Supreme Council for National Defense: A presidential candidate benefited from massive exposure on TikTok

There have been cyber-attacks aimed at influencing the fairness of the electoral process, the Supreme Council for National Defense found today.

Supreme Council for National Defense members reached this conclusion after analyzing documents submitted by the authorities responsible for defense, public order and national security.

From the analysis of the documents, the Council members found that, by violating the electoral legislation, a candidate in the presidential elections benefited from massive exposure, due to the preferential treatment that the TikTok platform granted him by not marking him as a political candidate, i.e. without requiring him to mark the video election materials with the unique identification code assigned by the Permanent Electoral Authority.

Thus, the visibility of that candidate significantly increased in relation to the other participants in the electoral process, who were recognized by TikTok's algorithms as candidates in the presidential elections, and the content promoted by them was massively filtered, exponentially decreasing their visibility among the platform's users.

This preferential treatment was enhanced by TikTok's failure to comply with the decision of the Central Electoral Bureau, which found that, in fact, the Chinese company, contrary to what was officially communicated to the Romanian authorities, had not implemented in any respect the provisions of the BEC decision.

From this perspective, the Council took note of the fact that the social network TikTok did not comply with the legal rules governing the conduct of the electoral process, with an impact on the final outcome of the latter. In this context, the members of the Council asked the authorities responsible for national security, those responsible for the proper conduct of the electoral process, as well as the criminal prosecution authorities to urgently take the necessary steps, in accordance with their legal powers, to clarify the issues presented at the meeting.

Translated by: Radu Matei