Ahead of the Romanian presidential election runoff on Sunday 18th May, Refute has uncovered a widespread international influence operation targeting Romanian expat voters on TikTok.
The campaign includes inauthentic—in some cases, AI generated—videos deliberately targeting locations with high Romanian expat populations across Europe.
Refute detected approximately 32,500 videos on TikTok containing slogans promoting populist candidate George Simion and annulled candidate Calin Georgescu. Many of these videos are inauthentic, such as videos that have been duplicated in a coordinated manner across dozens of accounts.
Despite the fact that only 24% of Romanian nationals live outside of Romania, 48% of engagement with these videos (40 million likes and comments) came from outside Romania. Countries outside of Romania with the greatest share of engagement were the UK (15%), Italy (7%), Germany (7%), Spain (5%) and France (2%).
“The fact that nearly half of engagement with videos pushing populist candidates comes from outside of Romania—twice the percentage of Romanians living abroad—indicates that Romanian expat voters are being disproportionately targeted to manipulate the election rerun." – - Vlad Galu, Refute co-founder and CTO and Romanian native
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“We’ve already seen the use of influencers and bot farms in the November 2024 election, but this is a new example of a sophisticated influence operation crossing international boundaries to sway Romanian voters living abroad,” added Tom Garnett, Refute co-founder and CEO.
“Refute’s platform uses learnings from behaviours observed in last year’s election to automatically score and predict coordinated and inauthentic behaviour with unmatched speed and accuracy.”
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The November 2024 Romanian presidential election was annulled due to alleged foreign interference, which is thought to have contributed to the success of first round winner George Simion, as well as continued support for the banned candidate Calin Georgescu.
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I’m so sick of TikTok and Facebook being allowed to set fire to democracy.
European Commission preliminarily finds TikTok’s ad repository in breach of the Digital Services Act – [15 May]
The Commission has informed TikTok of its preliminary view that the company does not fulfil the Digital Services Act (DSA)'s obligation to publish an advertisement repository.
Such an advertising repository is critical for researchers and civil society to detect scam advertisements, hybrid threat campaigns, as well as coordinated information operations and fake advertisements, including in the context of elections.
Who uses social media for gathering information
