The result was an absolute bombshell — both in Romania and abroad.
The first round of the Romanian presidential election was won by independent politician Calin Georgescu, who was largely unknown in his native country, did not take part in any of the important television debates and ranked at best as an also-ran in opinion polls before the vote.
On social media, however, and on TikTok in particular, he had a high profile. His channel has 520,000 followers and 5.7 million likes.
Images reminiscent of Putin
Georgescu’s polarizing election campaign videos on TikTok have been viewed millions of times. In them, he not only criticizes Romania’s political establishment — often making false claims against politicians — but is also seen doing judo or riding horses, just like the man he so admires, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
When Georgescu won the first round of the election, the surprise and the dismay were huge. Now, the extreme right-wing conspiracy theorist, NATO critic and Putin admirer has a chance of being elected president of Romania on Sunday.
Many observers are convinced that social media platforms — and above all TikTok — played a major role in Georgescu’s success.
The short-video platform is very popular in Romania: About nine million of the country’s 19 million inhabitants, especially young people, use the service.
Did TikTok give Georgescu preferential treatment?
Although other leading Romanian politicians are on TikTok, none of them reached anywhere near as many people as Georgescu.
The upshot was that just under a third of 18- to 24-year-olds voted for him, despite his outlandish theories, for example that the 1969 moon landing was staged.
Romania’s electoral authority accused TikTok of giving Georgescu an advantage. Before the election, it had instructed the platform that presidential candidates must be identified as such and must disclose their financial sources.
It said that in the case of Georgescu, TikTok did not enforce this rule, thereby giving him an advantage over the other candidates.
For this reason, Romania’s media watchdog called on the EU to investigate the video-sharing platform.
TikTok claims there was no meddling
TikTok rejected all allegations and pointed to the fact that it had removed tens of thousands of fake accounts and millions of fake likes and followers.
It also claimed that it had found no indication of covert interference from either inside Romania or abroad.
German communications scientist and TikTok expert Marcus Bösch sees this as a glaring contradiction: “How can it be that countless accounts and likes were removed even though there was no indication of interference?” he asked in an interview with DW.
‘Extreme views are becoming normalized’
US linguist Adam Aleksic sees the main problem in the algorithms of modern social media platforms, which are no longer based on the follower principle. Simply put, this means that users no longer see posts from the people they follow, but from the people who shout the loudest.
Writing for the online magazine User Mag, Aleksic said that “algorithms use engagement as a metric for virality, and misinformation tends to generate more engagement. Claims about, say, Haitians eating household pets are going to elicit the extreme responses needed for virality. Even attempts to correct those falsehoods can paradoxically register as additional engagement.”
Aleksic adds that the days of detail, accuracy and nuance are gone and that extreme views are becoming normalized.
‘App of the moment’
As Marcus Bösch sees it, the main problem is that TikTok is being used by a lot of people, while strong, independent media brands are disappearing from the market.
However, he says this is true not only of TikTok, but also of all social media platforms.
“But TikTok is the ‘app of the moment,’ and this means that lots of themes and trends are subsequently found on other platforms,” said Bösch.
“Societies, politicians and platform operators must understand that these threats and attempts to influence people exist and will continue to exist and must correspondingly become more resilient, better prepared and more willing to take action in the context of strategic communication,” he said.
This article was originally published in German.
