RomânăThis report’s monitoring exercise confirms and deepens findings from earlier Expert Forum monitoring for FACT-HUB.EU, which have documented coordinated disinformation operations in Moldova. Among our recent conclusions: (i) that pro-Russian narratives are being spread through both overt channels (e.g. political actors, media outlets) and covert ones (fake or anonymous social media accounts), (ii) that online narratives frequently exploit economic hardship, historical grievances, and identity politics, and (iii) that the methods include mirrored dissemination across platforms, repetition of themes with slight variations, and use of inauthentic profiles to simulate grassroots support. These prior findings provide a foundation for the current monitoring, which reveals even more complex networks and more aggressive behaviour, particularly on Facebook and TikTok.
Key insights:
- We’ve found significant traces of identical profiles with the inauthentic accounts on TikTok we already published
- 100 inauthentic accounts on Facebook
- 1008 posts analyzed in the interval 1-17 September
- More than 30 of these accounts were already active in August and documented by WatchDog.MD in their report on Russian disinformation networks
- What do they do? Functions: sharing in groups, interacting with content, following other CIB accounts
- Persistent pattern – infecting the feeds with either fearmongering content, AI generated disinformation
- A part of the accounts are organised with similar hashtags on Facebook such as: #Sandu #glasulpoporului #josPAS #alegeri2025
- The pages strategically combined crisis messaging with metaphors for national humiliation, economic grievances, external control narratives and emotional camouflage through apolitical “everyday joy” content to mask the coordinated nature of propaganda content.
Read the report here.