Comment by petre
10 hours ago
Precisely how Russia tainted the Romanian presidential elections using Tiktok dormant accounts to hijack another PR campaign.
I'm with the SCotUS on this.
10 hours ago
Precisely how Russia tainted the Romanian presidential elections using Tiktok dormant accounts to hijack another PR campaign.
I'm with the SCotUS on this.
There has been very little public investigation. This is what I could find:
https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...
The Romanian National Liberal Party (opponents of Georgescu) bought the campaign. Their hashtag was "hijacked" (whatever that means) to boost Georgescu instead.
I do not know how TikTok works. Perhaps it is as simple as Georgescu supporters simply using the paid for hashtag for their own messages.
So, according to this article, the Russians did nothing. The Liberal Party engaged in questionable TikTok interference and Georgescu supporters jumped on the bandwagon.
The Western media falling silent on the issue would indicate that this politico.eu is correct.
The "ties" are bots boosting up Georgescu on Kensington Communications' campaign (by adding comments to the videos and reposting it). The PR's company management were dumb enough to do a teaser campaign. Russia used this opportunity to hijack it by using bots that answeed the question describe the profile of your ideal candidate, the subject of the videos paid for by the PR company. The hijackers also used a very similar hastag. Accounts used to hijack the campaign predate Tiktok's launch worldwide. Russia bough dormant accounts and weaponized them to generate over 100M posts in a single day.
The problem is regular people do not fully understand this narrative manipulation mechanism. Not even the infuencers involved in the campaign, or the company that ran it realized who they were promoting until it was too late.
The EU should use this incident to at least fine Tiktok into oblivion, but they're obviously sleeping at the wheel. The Biden Administration, as weak as it has been, has made the correct decision yet again: ban the Chinese propaganda blowhorn.
Hasn't the Russia story been already debunked? https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/12/23/romanian-centre-rig...
Debunked? That article says the election was annulled after evidence of Russian interference was provided.
Anyway Russian interference doesn't usually involve the Kremlin giving money to voters directly (unless you are a citizen of Moldova), but through people in the country willing to sell themselves to Russia. Like "Bogdan Peșchir" in the article who donated €1 million to Tiktok users who promoted Georgescu.
That's the campaign that was hijacked by Russia. The PR company tried (and failed) to use a teasing campaign to promote another candidate without naming him. The Russian bots were commenting with the far-right ultranationalist's candidate name the day before the election under the unsuspecting influencers' videos paid for by the PR company.
In parallel there were other campaigns in the ultranationalist's favour, paid for with crypto.
He's also linked to a former secret service figure¹ who betrayed NATO to the KGB in the '60s, so he's either a FSB trojan, an useful idiot, or both.
1. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihai_Caraman