Última actualización Lunes, 05/05/2025
If someone had told me a year ago that Romania’s 2024 presidential election would get cancelled because of TikTok bots and foreign interference, I would have laughed. And yet, here we are. Romania just became the test case for a whole new level of political manipulation. The last week of November 2024 might have been ordinary elsewhere, but in Romania, it was a week full of questions, many of which I address in this article. From “In what country did I wake up?” to “Who even is Călin Georgescu?”
For anyone asking, “Why should I care about Romania?” Well, let me tell you. What happened here isn’t just about Romania. It’s about the future of European democracy, about how easily public opinion can be hijacked, and about the terrifying reality that elections can now be influenced the most by social media.
November 24, 2024. Romania holds its presidential elections. The results come in a plot twist nobody saw coming. Călin Georgescu, an independent candidate who barely registered in opinion polls, wins the first round with 23% of the vote (Trifan, 2025). Who is this guy, and how did someone with practically no visible political momentum suddenly surge to the front? People started digging. The media, political analysts, and even casual voters.
Georgescu is a former UN bureaucrat turned nationalist figure, known for promoting conspiracy theories, including anti-EU, anti-NATO narratives, and for previously expressing admiration for controversial authoritarian leaders. His rhetoric often echoed messages favoured by the Kremlin.
So why would a «foreign state» be interested in helping him? Because a president openly critical of Romania’s Western alliances would mean exactly what Russia and others hostile to NATO want: a weaker European Union and a destabilised Eastern flank.
Then, reports of suspicious social media activity surfaced. A few days later, the government declassified intelligence reports, confirming that a “foreign state” engaged in a coordinated cyber campaign to manipulate public opinion in favour of Georgescu.
The key tool? TikTok bots, disinformation networks, and artificially inflated engagement, all designed to propel a candidate into the spotlight (STĂNESCU, 2024). After intelligence agencies confirmed the interference, the Constitutional Court did not cancel the results, but they had ordered a ballot recount, and guess what?
Georgescu’s votes were still there. No ballot stuffing, no direct electoral fraud. But here’s where it gets complicated:
Under Romania’s electoral law, elections can be annulled if foreign interference significantly impacts the results. This is exactly what the court ruled on December 6, 2024, making Romania the first European country to cancel a presidential election due to cyber warfare (Carrozzini, 2024). For some, this was a necessary move to protect democracy. For others, it sets a dangerous precedent, wondering who decides when foreign influence is too much?
The Bigger Picture
Foreign interference in elections is nothing new, but why Romania, and why now?
Romania is not just any country; it’s a strategic NATO player on Russia’s border, sitting right next to Ukraine and hosting major NATO military infrastructure (IACOB, 2024). In this context, a Georgescu win, given his anti-West, pro-isolationist stances, would have meant serious instability, both internally and for the broader region.
So… What Now?
With elections annulled, Romania finds itself in uncharted territory. A new vote is on the horizon in May 2025, but this entire saga raises a major question: how do we protect democracy in a world where elections can be hacked?
One thing is clear: this was not just about one election. This was about the evolution of political warfare. The biggest takeaway? Digital security is now a fundamental pillar of national security. Cybersecurity must be treated as a core defence issue. If social media manipulation can shift electoral outcomes, then every democratic nation needs to rethink how it safeguards its political strategy.
And finally, everybody blames Georgescu, TikTok, bots and the media, but who do I blame?
Maybe it’s time we stop pointing fingers and start asking ourselves the real question: When did we let TikTok replace critical thinking? When did an algorithm become more persuasive than facts? It’s not just about who wins an election; it’s about whether we, as voters, are even paying attention anymore. The need for stronger media literacy is more urgent than ever. The speed at which misinformation spreads online is alarming. Fake news spreads faster than the truth. If people can be swayed by coordinated digital campaigns, then education on how to critically engage with online content needs to be a priority.
To give you an idea, Georgescu’s TikTok presence was carefully crafted: short clips showing him speaking «against the system,» promising to «free Romania from foreign control,» heavily relying on emotional imagery like children, old people, and national flags (Tukiainen, 2024). These were sprinkled with half-truths and out-of-context data, making them seem plausible to those scrolling fast without fact-checking. The persuasive power came not from logic, but from emotion, repetition, and algorithmic amplification.
© Shutterstock
The Future of Elections
This whole fiasco forces us to rethink how we interact with political content online. How do we even verify if something is real or manipulated? It wasn’t just the quantity of posts about Georgescu, it was how they were seeded into TikTok’s pages: fake endorsements, doctored videos showing imaginary support from foreign leaders, deep fakes, and manipulated polls showing him ahead when he wasn’t. When you see hundreds of people apparently supporting a candidate, even when it’s bots, it creates the illusion of inevitability.
