Romanian Elections: report with the support of National Endowment for Democracy (NED)

Key Findings:

·       TikTok's Political Landscape: Political hashtags consistently topped Romania's trending topics, fueled largely by accounts supporting presidential candidates. TikTok's official stance against paid political advertising is contradicted by the prevalence of unmarked political content. The lack of clear traceability for these accounts and TikTok's ineffective moderation are highlighted as key problems.

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·       Candidate Performance: The report examines the online performance of several candidates, focusing on views and followers. Significant discrepancies are found between official accounts and unofficial accounts pushing their campaigns.

o   George Simion: Maintained a consistent viral presence with significant viewership, leveraging a network of supportive online accounts.

o   Marcel Ciolacu: Experienced high viewership but with a mixed bag of positive and negative content, alongside satirical accounts.

o   Elena Lasconi: Showed consistent, organic growth, primarily driven by USR youth accounts.

o   Călin Georgescu: Demonstrated a surprising surge in popularity in the final two months, attributed to both coordinated promotion and indirect advertising through influencers.

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·       Călin Georgescu's Campaign: His campaign's success was analyzed in detail, noting the unusual speed and magnitude of his rise, the heavy use of a single hashtag, and use of indirect marketing (influencers who didn't identify their promotion as such). A specific influencer campaign, “#echilibrușiverticalitate”, garnered 2.4 million views and used indirect messaging to promote him.

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·       Counter-Campaigns: The report indicates the existence of counter-campaigns targeting Călin Georgescu in the final days of the election, aimed at portraying him as a "globalist in disguise." These campaigns utilized multiple accounts from various political parties.

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·       Methodology: The report's findings are based on data analysis from the Exolyt platform, which tracked views, likes, comments, and shares across multiple accounts and hashtags.

Overall Conclusion: The report concludes that Romanian political campaigning on TikTok has operated within a largely unregulated environment, lacking consistent standards for verifying the authenticity of accounts and content. This allowed some candidates, particularly those on the far-right, to gain disproportionate visibility. The report highlights the potential for misinformation and manipulative campaigning within this loosely regulated environment.

This report was created with the support of National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the full version can be found here: https://expertforum.ro/en/extremism-and-momentum-how-calin-georgescu-has-risen-in-the-polls/