EU Summons TikTok CEO After Romanian Election Shocker | Hacker News Reader

EU Summons TikTok CEO After Romanian Election Shocker

romania-insider.com

58 pointspreaching527173 comments

That's certainly easier than sitting down and questioning your own decisions over the last couple of decades and wondering why people are voting in ways you don't like

(For the record I'm not a Tiktok user and I think it's a net negative to society)

In this specific case of the first round of Romanian presidential election the traditional candidates from the bigger parties (PNL/PSD which have a government coalition at the moment) have both admitted to understanding why they lost and that the people's vote was against their policies. Both of these leaders have quit their leadership positions in their respective parties.

There is still a very serious discussion going on about potential foreign powers (China) getting involved in our electoral process with platforms like TikTok, see my other comment in this thread about this.

Since the resignations, the PSD candidate was resurrected and is back on course to become president, after the result of the democratic vote was .. cancelled. How is that "understanding" looking now ?

I find it so incredibly funny that even questioning western media immediately puts a leader into fascist category but someone loses an election in romania and questioning tiktok is just the wisest more logical and righteous thing to do. "Fascism" exists now in the same space as "communism" did during cold war - easy othering.

EDIT: And may be that is why there is huge distrust against media. It is quite disturbing that tea-party has became the new hippie movement.

Read the article - This is not the EU commission or some bigwig requesting a hearing or an investigation.

Rather there was one delegate from one of the many political groups in the EU Parliament (which has very little authority and power) who made a statement .

In analogy to the US political system: This is not Mark Zuckerberg summoned to a Senate hearing. Rather this is someone of the House of Representatives making some weird proposal or claim.

Maybe I am oversimplifying here, but you get the idea.

Does it matter in the end?

The way I see it, it's a parliamentary member from France from the Renew group in the EU parliament who is not happy with the results and thinks that the democracy needs to be saved because the results do not align with their expectations.

The decent thing to do would be to take this vote into account and accept that not everyone wants the same thing.

> Does it matter in the end?

Yes, it does. It matters very much. The difference between a governmental body ordering you to do something and a single employee making one comment is tremendous. Maybe the latter can lead to the former, maybe, but they’re very far from being the same thing.

ok, let's follow your logic there to the very end.

Your argument is that we should not pay attention because whoever the MP who made this comments is, she is not part of the EU commission and she is not a big wig as you put it. So we could assume that whatever she says does not carry much weight.

But the website reporting this news does not agree with you here, otherwise, why report it in the first place? To them, it matters and it is important because she is part of the Renew group. The Renew group is staunchly opposed to the far-right and pro NATO and pro Ukraine, that is to say the complete opposite to this Romanian candidate.

Furthermore, the MP in question is a close ally of the French president which means she could have the means to convince other MPs to join her and maybe get some support from Macron to jump start some kind of investigation into this matter.

Macron is/was the de facto leading figure in Europe (before becoming a lame duck in the last election) and his words still carry a lot of weight at the EU level.

If she was a random MP in a small fringe party on the sidelines of the EU parliament, I would have agreed with you but not in this case.

Maybe you are right and nothing will come out of it but to me this is not nothing and it should not be dismissed as easily as you think.

> Your argument is that we should not pay attention because whoever the MP who made this comments is, she is not part of the EU commission and she is not a big wig as you put it.

No, that was not my argument at all. I didn’t call anyone a bigwig. You’re not replying to the same person and are starting from an entirely false and incorrect premise, thus reaching a wrong conclusion.

I don’t think this should be dismissed, nor have I claimed it. My sole point is that the difference as it exists is meaningful. One is a certainty, the other is a possibility. Possibilities may be avoided, with different degrees of probability.

No, Macron lost his credibility and influence in the last elections, and by refusing to let his opponents try to form a coalition first (wether or not it would have succeeded is irrelevant here.), he is sometimes viewed as an anti-parliementarist by some of his allies. Being part of renew and batting for 'democracy' is quite ironic,and my guess is that she'll be ignored.

It matters in the sense that the title makes this sound much bigger than it actually is. Every parliament has a spectrum of members, some of them being relatively edgy/extreme in what they say. And most of the time what they say doesn't have any later consequences - apart from, I guess, affirming their voter base - which is why they are there in the first place.

Agreed, would they have called the CEO of TikTok if one of the mainstream parties had won?

To me it looks like the EU wants to become an auditor of the elections of the EU members and is taking sides.

And here I thought that the EU wanted to promote democracy and the will of the people.

Read the article. What is concerning is not that some politician with extreme views did well in an election. The concern is that a politician did well because of a large number of votes from people who admit to not even knowing much about him.

You seem to be denying the fact that humans are easily programmed meat machines, even the best of us.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8116821/

You make the assumption that social media is the main source of truth for voters.

But people are waking up and vote because of what they see with their own eyes.