Simple: cross-check information. If a sensational claim only appears on obscure TikTok accounts and nowhere else, it’s probably fake. Use multiple sources: independent journalism, fact-checking websites.
But even that might not be enough. We must also ask: Who benefits from this narrative? Even fact-checking organisations can be vulnerable to bias, especially when big media outlets are owned by powerful economic or political interests. In countries like Portugal, political parties have started creating their own «fact-checking» units, blurring the line even more (Cazzamatta, 2025). Government communication offices sometimes use «public information» campaigns that end up being thinly veiled political ads. Critical thinking means going one step further: questioning the architecture behind the information itself.
Relying only on what shows up on your feed is like believing in a lottery scam just because you got a winning email.
Should we let candidates campaign on TikTok, where algorithms, not journalistic integrity, decide what you see? If we don’t regulate it, we’re letting social media companies, not voters, shape elections. Politicians using TikTok isn’t the issue; the problem is when their popularity is artificially boosted with bots and disinformation.
At the European level, there’s already movement: the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) includes provisions forcing platforms to disclose political ads and their sponsors, but enforcement is still a work in progress (Nannini, 2024). Some experts are even proposing stricter «blackout periods» for political ads on social media close to election days, similar to TV rules.
Should online campaign sponsors be made public? Absolutely. If someone is paying millions to promote a candidate, voters have the right to know who’s behind it. Right now, online political ads are far less transparent than TV campaigns, where sponsorships must be disclosed. Digital platforms should be held to the same standard, if not a stricter one, considering their influence.
The truth is, online content now has more power than TV or newspapers ever did. A 2024 Pew Research study found that 67% of young adults aged 18–29 get their political news primarily from social media, compared to just 21% from TV (Pew Research Center, 2024). When candidates focus more on engagement than actual governance, democracy turns into a popularity contest. Voters nowadays are swayed by online trends more than policies. When candidates focus more on engagement than actual governance, democracy turns into a popularity contest.
Of course, some might say, wasn’t democracy always a bit of a popularity contest? True, but there’s a difference between popularity based on real-world support and popularity engineered through bots, algorithms, and psychological manipulation.
This isn’t just about Romania. This is about the future of democracy everywhere. It exposed the vulnerabilities of modern democracies and forced an urgent conversation about how elections are conducted in the digital age. These presidential elections will go down in history as a warning shot, one that hopefully makes us smarter, not just more paranoid.
Will we learn from it, or is this just the beginning of a new era where political campaigns (for better or for worse) are fought and won on the internet? Actually, it’s not even the beginning. Trump’s 2016 campaign, Obama’s 2008 campaign both showed how online organisations could beat traditional political structures (Swartley, 2018). The tools just got sharper and scarier.
P.S.: On 27 April 2025, Romania held the first round of its rescheduled presidential elections. The candidate who received the most votes is widely seen as the political successor to Călin Georgescu, the same man whose candidacy was barred earlier this year due to illegal campaigning and ties to Moscow. If anything, this confirms that the networks, narratives, and influence Georgescu built didn’t vanish when he did. They just changed names. So the question remains: what have we really learned?
References
Carrozzini, A. (2024). The Romanian Constitutional Court’s Annulment of Presidential Elections. verfassungsblog.de.
Cazzamatta, R. (2025). Building a Cross‐Border European Information Network: Hyperlink Connections Among Fact‐Checking Organizations. Media and Communication, University of Erfurt, Germany, 13(Article 9389).
IACOB, D.-D. (2024). ROMANIA AND THE ROMANIAN ARMED FORCES: 20 YEARS IN NATO. Romanian Military Thinking, (1), 6.
Nannini, L. (2024). Beyond phase-in: assessing impacts on disinformation of the EU Digital Services Act. AI and Ethics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-024-00467-w
Pew Research Center. (2024). Social Media and News Fact Sheet. Pew Research Center.
STĂNESCU, G. C. (2024). Fake News, Bots, and Influencers: The Impact of Social Media on Romania’s 2024 Elections. Social Sciences and Education Research Review, 11(2), 361 – 366.
Swartley, M. (2018). Political Marketing: How Social Media influenced the 2008-2016 U.S. Presidential Elections and Best Practices Associated. Liberty University.
Trifan, E. (2025). From self-help to sovereignty: the rise of Călin Georgescu and Romania’s far-right mysticism. Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe.
Tukiainen, J. (2024). The TikTok factor: Young voters and the support for the populist right. TYÖPAPEREITA.
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Young Journalists in Europe – Meet the author
Luiza Elena Zob
“With a love for people and all forms of art and creation, writing is one of my ways of connecting with people and ideas, and I’m honoured to join this team of young European journalists.”
Article collaborators: Romane Pichon, Oliver Čechmánek, Guilherme Alexandre Jorge (Lexi), Lisa Leopoli
This article reflects the views of the authors only. The European Commission and Eurodesk cannot be held responsible for it.