Former presidential candidate Călin Georgescu has got himself a new TikTok account after his audience plummeted following a shadow ban on the social media platform_ but some of his new fans are bots, an expert said.
The far-right Georgescu claimed he’d been hit with “a form of censorship that drastically reduced the visibility” of his initial account, Snoop reveals.
Shadow bans are common on TikTok. Universul.net’s own account has confronted the same problem. Social media platforms do this because they’ve identified behavior that is spammy, abusive, or goes against their terms of service.
The new Calin Georgescu account ‘calin.georgescu.real’ had 4.5 million views, 562.4 thousand likes and over 44,000 comments by Monday midnight.
Cybersecurity specialist Andrei Bușe scanned the comments section of the first video published on Georgescu’s latest account.
Bușe noticed a pattern: fake accounts ,profiles that haven’t posted, and only repost clips with Călin Georgescu. They are users with Romanian names and surnames, but also some who imitate pages, with false names or, simply, user followed by a long number (code).
“It happened after the intervention of the European Union,” Andrei Bușe, digital marketing and cybersecurity specialist told Snoop.
Romania’s Constitutional Court canceled the presidential runoff on Friday after declassified intelligence files showed Russia had interfered in the first round of presidential elections including on the TikTok platform. Mr. Georgescu, a EU and NATO skeptic, stunned supporters and opponents after he improbably won the first round.
TikTok representatives were questioned in the European Parliament in connection with suspicions about interference in the first round of presidential elections in Romania. They denied favoring Georgescu, who went from single-digits in the polls to win 22.94% of the votes and come first.
