Russia and China rigged Romanian Elections using 10M fake TikTok accounts | Hacker News Reader

Russia and China rigged Romanian Elections using 10M fake TikTok accounts

kyivinsider.com

87 pointslatexr87 comments

The linked article is a bit hyperbolic but the news covered pretty widely. "Rigged" might not be the right term, but pretty coordinated interference seems to have occurred.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-concerned-about-pote...

https://archive.is/0MJ6X

https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-removed-3-influence-c...

If one side pushes an online agenda to the point that it affects the coverage of publication apps/sites by intent of the ones pushing the agenda, then yes, it qualifies as rigging. It doesn't need to be something like issuing number 2 pencils to the people registered to your party while issuing non-number 2 pencils to everyone else so the votes are misread, or having Hugo Chavez' personal programmers change the code of the voting machines. If you can change the "heart & minds" of someone with disinformation, that's like the perfect rigging effort.

TikTok is rife with russian sock puppet accounts run by trolls that try and persuade people. Look at any of the political posts and then check out the accounts posting pro-red and anti-blue sentiments. There is a clear pattern to their accounts.

We have to be careful, it cuts the other way too.

Part of the propaganda is also showing extreme left content AND extreme right. The goal is not pushing left or right, the goal is divisiveness.

We have to be careful that once authoritarian rule is established globally we won't really be able to get out of it. Right now, using social media to make that happen seems to be extremely effective and because democracies believe in the idea of "free speech at all costs" we really have nothing to stop this.

The answer was probably better education which needed to start 20 years ago in order to counter this but we didn't do it and now we really have no answers but to elect every puppet they push.

That's true to an extent, but the trend is definitely leaning towards one side more than the other. I'm pretty sure that's just because of where the traction leads the algos to push the bots. Is one side more susceptible than the other is a question for a different thread, but I don't know how to attempt to learn the answer without fanning the flames of either side.

that’s my instagram

Right... "low level professor with pro-Russian leanings". Dude was even proposed to be the prime minister of Romania at one point in time, was member of the government, and some other things in between.

Here's just one example https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-toxics-and-hu...

I do NOT endorse him at all, I disdain his ideas, but what they're doing is exactly what they're accusing the other part of... So please spare me..

He was actually proposed multiple times for the role of prime minister, not once. He has also represented Romania at the United Nations for many years. The critics cannot decide between "he's actually part of the system" and "he appeared from nowhere". See also: https://revdem.ceu.edu/2024/12/05/rise-of-calin-georgescu/

> He has also represented Romania at the United Nations for many years.

No, he did not. Please provide proof of that.

I would argue that the main benefit of democracy is not electing "the right people" by a free and fair election, but by having a mechanism to remove bad leaders without violence. So a propaganda machine influencing elections is not ideal, but if it results in bad leaders, then that will become obvious to people at some point and they will vote them out. Elections will always have some random factors. Not everyone is going to vote. There will be fads. So election isn't the important part, UN-election is.

Rarely you find a country where a president can be removed without violence.

In the UK we haven't had any need for violence to change government for hundreds of years.

I mean, technically, the US does it every four years. At least, it used to. But that was just a blip in the historical record. We'll see what happens in four years from now to see which way the trend moves. Here's hoping it was truly a blip and not the start of a trend

I don't think I was clear, I meant removal before their term has ended. Also, I said rarely so I know it exists, but not in the majority of countries.

Is “propaganda” rigging?

As of late, whenever someone doesn’t like the result of an election “rigging” is an adequate term.

Go to China and try use Instagram :)

They know what they're doing by using your love of free speech against you to spread lies.

Social media is a backdoor into our societies which is why authoritarian countries ban it.

Youtube is banned in Russia, all western social media is banned in China, because they know how it can be weaponized against them...because they weaponize it.

> Social media is a backdoor into our societies which is why authoritarian countries ban it.

Sort of. They are perfectly happy for you to use the social media which is subject to the local nation's laws/regulations, and which they have potentially-unlimited degree of influence over.

Which isn't the same thing as the USA, we just let millions of bots onto our platforms to spread any stories those bots like.

