their own record of events. In today’s Albanian protests, memes function simultaneously as a digital placard, a sharp caricature, real-time political commentary, and a vital mobilization tool. A single, widely shared satirical image says more, and says it faster, than an official government press release ever could. For a population that spent forty years being dictated to about what reality was, the people have decided, collectively and visibly, that they will document reality for themselves.
And yet the same crisis carries real dangers, especially now, in the age of AI. When trust in institutions collapses, the space it leaves is not automatically filled by truth. It can be filled by synthetic images, manipulated clips, and disinformation that spreads through the very networks the protesters rely on. And when anger at “the media” as a system turns into hostility toward the camera operator standing in the crowd, a trust crisis becomes a safety crisis. The Albanian Association of Journalists had to remind the public twice in June that field reporters are not the enemy, that criticising captured ownership structures is legitimate, while threatening the freelancers documenting your own protest is self-defeating. Media literacy cuts both ways: It requires questioning the narrative you are handed, but it also demands knowing the difference between a journalist and a propagandist. That distinction is up to the audience to figure out.
Acting like Europeans, because they are
What moves me most, watching from Peja, is that Albanians are not waiting for Europe to certify their democracy. In 1991 Albanians tore down a statue to join Europe. In 2026 they are pulling down something harder to topple: the monopoly on the story. Hoxha jammed the antennas. His successors captured the channels. This generation simply built its own.
The flamingos, for what it’s worth, are still in the lagoon. And so are the people.
Photo Credits: Adnan Beci
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