Romania’s Voided TikTok Election (Russia! Russia! Russia! PROVEN to be FAKE NEWS Again!)

On November 24, at the southeastern frontier of the European Union and NATO, Romanian voters delivered an unexpected victory to a rightwing populist named Călin Georgescu in the opening round of the country’s presidential election. Always considered a longshot, Georgescu had been polling in the single digits just weeks before surging to claim first place with 23 percent of the vote. The result shocked Romania’s two dominant parties, who found themselves on the sidelines as Georgescu campaigned for the runoff against another anti-establishment candidate who came in second place, Elena Lasconi of the reformist Save Romania party.

Then, on December 4, four days before the deciding round was to take place, Romania’s Supreme Defense Council (CSAT) released a small clutch of heavily redacted documents from the country’s foreign intelligence service. The documents outlined allegations of a Kremlin-backed social media campaign that supported Georgescu in violation of national election laws. “Data were obtained,” the accompanying government statement read, “revealing an aggressive promotion campaign that exploited the algorithms of some social media platforms to increase the popularity of Călin Georgescu at an accelerated pace.”

Within hours, the U.S. State Department expressed its “concern” over the allegations. Two days later, on December 6, Romania’s Constitutional Court unanimously ruled the November 24 vote invalid. “The entire electoral process for electing the President of Romania is annulled,” the court announced, citing government claims of irregularities on social media. Six weeks passed before a redo date of May 4 was finally announced on January 16.

Long story short: Russia did NOT pay for the TikTok influencer campaign. Instead it was a rival party who did it because they thought votes for Georgescu would ultimately help its own candidate. Investigators, the courts, and the U.S. State Department knew the TRUTH of what happened but LIED via the heavy redactions.

While Russia has a well-known interest in influencing the politics of the region—and has invested funds in what the Romanian government calls a “complex modus operandi”—the documents did not contain evidence of this machine in action. Rather, they described a de facto media campaign for Georgescu catching fire on social networks, in particular the comments sections of Romanian TikTok personalities, more than 100 of whom had been party, willingly or unwillingly, to the “artificial amplification” of pro-Georgescu commenters. Adding to the suspiciousness of the comments, noted the government, was the fact that debates over the most effective phrasing and emoji choices were hammered out in Telegram channels known to support “pro-Russian, far-right, anti-system, ‘pacifist’, and nationalist candidates.”

Central to the government’s case were a series of hashtags that began springing up across Romanian TikTok in the weeks before the November 24 vote. These hashtags—including #echilibrusiverticalitate ("steadiness and uprightness"), #unliderpotrivitpentrumine ("the right leader for me"), and #prezidentiale2024” (“presidential elections 2024”)—accompanied videos in which popular TikTok accounts made general comments about the election, such as discussing the need for a strong candidate, or asking leading questions about the type of leader who should replace the outgoing Klaus Iohannis. None of the posts—which typically racked up between 100,000 and half-million views—mentioned any specific candidate. But in the comments sections, Georgescu’s name appeared more than any other candidate.

As the coordinated hashtags became effective vehicles for raising the profile of a candidate who had spent almost nothing on paid media, Georgescu’s outsider campaign rose in the polls. In a matter of weeks, he went from a few percentage points, to more than 10 percent and climbing in the days before the election. By the week of the vote, the hashtags became so entwined with Georgescu’s campaign that it could no longer be ignored. On November 22, a Romanian Twitch streamer named Silviu Faiăr flagged the hashtag campaign’s rapid metamorphosis and noted that many of the influencers could be connected, not to Russia, but to a local pay-to-play influencer agency called FameUp. Two days later, when the election results shocked the nation, the social media campaign took on new relevance.

Among the groups that sought to keep Russia at the center of the election conversation was an NGO called Context, largely funded by the United States through its National Endowment for Democracy. On November 29, the outfit published a report that included a summary of an analysis it conducted using software from a Ukrainian tech firm whose clients include NATO and the European Commission. In other words, five days after the election, a US-funded watchdog was relying on a NATO-funded analysis to purport to expose foreign interference, shortly before the government released its own report.

...Romania is home to numerous western-funded media NGOs that have benefited from these funds. Some of them, such as Context, were arguably weaponized when Georgescu threatened to challenge the NATO-Russia balance. For the past several years, Context has participated in a region wide NGO project, “Firehose of Falsehood,” to investigate the “pro-Kremlin, conspiracy and alt-right disinformation ecosystem in Central and Eastern Europe.” The participating groups often have similar funding streams and various western institutional connections. In the case of Context, its budget is overwhelmingly covered by funding from the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy, and its executive director, Mihaela Armaselu, spent 20 years working in the press office of the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest. (Context is also a member of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global reporting network also heavily funded by the U.S. government.)

Time for FIRINGS at the U.S. State Department...

...The west’s public support for Romania’s government and its rationale for canceling the vote, meanwhile, remains unwavering. It was re-stated at the U.S. embassy in Bucharest during a mid-January press conference held by a senior State Department official named James O’Brien.

...Starting with James O'Brien.

Romania’s border is home for the main Neocon Front Line and the Neocons were (maybe still are) in the process of building a huge military base there.

The problem is that Romanians aren’t too hot on the Neocons turning their country into another Ukraine (they had been through enough during the Cold War), so they didn’t vote as demanded, but luckily for the Neocons, they also controlled the courts in Romania, so they simply ‘evaporated’ the election.

By the way, if the multiparty election were repeated, this ‘far-right’ candidate would now get around 35%, up quite a bit from his 23%. And if the runoff, that should have been over by now had not been stopped by the Neocons, this ‘far-right’ guy would have gotten well over 60% of the vote...at least according to what I’ve heard.

In any case, Romanians have a recent history of being able to deal with trash governments...and they’ll deal with this bunch, when the time is right.

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