In USA this is called “freedom of speech” :)

Yes but you must see the slippery slope we're on and we have no antidote for.

no antidote is right... the only semi-reasonable idea I had was to pass a law regarding identity proofing of accounts on ALL social media (anyone claiming protections under section 230 would be in this bucket).

the "blue checkmark" would be reserved for any account that has gone through identity proofing (e.g. IAL2). anonymous accounts would still be allowed of course but at least you would have a clear way to differentiate bots and propaganda vs. actual real people with known identities. not to say that identity-proofed accounts would not still be posting sh*t but it would be a better system overall

Youtube is not banned in Russia (yet)

It's blocked. A distinction without a difference.

Yeah, by all accounts I have read, it was blocked rather recently. I have read to coverup the failures and huge losses in Ukraine.

>Is “propaganda” rigging?

The propagation of the propaganda can be rigging. Every side has propaganda, so I'm not sure what your intent of scare quotes was meant to do. If you can saturate a publishing platform with the use of fake accounts so that your "propaganda" is pushed by the platform's algorithms in an "unnatural" way, then that's pretty much the definition of rigging.

Rigged? Or just convinced enough idiots with propaganda?

The person that thinks they're above propaganda is the one most swayed by it.

Parent post wasn't saying they were above it, they were saying they were aware of it. Big difference.

Well, that rule would apply to people who are generally arrogant.

That rule would apply to people who are generally people...

Perhaps, instead of fixing platforms, or banning them when we have no control over them, we should work on the idiot thing... Although I imagine it's a lot harder than just banning platforms. Especially when the local governments benefit from keeping people uneducated.

What's the difference, spreading populist lies to intentionally change the out come of an election is what?

The latter. I guess people are more malleable than we thought.

We knew how malleable they were immediately after WWII, but have since forgotten again.

They didn’t rig an election — at least not based on the description in the article. They campaigned for a candidate using underhanded tactics.

Election rigging isn't the right term. It should be election interference.

They only call it interference if it supports the wrong people. Russia taking out ads on Facebook: election interference. Various state sponsored media outlets and foreign politicians and officials disparaging Trump: free speech.

Illegal tactics, it sounds like. Elections have rules. Breaking them to give someone an advantage is rigging it, no?

Rigging is a direct action on the election itself. Like removing ballots that were valid, submitting and accepting ballots of ineligible voters or straight fake them, blocking groups of people from voting (e g. blocking roads to voting polls), straight changing the numbers etc.

I see a distinction because all of the above are still happening in many countries, and there is a degree of illegality that is way above simple conning.

There's the other situations where people feel under threat of direct violence if they vote the wrong way. Perhaps there would be a different term for that altogether.

Do Russia and China have laws preventing their governments from interfering in other countries’ elections? If this all happened online, I’m pretty sure Romanian laws don’t apply.

It's not like they made the dead vote. They just used an unregulated vector of appealing to the electorate in a better way than the opponent did. I'm not saying it's not not rigging, as that's definitely the intent, but let's not turn a blind eye to what is an obvious thing

10M fake accounts? I mean, that in and of itself is impressive. Apparently, it's easy to create fake accounts on TikTok still? How hard would that be today with FB, Twitt...er, X or any thing else really?

Meta is not really an issue today because they have been heavily down-ranking political content and external links across their platforms.

X is just the wild west. The algorithm actually treats blue-checks as legitimate and non blue-checks as being spam. And so it's been easy for scammers to get a foothold simply by getting blue-checks using stolen credit cards. Also its ad platform is basically unmonitored so there are many scams and pyramid schemes freely advertising.

I am sure it's easy when you likely have direct access to APIs.

That's something that I was alluding to, but we can expand on that more directly. The fear of TikTok currently is that it is potentially under CCP influence. So if the CCP says that they need something to happen, can TikTok do anything other than what the CCP wants? I don't know the nuances of the current attempt to ban TikTok without being sold, but knowing the power of the "influencer" on TikTok and how they can be pushing agendas is what makes it incredibly scary for those not pushing the agenda.