> But people are waking up and vote because of what they see with their own eyes.

Which part of this guy's platform do you think people voted for? In a staunchly pro-EU and pro-NATO country that has centuries of bad blood with Russia, with a walking and talking unstable living proof of it (Moldova), a pro-Russian Eurosceptic sounds like a weird choice

Sometimes people vote not for something, but against something, when they don’t really have a good choice. It’s a „format HDD“ button for the political system. Wipe out the mainstream and hope that something new and better comes to the rescue.

> You make the assumption that social media is the main source of truth for voters.

That’s no longer an assumption, we’ve seen that happening for years now. For crying out loud, the CEO of a major platform regularly repeats every bullshit he reads on his own network, as long as it conforms to his world view.

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/25/lies-damned-lies-and-elo...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/elon-musk-x-po...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u8_fp1TtJE

OK, please stealman the argument for Georgescu's platform.

what was this guy's platform anyway? The internet doesn't have much detail in english as far as I can tell from a few quick searches. wikipedia has "Among his campaign stances were strengthening Romania's defence capabilities, diversifying Romania's diplomatic relations, increased support for farmers, promoting energy and food production, and reducing dependency on imports" which is kind of vague and could be great ideas or a mixed bag depending on the actual details. (i.e. strengthening defence capabilities and diversifying diplomatic relations seem pretty spot on if they are middle of the road in that direction policies, but could be very bad if they are not. "supporting farmers" could mean anything from good ideas (decreasing over-regulation [that in itself needs a book to explain it accurately so just assume it means something you think is good for getting rid of a regulation]) to very terrible ideas (explicit subsidy,etc).)

which is precisely why 65% of votes went to Trump and JD Vance in Springfield, Ohio /s

Quite the opposite, they just proved it.

How so? A candidate who nobody knew about built his following on a platform known for CCP control, short attention span, and repetition.

What is the substance?

The substance is many people there didn't want Romania to get into a catastrophic war with Russia like Ukraine did and see hundreds of thousands of their countrymen die (likely ultimately for nothing, as Trump seems to be planning to let Russia keep the land it took).

This comment has me puzzled for so many reasons. Which candidate or party wanted Romania to get into a war with Russia? I don't think this issue was mentioned at all during the entire campaign because nobody is even thinking about that possibility. And what do you mean Ukraine "got into a war"? They where attacked.

NATO seems more safe to be honest

Are you trying to tell me that Putin is invading Romania, and Romania has already given up?

I know some Romanians, and they ain't no papa laptes.

Like giving them a tons of money then be told to get lost?

For from me to defend any politician but denying the role of social media in shifting public opinion is like sticking your head deep in the sand.

The real culpability of politicians and governments the world over is that they have endorsed this freak development for decades.

They are all present on social media, they are advertising both directly and indirectly, by placing links and "follow us on xyz" on every damn government website.

They have made a faustian pact with the devil and now the devil is extracting his pound of flesh.

100% this.

This would never have happened if it would have been a left wing politician obeying to the EU elites.

We don't have true left wing candidates in Romania, or not any that have made it far in the election cycle, so this is not relevant.

The EP never had a left wing majority, especially not in the last decade. What are you talking about?

So you think amplified disinformation and misinformation, with high frequency per user, play no role in people's perception of reality and their decision-making process?

I agree that politicians in a good chunk of Europe have let their constituents down one one too many times, that the breach has gotten too wide and that protest voting makes perfect sense for a lot of people. But two things can be right at the same time: I also believe it's true that dictators are sabotaging democracies everywhere and that social networks (not just TikTok) are both addictive and a major source of misinformation.

I'm constantly reminded of this bit from [1] (which is a great read):

> Later, when I ask Chase whether he’s ever heard about the QAnon conspiracy, he says no, but explains that the video must be legit because “it’s gotten deleted multiple times off the internet, which is insane.” Epistemologically, this is where we are as a country: when content gets expurgated because of blatant misinformation, it is taken as a sure sign of that source’s truthfulness.

I certainly want more politicians to be afraid of the people they claim to represent, but I also want social networks to stop throwing their hands in the air and pretend they're not responsible for spreading misinformation at an unprecedent scale.

[1] https://harpers.org/archive/2021/06/tiktok-house-collab-hous...

It’s well known that TikTok uses human curation and weighting to a far greater extent than other social media platforms. The others primarily try to hide and remove unwanted content, but TikTok actively picks what gets shown.

(Twitter apparently now has a patchwork of hacks like the famous “author_is_elon” multiplier that slipped into their public source code release, but that’s nothing like TikTok’s meticulous selection process for algorithmic boosting.)

It would be good to have more visibility into this process because it wields massive influence among the 13-28 demographic, roughly.

> massive influence among the 13-28 demographic

So not really the people who vote.

Most people in the stated age range can vote.

