By canceling the second round of the presidential election, the Constitutional Court highlighted the importance of addressing voter manipulation on TikTok in favor of a far-right candidate, Le Monde writes.
The Romanian presidential election, held on Sunday, November 24 before being canceled on December 6 by the Constitutional Court in Bucharest, was a nightmare scenario for liberal democracies, the French publication said in a news analysis written by Damien Leloup and Le Monde’s Austria correspondent Jean-Baptiste Chastand. .
Calin Georgescu, a conspiracy theorist and pro-Russian candidate – who had promised to abolish political parties – emerged as the frontrunner in the first round out of nowhere, gaining popularity through a meticulously orchestrated interference campaign on TikTok.
Despite the lack of transparency surrounding his CV, inner circle and the origins of his campaign finances, he was poised to win the second round against a weaker pro-European opponent, an opinion poll released after Christmas showed.
The election was canceled at the last minute due to an electoral process that was “flawed throughout its entire duration and at every stage.” This was an extraordinary decision within the European Union, reflecting the unprecedented level of doubt surrounding this election.
For the first time in the age of social media, these most likely “state” actors, according to Romanian intelligence services, successfully manipulated TikTok’s algorithms. Within weeks, videos promoting their chosen candidate flooded the phones of the platform’s nine million Romanian users, making it the ninth most popular trend worldwide, and turned tens of millions of views into over two million real votes in a country of 19 million people.
Of course, the rise of pro-Russian far-right ideas in Romanian public opinion predates TikTok. As in much of the Western world, a combination of record-high inflation, weariness over the war in Ukraine and anti-establishment sentiment has, for months, created a climate of frustration that has allowed various nationalist political movements to thrive.
However, Georgescu’s specific success in this fertile breeding ground was anything but organic.
Eyes on Russia
In the weeks leading up to the election and even on the eve of the vote fake accounts and genuine influencers funded by sources of unclear origin artificially boosted the popularity of this candidate, who conducted almost no real-world campaigning. It was only on the evening of the first round, when he unexpectedly garnered nearly 23% of the vote, that the press and intelligence services scrambled to investigate the campaign of this anti-establishment candidate who had previously remained entirely under the radar.
Doubts quickly arose about this influence operation, although Georgescu was adamant that he did not spend a single euro in his campaign. Four days after the election, the Supreme Council of National Defense, the country’s highest security organization, said that a candidate had “benefited from massive exposure” on TikTok by “violating electoral law.” The CSAT, however, was careful not to go further and the campaign for the second round continued, in an electrified atmosphere.
Everything would change on December 4, four days before the second round, when the incumbent president, Klaus Iohannis, decided to declassify intelligence reports. They claimed that such an operation could have come only from a “state actor”, with all eyes naturally directed towards Russia, even if the Romanian services were not able to establish this with certainty. Suddenly undermining all democratic institutions, these accusations pushed the judges of the Constitutional Court to annul the elections less than forty-eight hours before the polling stations opened for the second round.
This radical decision was naturally attacked by the far right. Georgescu immediately denounced a “coup d’état”, invoking in particular the fact that the Romanian constitutional judges were appointed by a political power discredited by multiple corruption scandals. However, Georgescu did not dare to call his voters to protest and was content to promise appeals. Unaccustomed to taking to the streets, his voters seem to have resigned themselves to having to wait for new elections, while doubts about the profile of their candidate have come to spread even within the far-right parties that support him.
The Romanian authorities, even if they fumbled during these two weeks in which the country almost collapsed and even if they were not always without hidden political reasons, played a crucial role by choosing transparency. Faced with unprecedented interference in a Western electoral process, the authorities have understood that it is essential to put into public debate the worrying elements they have managed to gather.
Still imperfect and unfinished at the time of their publication, the content of the intelligence reports was so serious that it managed to counter the roller coaster of conspiratorial messages inspired by Moscow.
TikTok, on the other hand, remained in denial: even though the network collaborated with the authorities and has a fairly reasonable number of moderators, it continued to claim that it had not detected any major influence operations on its platform. The piles of fake comments, payments to influencers or accounts that have been dormant for years and are suddenly reactivated – all these are signs that the security procedures put in place by the big platforms seem inadequate to deal with agile players, who are perfectly familiar with the techniques that allow manipulative algorithms.
Massive unprecedented pushback for Putin’s election meddling, from Romania