I'm not giving these governments the benefit of the doubt here, but I'm wondering if these really are state actors at play here, or just tech savvy trolls

Or if this can be considered trolling at all?

The good that will come of this that a lot of these social media platforms will need to become more regulated or just flat out banned.

They're generally not good for us emotiona anyway.

We should all touch grass more often

It's undeniably state actors. We know because every so often Meta will release reports that show just how many bot accounts you need to really move the needle:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/30/meta-...

Another article https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-russia-election-interference...

Wow, this disclaimer on the side of the page was a bit surprising: "If you are in Russia or the Russia-controlled parts of Ukraine and hold a Russian passport or are a stateless person residing permanently in Russia or the Russia-controlled parts of Ukraine, please note that you could face fines or imprisonment for sharing, liking, commenting on, or saving our content, or for contacting us."

It's state sponsored media from a geopolitical adversary.

> Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is an American government-funded media organization broadcasting news and analyses in 27 languages to 23 countries...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Libert...

Yeah but like, so is a huge percent of what's shoved in our face everywhere in modern media - my surprise is at this part: "you could face fines or imprisonment for sharing, liking, commenting on, or saving our content, or for contacting us". The idea of being fined or even imprisoned for, say, liking a tweet or something, seems completely bonkers to me.

Not surprising at all, actually.

welcome to the free world.

Why are all the links being posted here from disreputable sources? Kyiv Insider, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (which is explicitly a propaganda organization run by the US government)...

Why are all the links being posted here from disreputable sources?

A careful analysis indicates that about 18 percent of the links in this thread are from the sites you mentioned.

Can you explain how you arrived at the formulation "all the links", in this context?

From what I've come to understand:

- Romania's voting system is in 2 rounds, and he won the first. The second is in ~2 days.

- Most people never heard of him up until 2 weeks before the first round, when an aggressive Tiktok campaign started. Polymarket.com didn't include him in their system. Many were taken by surprise.

- Many videos promoting him on Tiktok weren't marked as being propaganda, and thus allowed to go viral.

- He claims 0 campaign spending and that it's thanks to volunteers.

- Many who voted for him aren't into politics, and liked the way he presented himself.

- His content is a mix of populist, nationalist, anti-establishment, and mostly contain patriotic and emotional narratives to connect to viewers.

- Larger cities voted for the pro-western candidate

- He's made some controversial statements, such as the moon landing being fake, covid denying (am not sure to what extent), 5G conspiracy, denying climate change (those being just a few)

Everyone's talking about him. I'm curious how it will turn out and to see how the quote "there's no such thing as bad publicity" fares in this case.

That's an excellent summary. I'd add: - Someone so unexpectedly winning the first round creates its own myth, and people tend to join such candidates "to be on the winner's side", so he seemed to have a solid chance at winning the second round too.

USA Fails to rigg Romanian Elections using 1M fake TikTok accounts.

You gotta step up your game boys.

Well, regardless of what happens in Romania, I guarantee that this will be a factor in the US treatment of TikTok.

That site is fairly biased (but the same can be said for almost every news site).

It's not really "rigged," per se; it's more like throwing half a billion dollars worth of campaign contributions into the mix. We certainly saw similar, in the US, but it looks like Romania had zero safeguards.

It's different than campaign contributions. When I see a campaign ad I acknowledge that it's a campaign ad. What's devious about the bot armies is it gives the false appearance that my neighbors hold certain beliefs when they do not.

This is true.

It's more than uncontrolled campaign spending, but these days, political campaigns are doing a lot of astroturfing, as well.

elon will purchase TT - problem solved :)

I think there is a reckoning coming for TikTok and X in the EU.

There is widespread criticism coming from the left and the right about how elections are being manipulated either intentionally or through indifference.

Hiding behind the "free speech at all costs" banner may be politically popular in the US but it isn't the same in most other countries.

Seems like this is very good grounds to just nullifying the results. But unfortunately the people have already been influenced and that doesn't go away for the next vote.

We really desperateöy need good counters against these things or we can kiss democracy goodbye.