Yes but unfortunately they're often the people who vote the less. https://national-policies.eacea.ec.europa.eu/youthwiki/chapt...

> Turnout among young people in Romania is generally lower than the turnout of elder people.

A bit of context: the presidential candidate in question was predicted below 1% on all polls days before the election. He declared a campaign budget of absolute zero. He had no posters, no tents, no apparitions on TV, absolutely nothing. After a massive presence on TikTok in the last couple of weeks he won 23% of the votes, placing him first and wining a spot in the final elections where just the first two placed candidates run.

Currently the elections in Romania are in an total chaos. The Romanian Constitutional Court ordered an unprecedented recount of the votes, even though the count was sanctioned by all the parties through their observers. Also the country's Defense Council declared they have proof of cybernetic attacks which influenced the elections.

That sounds like either the pollsters or the people running the election have significantly bigger problems than whatever that candidate might or might not have done. How did they not find any of the people swayed by TikTok? Why are they even looking at TikTok at that point?

"It didn't go as we wanted, someone else must be to blame!"

If TikTok (or any other platform) can have this kind of real impact then other political forces should consider using it as well.

This is not a really easy thing to do:

Lets analyze a bit just on the top of our heads what kind of content goes viral on social media?

I so far almost (I write here almost just in case I missed one case) NEVER saw any rational, sensible discussion.

So no, not all parties or arguments get the same amount of exposure even if they use TiKTok. Only the simplest (as in ignoring the complexity of situations), conspirationist, false and sometimes stupid challenges ones go viral.

It's not hard to create content for TikTok (also, I don't think it's hard to do "debunk shorts" if they wanted to). They should just do it as this new "short video" form clearly works.

edit: Were you perhaps replying to someone else?

> Many of Georgescu’s voters admit to not knowing too much about him.

There seems to be a greater problem than Social Media abuse, to me there's a lack of education around the candidates and the actual meaning & process of voting. That said, everyone can vote for whoever they want so I'm not really sure what can be done.

I'm Romanian, and to add some more context here's what TikTok sent Romanian authorities about the situation:

> The company that it found no evidence of a covert influence operation on the TikTok platform in recent weeks related to the Romanian presidential election and no evidence of external influence.

> "Although it has been alleged that there were 5,000 fake accounts involved in election interference, our investigations have found no evidence to support these allegations," the company said in its letter, which notes that it is "still investigating."

> From September through the beginning of this week, the company has removed more than 66,000 fake accounts, 7 million fake likes and 10 million fake followers from the platform, TikTok says in its letter. The figures refer to posts and activity in English. Note that it does not specify whether they were electoral or in favor of a specific candidate.

> TikTok also says it has prevented 40 million likes and blocked more than 216,000 "spam accounts" before they went online.

Translated with DeepL from https://www.paginademedia.ro/stiri-media/tiktok-scrisoare-au...

It's a bit of "we've investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong".

There's been a huge uproar about this candidate which was polling below 5% reaching the 1st spot in the 1st round of the presidential election in Romania. The candidates need to report spending to a state organization overseeing elections and this guy reported that he spent nothing on his election campaign, which is a bit impossible as there have also been flyers with his name on them, so there's definitely something fishy going on.

There are also a lot of TikTok influencers that have come forward claiming to have received payments through a third party company to present the candidate in a positive light, and the issue is that these videos should have been tagged correctly as "electoral ads" according to Romanian law, which did not happen.

Purely from an observation perspective there has been a huge amount of spam activity on Romanian tiktok, with accounts spamming random videos with copy paste messages similar to "We're massively voting for Calin Georgescu" which led a lot of people to believing there was a massive bot campaign promoting this guy.

A criminal investigation has been requested by The Supreme Council of National Defence, which is the autonomous administrative authority in Romania invested by the Constitution with the task of organising and coordinating, by unanimous decisions, the activities related to the country's defence and national security.

Why single TikTok out? Was there more campaigning that EU doesn't like on TikTok compared to Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter?

Does Facebook et all promote / filter political contents different from TikTok?

It’s in the article:

> Georgescu based his campaign on TikTok

It’s not “singling out” if that’s the principal hub.

Adding to this discussion here one point of view:

So if we say in almost every country that social media is bad and oh my people are using it wrong and we should change people to better handle social media, could it not be the case that maybe people are not wrong but social media is?

Why do we have to do such amount of change to accommodate the way our current social media works? Could it be that people are using it wrong or that social media is a negative influence and we should fix that.

Maybe EU should enforce crippling economic sanctions and trade embargo against Romanian population for daring to vote wrong?

the situation is simple: the guy that got 1st place with 22% (after being invisible until just 2 weeks before the elections) posted a shitstorm of content (without labelling it as political content), via some obscure hashtags, paid micro influencers to share and post and then sent a lot of bots to comment, share and broadcast. all while the other candidates were not allowed to post anything.

the guy took advantage of tiktok algorithms and manipulated micro influencers into reaching his audience.. everything in 1-2 weeks.

tiktok is not to blame, but it wasn't real democracy.

