Română
Authors: Voinea Mădălina, Sorin Ioniță
Expert Forum (EFOR) has identified a coordinated network of 17 TikTok accounts that have generated over 1 million views in the last seven days to promote parliamentary candidate Vasile Costiuc. The network shows clear signs of inauthentic behavior, with 993 “soldier” accounts systematically following the same political profiles. This is an example of how electoral systems are vulnerable to manipulation through political advertising disguised as social media content. In response, we must take systemic action to increase transparency and generate real countermeasures from large platforms.
The broader and unresolved issue of social media platforms
Election periods remain a sensitive time and an unresolved issue for social media companies, which theoretically claim to provide citizens with information but in practice become a favorite environment for spreading disinformation.
The obsessive argument of limited responsibility—i.e., the insistence that “we are just information intermediaries,” or the self-proclamation as an entertainment platform, as TikTok has repeatedly done—has brought us to the point where people get their information mainly from social media, but democratic states have their hands tied when it comes to imposing transparency requirements, monitoring foreign influence (FIMI), and disguised political advertising. A live experiment will take place in the EU, which will be all the more interesting given that both Meta and Google are abandoning political advertising due to the new European TTPA regulation, which comes into full force in October. [TTPA – Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising – is the new European regulation that requires platforms to be more transparent about political advertising.
We have reached this point because there is still a lot of inertia in Europe and, as such, very little cooperation with social media platforms. Most European countries have not even mapped their information space in terms of the main threats, patterns of inauthentic infiltration, or artificial traffic.
The case of Romania sent shock waves, but prevention mechanisms remain weak, and that is the most elegant way we can put it. This is because we still allow social media companies to claim that they have limited responsibility for what happens in the online information space during election periods, but not only then.
The Moldovan elections, fertile ground for manipulation
In the Republic of Moldova, all these limitations in creating a transparent and secure information ecosystem for users during intense moments such as the parliamentary elections in September create fertile ground for illustrating how vulnerable we are. On the one hand, we are faced with the reluctance of platforms to provide access to public data for live monitoring of what is happening. On the other hand, there are regulatory gaps in European legislation, which is otherwise excessive on details that concerned us five years ago but are now less relevant, fueling the platforms’ lack of willingness to be accountable. In addition, there is a constant background interest on the part of Russia, generously funded, to interfere in elections in European countries, using means ranging from direct intervention through voter bribery to more rudimentary and easily organized online influence operations.
The case of Vasile Costiuc: a suspicious rise online
Vasile Costiuc is the president of the “Democracy at Home” political party, a self-proclaimed radical unionist and partner of Romania’s AUR party and its leader, George Simion, with whom he has engaged in joint political activities. Costiuc campaigned for the AUR in the Romanian presidential elections, including media actions related to alleged vote rigging (without evidence), which were taken up and amplified by the AUR. In the past, Costiuc has been active in public actions to expose corruption, sometimes real, sometimes alleged. At the same time, he was part of a larger group of politicians loyal to oligarch Vladimir Plahotniuc, being used against the opposition at the time. Previously, information emerged that Vasile Costiuc was involved in events organized by FSB general Alexandr Kondyakov in Russia.
The accounts promoting Costiuc have seen a surge in popularity on TikTok in recent weeks. A 300% increase in the last seven days compared to the previous week raises legitimate suspicions about the authenticity of this popularity.
The figures are impressive, but not atypical for the TikTok platform, where everything goes viral unpredictably: over 1 million views in the last week alone. This explosion prompted us to investigate whether there were any patterns of inauthentic behavior behind this growth and to see who was creating content about the politician, but also who was consuming it—that is, who his followers were.