Comment by tw1237128
7 hours ago
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.