Every platform has problems.

Not being a US citizen or living in the US I can still understand how the upcoming president was elected - regardless of how one feels politically about if they should or should not have been.

Reddit has become an extreme echo chamber of a particular ideology to the point I find myself even with agreement on many points leaning the other way out of the exhaustion of the echo chamber. It feels like some amount embrace, get off on the echo chamber and then there are others (myself?) who get so sick of the constant echo chamber end up being just opposed to engaging even in things we normally would support.

It's not a perfect analogy, but it reminds me of kids who left to their own free will, will eat boat loads of candy to the point of being sick of candy and don't want it anymore even though they did/do enjoy candy they're simply maxed out on having it.

China!

It is a travesty that western countries haven't banned TikTok altogether.

The information warfare situation is highly asymmetric, and we seem to just let it fester on.

The west doesn't have ubiquitous mind control devices deployed behind the great firewall. That this situation persists is a signal, to me, that our leaders aren't well equipped to deal with the realities of tech in 2024.

Our leaders do their job by trying to uphold our values like freedom of expression and equality and that other stuff.

This makes us vulnerable and we have to adapt. But hopefully not by banning these things, but by educating ourselves about the risks and gains of using addictive technology. At least that's the theory, I guess.

TikTok should be handled like an addictive substance. It and things just like it should be heavily regulated and watched over (e.g. by protecting and educating our youth).

> Our leaders do their job by trying to uphold our values like freedom of expression and equality and that other stuff.

Is that so, what about Chat Control then? is that law upholding freedom of expression? I guess I was not aware that automated reports to the EU cops of "suspicious" messages could be seen as maintaining freedom of expression in the EU.

Have we crossed the Rubicon here? War is peace, freedom is slavery and freedom of expression is 24/7 monitoring of your private conversations.

> but by educating ourselves about the risks and gains of using addictive technology

Teenagers are educated by these platforms instead, as people around have limited free time, while algorithms have all of it.

Pretty much.

It's a travesty that western countries have moved from trying to gain their people's support by improving their living conditions to trying to gain their people's support by lying to them, such that unrestricted discussion of the facts is such a threat to the governments in power.

If only it were facts being discussed, but social media is plagued with alternative facts(aka lies) and no mechanism of getting rid of it, as reporting doesn't do anything since social media companies just fake compliance but take no serious action against disinformation.

This is all from my personal experience reporting egregious fake information (the kind you can check with the first google result) on social media sites and the content still exists.

If we are going to go down that road, then what about the mainstream media then? How many lies have they gotten away with and never corrected?

I agree that misinformation is spreading on social media, but let's not forget that the mainstream media has been caught lying deliberately or by omission more times than I can count.

No need for whataboutism, mainstream media lies are bad as well.

Western countries do the same thing with colour revolutions.

YT Shorts is OK however

Given the YT algorithm is such that (in my case) out of 60 recent suggestions on the home page, 45 were bad and 14 were already in my "watch later" list, I don't think there's much chance of it influencing anything.

But sure, keep an eye on it anyway. It's not magically good by virtue of which country owns it.

The US VP elect has threaten withdrawal from NATO if Twitter is regulated in the EU.

There appears to be no such threat regarding TikTok.

This is a test of the EU. If TikTok is not banned quickly, it's not a good sign.

I cannot believe that people are calling for the ban of TikTok or X or any other social platform. It's just a gut feeling but it feels to me as though the more the economic situation in Europe deteriorates the more the continent descends into totalitarianism.

Most countries have laws on TV and radio time per political parties to regulate these things, why not do it on social medias?

Democracy isn't just about voting every X years, it's also about being able to make well informed decisions, which is not the case when a foreign state agent employs bot farms to skew the story. I'm not saying the current system is perfect but clearly sprinkling it with foreign influence isn't going to make it better.

Social medias are the only thing that are still mostly unregulated black boxes, the government knows about the secret recipe of coca cola, or the secret recipe of KFC spices, &c. But the algos of TikTok, Instagram, &co aren't discussed anywhere

If RussCola sold bottles of soda with mercury in Germany would you say it would be totalitarian to ban them? If people want mercury in their cola who are we to judge?

We have a lot of experience of, and fear of, propaganda in this continent. More so than fear of the lack of knowledge about government failures.

"Freedom from, not freedom to", to paraphrase a recent video I've seen by US migrants to France.

Given the scale of Europe's economic problems, gaslighting people is the path of least resistance for governments there, as solving the economic issues would be extremely difficult, especially given Europe's demographic crisis/aging population.

> especially given Europe's demographic crisis/aging population.

This is a problem for all developed nations, is it not?

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