Romania’s cancelled election is a lesson in social media manipulation

The writer is a fellow at Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and the Cyber Policy Center. She is the author of ‘The Tech Coup’

Romania shocked the world last month when it voted for an outsider with ultranationalist views as president. Călin Georgescu was polling poorly just weeks before the election. TikTok was crucial to his sudden success. It also appears to have been a key facilitator of foreign interference from Russia.

Romania’s constitutional court has since opted to annul the results of the first election round. All eyes are once more on social media platforms and their ability to influence election outcomes. Until now, extraordinary discretion has been left to the companies curating our information ecosystem — Romania may turn the tide.

Suspicious online accounts, polls and paid influencers sharing political content are all seen as key online tools for influencing Romanian votes.

Within the country, intelligence services have accused Russia of aggressively using TikTok to promote Georgescu. The US state department describes “malign cyber activity”. In Europe, the Digital Services Act (DSA) has been invoked to impose a “retention order” that demands TikTok preserve all data related to European elections for scrutiny. A company representative for TikTok emphasised its compliance with EU law in a recent hearing before the European parliament.

After years of lingering questions about the precise impact of social media platforms on democracy, European investigations should finally shed light on the details of algorithmic influence. There will be lessons learned around the world.

Most importantly, it will be a litmus test for the enforcement of the DSA. This recently implemented law seeks to minimise harm by spelling out content moderation obligations for large online platforms. That includes mitigating systemic risks such as to the electoral process.

TikTok points out that it does not allow political advertisements and enforces measures against covert influence. Yet such corporate rules may not always be enforced. Researchers at non-profit organisation Reset Tech, Check First and EU DisinfoLab found evidence of co-ordinated posts about Georgescu on social media and stated that Meta had also failed to enforce its own policies, which “demonstrates Meta’s failure to follow the European Commission’s recommendations to comply with the DSA”.

Europe’s new law can challenge failures of self-regulation. For democracies under attack, avoiding an overestimation of disinformation and manipulation, while ensuring the risks are not underestimated, is key to political and policy responses.

Detailed independent research is also crucial for fostering greater public understanding. Societal resilience against attempts to undermine democracy must be fact based. 

That democracies and electoral processes are under attack is clear — from foreign interference to domestically-fuelled efforts intended to mislead and polarise voters.

But assessing the exact impact and causality has been a challenge for academics around the world. Companies typically don’t want people looking under the hood of their businesses and have shielded proprietary data. Insights gained in Romania’s case will indirectly shed light on any manipulation that takes place via social media platforms in other contexts.

Europe’s quest for accountability offers a contrast to America’s hands-off approach to regulating tech. There, social media platforms are now closer than ever to informing Donald Trump’s new tech policy. Elon Musk, a close ally and adviser to the president-elect and owner of X, considers any moderation of social media content as “censorship”. Meta has recently stated that it believes it was overly heavy-handed with certain content moderation in the past.

For TikTok, and owner ByteDance, much is at stake. Under the DSA, the European Commission can impose sanctions of up to 6 per cent of global turnover.

But events in Romania will reach beyond a single company. It will challenge the practice of allowing corporate rules to act as democracy’s best defence.

Details about the interplay between the Kremlin subversion tactics and social media algorithms will hopefully play a significant role in ensuring accountability. While Romania is experiencing a terrible political shock from the attack on democratic principles, the facts that will be uncovered about this election should go a long way towards making democracies more resilient and holding tech platforms to account.