Shortly before the election, a campaign using the hashtag “stability and integrity” flooded Romanian TikTok. Influencers uploaded videos describing what they were looking for in a future president: “stability”, “progress”, “a patriot”.
They did not name a specific candidate.
They had been paid to upload videos with these messages through a marketing platform called FameUp, which allows brands to hire influencers at scale to promote products. But the influencers say they didn’t know who paid for it.
FameUp declined to comment to the BBC.
Cristina, an influencer from the city of Iasi, says that when she took the job she felt “there was nothing shady about it”. She says “in the back of [her] mind” she thought one of the 14 candidates likely paid for it and she “just thought it was a smart approach. That’s not doing any political propaganda. It’s just encouraging people to go out and vote”.
Some influencers did not mark the posts as paid content. This goes against TikTok rules, where paid political advertising is banned.
While the adverts didn’t mention Georgescu’s name, influencers we spoke to described a “wave of comments” supporting him that appeared under the videos. Romeo Rusu, a micro-influencer from the city of Constanta with 25,000 followers, said: “Right after I posted the video, within a few seconds, I started receiving dozens of comments. In the end, I received around 300 comments, all backing the independent candidate Calin Georgescu… I was absolutely surprised.”
The comments came into focus after TikTok stated in a report it had removed a network of over 27,000 inauthentic accounts that “used fictitious personas to post comments related to the Romanian elections”.
It is still not clear who created these bot accounts.
Experts say that flooding unrelated videos with pro-Georgescu comments was a tactic to game TikTok’s algorithm and get his name trending, which would in turn push his content into more users’ feeds.
A TikTok spokesperson told the BBC that, during the presidential campaign, the company “blocked millions of fake engagement attempts, removed hundreds of thousands of spam accounts, prevented impersonation of political candidates, and disrupted three covert influence networks with limited reach”.
“We continue to work closely with local and EU authorities and partner with local organisations to elevate reliable election information,” they said.
The uncertainty around the campaign lasted into the new year, until a surprising twist in January.
The Romanian Tax Authority revealed that the #stabilityandintegrity campaign was paid for by the centre-right National Liberal Party (PNL), who were backing their own candidate in the elections.
In response, the PNL told Romanian journalists at news outlet Snoop that their campaign was hijacked to support Georgescu.
