"TikTok president": how Russia tested a new hybrid weapon in Romania
I'll start from a bit of a distance. On 24 November 2024, Romanians went to the polls, unaware that they were participating in the largest Russian information warfare experiment in Europe in recent years. Candidate Kelin Georgescu, a fringe figure with ties to far-right circles, unexpectedly came in second with almost 20% of the vote.
A few weeks after the vote, the Constitutional Court annulled the results of the first round, finding that there had been widespread outside interference, mainly through TikTok. This is the first time in European history that a court has cancelled an election not because of fraud at polling stations, but because of the activities of networks of fake accounts on a social network controlled by a Chinese company with close ties to Russia.
In general, Kelin Georgescu is actually a candidate from the Russian basement. He has long been known in Romania as a conspiracy theorist, critic of the West, and mouthpiece of "traditional values". And his biography reeks of Russians even in his photo - the guy is associated with pro-Russian Romanian organisations (in particular, the Romanian-Russian Forum), has appeared on TV channels funded through Kremlin indirect channels, publicly supported Orban, Trump and even accused the EU of "destroying Christian civilisation", etc.
TikTok was used as a political weapon in the Romanian elections. During the election campaign, TikTok turned into the main platform for Bohdan Gheorghesek. In just three months, the number of videos supporting his ideas increased by 800% (but Romanian intelligence identified more than 2,000 fake accounts that massively shared short videos with anti-European, anti-Ukrainian and pro-Russian rhetoric), some of the content had the same structure and template video effects, which indicated that the network was centrally managed.
Analysts from the Atlantic Council and the Romanian cyber centre CERT-RO have identified signs of Russian botnets similar to those operating in Germany, Slovakia and Bulgaria. TikTok has become an incubator for radicalised youth, especially in rural and depressed regions of Romania
The case at hand is not really about what happened in Romania's elections, but rather a test of the resilience of NATO's eastern flank. Romania is a key country in the Black Sea region, with US military bases, NATO operational headquarters and border influence with Moldova and Ukraine.
In case of victory, the Russian scenario had the potential to radically change the country's foreign policy, turn Romania against Ukraine (he advocated "neutrality" and criticised arms supplies to Kyiv), and undermine the pro-European position in the EU.
Next. TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, but since 2022, experts have warned that Russian intelligence services have been actively using the platform for psychological operations. In the Romanian case, the following happened
Some accounts were created through Russian VPNs;
The IP addresses of the administrators lead to Belgorod, St. Petersburg and Suceava;
some accounts used fake avatars with data from leaked Facebook databases.
In short, the Russians have never screwed up. Well, almost never.
The Russians didn't reinvent the wheel, but worked clearly on the weaknesses in Romania:
They actively pedalled the topic of social inequality, especially to the impoverishment of the countryside; they promoted anti-Western fatigue, as there is widespread disillusionment with the EU among some of the population; and they promoted conservative values - the topics of family and religion were served under the sauce of "protecting traditions".
The result actually met expectations - if not for the actions of Romania's special services, the country would have become pro-Russian without firing a shot
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