Romania’s presidential election in November 2024 was canceled after alleged foreign interference catapulted outsider Calin Georgescu into first place.
A large international influence operation is targeting Romanian voters in the diaspora across Europe on TikTok with fake videos, in some cases AI-generated, Refute, a London-based tech company dedicated to detecting and combating disinformation campaigns targeting commercial organizations said Thursday.
It said it had detected about 32,500 videos on TikTok containing slogans promoting populist candidate George Simion and former candidate Calin Georgescu. Many of these videos are inauthentic, and have been duplicated in a coordinated manner across dozens of accounts.
The videos have been liked 40 million times with the highest share of interactions in Britain, (15%), Italy (7%), Germany (7%), Spain (5%) and France (2%).
“The fact that almost half of the interactions with videos promoting populist candidates come from outside Romania—twice as high as the percentage of Romanians living abroad—indicates that Romanian voters in the diaspora are disproportionately targeted to influence the second round of elections,” said Vlad Galu, co-founder of Refute.
“This surge in interactions from accounts based outside Romania could have a significant impact on the results of Sunday’s elections,” he added.
AI-generated videos frequently include mundane images unrelated to the political narratives mentioned in the audio. These videos are often copied and shared by other accounts, including those created to imitate other users on the platform.
For example, the TikTok account “danielbudurescu88” is almost identical to the user “daniewov66p”:
Calin Georgescu benefited from a massive push from TikTok accounts, many of them inauthentic. Romania’s top court canceled the election after intelligence reports revealed foreign interference.
Romania’s presidential frontrunner candidate rebuked after calling opponent “autistic”
