Română
Policy Brief 190 – From Underdog to Contender The Rise of Călin Georgescu in the Polls
From September 2024 until now political hashtags have been constantly TOP trending on Romania. Following our online monitoring it was clear to us that the invasion of political content is coming from a wave of accounts that mostly support posts about presidential candidates.
TikTok’s official position is that the platform does not support paid political advertisements, but this PR exercise of theirs is contradicted by the reality that the overwhelming majority of the content remains unmarked. What’s more, the accounts are superficially vetted: they claim to be entertainment but are doing political propaganda in plain sight. This remains the main problem for all political content accounts analyzed: they have no real-life traceability but create content with hundreds of millions of views.
In fact it would even be absurd to declare your own post as political, since TikTok does not allow political ads so the content would be taken down. This inoperative ban has in no way led to the depoliticization of the online space, but only an absolution of guilt for the platform in terms of moderation and transparency of political content.
An example of this is the whole scandal last month with Alexandr Stoianoglo, a presidential candidate in the Republic of Moldova, for the promotion of which Romanian influencers were paid and the content was not flagged in any way. On TikTok, the legal theory remains completely parallel to the reality of the content circulating on the platform: there are countless pages explicitly advertising a political party but claiming to be informative or educational accounts. In the Romanian space, here below is the top of political content gone viral from September 2024 to date, directly correlated with the hashtags of the presidential candidates.
Romanian TikTok has 8.9 million users
The constant viral political figures on Tiktok are George Simion with 589,800 followers and 240.6 million content views on the main hashtags; Marcel Ciolacu with 208.9 million views, mostly from content created by other accounts, his official account with only 38,900 followers. Elena Lasconi has had a steady, organic growth from August to now, reaching 123 million content views with her associated hashtags. It’s mainly USR Youth accounts and similar promotional ones, again, the official account has only 73 400 followers.
In addition to the above, the surprise Călin Georgescu, who has achieved in the last two months the virality built by the first three candidates in 11 months, has emerged. How did Călin Georgescu manage to obsessively invade voters’ feeds?
We discuss this at length in the section dedicated to him below, but in a nutshell it’s (i) a coordinated network of direct promotion accounts, plus (ii) a group of influencers indirectly promoting the politician without in any way marking paid advertising. An example is the #balanceandverticality campaign with 2.4 million views, where influencers describe Călin Georgescu according to a copy-paste script, without naming him, but using the characterizations he himself makes.
