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Brussels has threatened to open a probe into TikTok over its alleged failure to prevent the spread of disinformation and unauthorised campaigning on the social media platform in the run-up to Romania’s election last week.
The European Commission on Wednesday said that Romania’s national media watchdog has requested an official investigation by the Brussels-based regulator into TikTok, after a far-right candidate, Călin Georgescu, who had become viral on the Chinese platform, unexpectedly topped the first round of the presidential vote on Sunday.
The Romanian complaint alleges that TikTok’s algorithms “amplified” Georgescu’s content to the detriment of other candidates, said the regulator’s vice-president Valentin-Alexandru Jucan.
TikTok is considered a “very large online platform” under the EU’s Digital Services Act, Brussels said in a written response to the Financial Times, which means it “has an obligation to assess and mitigate systemic risks related to electoral processes”.
“If the commission suspects a violation based on the evidence available to us, it may open a proceeding to verify TikTok’s compliance with the DSA obligations,” it said.
Companies found in breach of the law face penalties of up to 6 per cent of their global annual turnover. TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, had an annual turnover of $110bn in 2023.
TikTok has denied wrongdoing and said it was “aggressively” enforcing a voluntary code of conduct against election misinformation. It added it had “proactively partnered” with the Romanian electoral commission to “elevate reliable election information” in Romania.
In the run-up to the Sunday vote, the electoral commission in Bucharest had ordered Georgescu to take down clips he was sharing on social media and which had not been flagged as campaign videos. He reduced the number of campaign messages on his official TikTok channel but many of the videos that went viral continued to be shared by fan accounts on election day.
TikTok received the electoral commission’s complaint about a number of videos lacking any campaign identifiers and took action within 24 hours, beyond what was required by Romanian law, said a person familiar with the matter.
Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu on Tuesday said that for an online campaign to be so successful, a lot of money would have had to be spent, potentially in violation of national limits which meant “foreign funding” could not be excluded. He urged authorities to look into it and take measures to prevent this from happening again in the run-off on December 8.
The country’s outgoing president, Klaus Iohannis, will hold an emergency security council meeting on Thursday to address potential threats to election IT infrastructure.
Georgescu, who had expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin when he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has since said he had no ties to Russia and claimed he spent “zero” money on his campaign.
The Romanian case would be the second after Brussels last month requested information from TikTok about the measures it has adopted to avoid manipulation by malicious actors and to mitigate risks related to elections.
In February the EU opened a DSA investigation into TikTok to assess whether it was doing enough to protect minors from online addiction and harmful content. That investigation is still ongoing.