That all said, the source on this could be a bit biased.

>How is it possible that a low level professor with pro-Russian leanings that no one’s ever heard of suddenly place 2nd in nationwide presidential elections?

Why don't they even try to hide their disdain for plebs?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was also an unknown pleb who quickly became an elected official. We don't question that, and in fact, we celebrate it. It's a great American underdog story. We love it. It's the spirit of our culture.

Why is Georgescu's rise disdained like this? Is it because he's on the "other side"?

According to Wikipedia, kyivinsider.com was founded with a grant from European Endowment for Democracy which like its American cousin, National Endowment for Democracy, is an NGO explicitly set up by Western intelligence agencies to push pro NATO narratives.

Looking through the grants list for NED: https://www.ned.org/explore-all-grants/

Not seeing anything related to NATO and a lot of noble humanitarian efforts.

There's a famous quote from the founder of NED [0]:

> "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA"

In the 1960s-70s, the US government found that covert foreign influence operations run by the CIA could seriously backfire when they were exposed. That's the reason why NED was founded. The idea was that a lot of this foreign influence can be done out in the open, removing the risk of scandal from exposure. It's an interesting approach that seems to have worked for the US.

0. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1991/09/22/i...

According to Wikipedia, kyivinsider.com ...

Funny, the string "kyivinsider.com" does not appear in Wikipedia at all.

I checked and you're right - I could find nothing about Kyiv Insider on Wikipedia.

Clearly the Western conspiracy extends further than anyone realized... or something.

Indeed. It seems we're just not meant to know the truth.

While that statement has a grain of truth (NED having being created as a result of Reagan's NSDD-77 directive) I would rather eat democratic / neoliberal propaganda slop rather than what Russia / China (and their allies) are pushing. This comment kind of reeks of a particular kind of odour that is not quite whataboutism but is very similar to FSB demoralization propaganda. Given your account's relatively young age and other comments I somewhat feel you might have an ulterior motive?

This is just more histrionic Russia hacked my brain nonsense.

How did they rig the election? Did they count tiktok users for the vote? Did they somehow use tiktok users to count to votes? Or maybe blackmail the vote counters? Oh wait, they used a disinformation campaign. So nothing was actually rigged.

Isn't everyone (including the US) trying to do the same?

Yes. I think the outrage here is that it’s being used to influence democratic elections by obviously non-democratic leaders like Putin.

The US and Europe use NGOs.

Well as long as those NGOs aren't funded by governments, then it's ok. They are NGOs after all.

NED, USAID et al all are directly or indirectly funded by the US State department.

Hate to say it, but Trump got the TikTok threat spot on, while Europe was busy writing cookie policies. Fake accounts powered by (early) LLMs just influenced Romania's presidential election, yet Brussels still thinks GDPR-style regulation is the answer to platform manipulation

EU GPDR was released before TikTok even existed.

And EU has been continually critical of TikTok for many years but obviously would prefer that it actually meets its DSA obligations before trying to shut it down.

As much as I want to trust "Kyiv Insider" for being nonpartisan, I unfortunately wasn't born yesterday. How does this low quality propaganda not get flagged as such? Why is this even on HN rather than an in-depth article proving the points against TikTok? This is literally out of the playbook from US Presidental election in 2016 when the Democrats claimed it was Russian interference that caused Trump to win due to Russian bots, and unless there's a thorough explanation (not from a corrupt, biased government), you would have to be a fool to believe the claims of 1M+ TikTok accounts fooling Romanians to vote one way or another. It's an insult against everyone's intelligence, and most especially against the voters themselves.

You can vote in romania with tiktok accounts?!

Put more clearly, I think parent comment is critiquing the use of "rigged", which is associated with actual manipulation of election results, with "unfairly influenced" which is what TikTok propaganda lies would be.

The Ukraine game all over again, i really have to say the CIA/Pentagon is doing an incredible job, and Europe is playing the perfect socket-puppet....

The US knows how to play games, that's for sure.

When one says seemingly counterfactual or less-held beliefs, one should expect to have to provide more evidence for those beliefs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com