Declassified Romanian intelligence suggests ‘state actor’ behind Georgescu’s campaign

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/12/04/declassified-romanian-intelligence-suggests-state-actor-behind-georgescus-campaign

by alexqaws

33 comments

  1. Five secret reports from different Romanian institutions and agencies have been made public by the country’s president upon their request.

    Declassified information from Romania’s intelligence agencies has revealed that the sudden rise of populist hard-right candidate Calin Georgescu in the first round of last month’s presidential election was “not a natural outcome”.

    Instead, the reports show that it was the result of a coordinated social media campaign, most likely orchestrated by a “state actor.”

    Romania’s President Klaus Iohannis released on Wednesday five classified reports from various national institutions and agencies on election interference, following requests from the institutions that authored them.

    A previously hidden network, mainly operating on TikTok, which had been largely inactive since its launch in 2016, was activated two weeks before the elections. The network’s operators, recruited and coordinated through a channel on the messaging platform Telegram, used methods typical of a state actor’s “mode of operation,” the national intelligence agency SRI concluded.

  3. So secret agencies are joining the election campaign in Romania?

    That’s new.

  4. It’s the same song and dance during every election now in the EU and America. Unfortunately it’s working and it’s very easy to operate these campaigns outside of the borders of the election. Hopefully the populations start wising up about what’s going on.

  5. Dear EU friends, please take note, this could happen anywhere. Romaina is just target practice for Russia’s disinformation war and plan to destabilize EU by applying a very well conceived divide and conquer strategy.

  6. Lasconi is supported by the EU, a union of state actors mainly controlled by Germany. So, who is the biggest hypocrite regarding foreign support?

    Edit: Von der Leyen is German, the ECB is located in Germany, the number of German delegates in the EU Parliament is 96, Germany has the most administrators in the EU offices and every time we want to increase our support to Ukraine, the German chancellor is saying “nein”.

  7. Active since 2016 means Prigozhin’s troll factories. The EU should stop playing around and ban all these fake accounts around the social media. They have been destroying the EU from within for years, just like they did with the US. If we don’t stop sleeping on it we should not be surprised that people are divided.

  8. It’s kind of a good thing that Romania and Bulgaria haven’t followed Estonia in the whole “Electronic Goverment” thing. If the russian can do this kind of thing with a couple of million euro, imagine what they could do if everything was online all the time.

  11. Who could have guessed?

    The real question is why nobody did anything.

  12. We don’t need intelligence to show that state actors are behind the opposition in Romania, because EU proudly declares that they are!

  14. I usually favour freedom over restrictions, but now it’s time to impose a few rules and processes on social networks. It’s also time for people to leave the platforms that have been the focus of such manipulations.

    The U.S. and Europe have a vast number of societal and political issues all related to the big social networks, and Russia and China are abusing those to the max.

  16. Declassified personal intelligence suggests it was Putain.

  18. Honestly both Russia and the US do this and constantly, it’s a neverending battle of influence – this is only news to the average civilian

  19. What the fuck is going on with our leaders? Why isn’t anyone DOING ANYTHING about this? It’s been fucking obvious for eight years, but everyone is standing around with their dicks in their hands shocked pikachu.

  20. Social media is by far the most powerful tool all the governments have at the moment.

    I’m following the elections closely (because I’m romanian) but after it is all over I’m deleting every social platform from my phone (including Reddit) and will get back to reading some books. Haven’t read a book in like 6 years. I used to love them…

  21. Sounds like someone needs to bomb Putin’s cyberwarfare offices if they want secure elections.

  23. So they knew all of this, knew the network was active “since 2016”, and all they found was “1 person who spent 1 million euro” – and they didn’t to absolutely anything about it. Interesting.

    Just one question: if 1 person spending 1 million euros in propaganda is sufficient to win the elections and shift millions of votes, why didn’t the pro-euro people spend 2 millions? 5 millions? 

  24. Bloody Lichtenstein, interfering in Romania’s election..

  25. I wonder when the EU is finally going to take some action against Russia fucking up our society using brainwashing instruments like X and TikTok.

    Maybe ten years from now, they’ll wake up in Brussels. Then we’ll have 10 more years of endless negotiations. Perhaps after that, something will be done about it.

  26. At this point I’m like fuck it let give them what they want. Get out of EU and NATO and deport all of his supporters from member states to Romania. We can take normal ppl here and lests see how they find for themselves, how else they are going to learn?

  28. Lol so if a liberal western govt funds or influences some other country elections thru funding and what not, it’s democracy! freedom of speech! a right wing candidate leads and it’s foreign interference, malicious state actors!

  29. Ya don’t say.This is why TikTok is probably the worst app ever created.

  30. If they know, they should just invalidate his votes. Look at what happened in the US, we can’t be soft on this anymore.

  31. Time to ban TikTok and make social media accountable. If we don’t, we will all be screwed.

  32. Just take actions and ban any russian/chinese apps. