A series of declassified documents suggest TikTok was exploited by a “state actor” to influence the outcome of Romania’s presidential election.
The European Commission has sent TikTok an “urgent” request for information demanding more answers about the platform’s increasingly controversial role in the first round of Romania’s presidential elections, which saw the sudden victory of Călin Georgescu and fuelled serious concerns of foreign interference.
Georgescu, an independent candidate who has embraced Eurosceptic, Russian-friendly, ultra-nationalist and pseudo-scientific views, qualified for the second round against Elena Lasconi, a pro-European liberal. (The contest was supposed to be held on Sunday until the Constitutional Court cancelled the entire process.)
“We are concerned about mounting indications of coordinated foreign online influence operation targeting ongoing Romanian elections, especially on TikTok,” said Henna Virkkunen, the Commisison’s executive vice-president in charge of digital policy.
The request, released on Friday, is based on the Digital Services Act (DSA) and comes with a deadline of 24 hours. It marks the second request for information sent to TikTok in the context of the Romanian elections after the first one sent last week.
Brussels wants the company to clarify the revelations contained in the intelligence documents that Romanian President Klaus Iohannis declassified on Wednesay, which strongly suggested Georgescu’s abrupt rise had not been “a natural outcome” but the result of artificially coordinated action to manipulate and exploit TikTok’s algorithm.
The campaign was likely orchestrated by a “state actor,” the documents said. Although Russia is not mentioned as the culprit, the agencies detected similarities between an online campaign in Romania and a previous one that Moscow had conducted in Ukraine.
According to the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI), a previously hidden network, mainly operating on TikTok, which had been largely dormant since its creation in 2016, became very active in the two weeks before the first round of the elections. The network’s operators, recruited and coordinated through a channel on the messaging platform Telegram, used methods typical of a state actor’s “mode of operation.”
The SRI also reported that nearly one million euros were spent in the campaign by an individual supporting Georgescu’s candidacy, with up to €950 paid for a repost. TikTok itself admitted to receiving €362,500 from this person last week, the documents showed.
The declassification sent shockwaves through Romania and beyond, stoking fears the Eastern European country had fallen victim to foreign interference.
“TikTok needs to set up resources to counter information operations ahead of the election weekend coming up,” a Commission spokesperson said.
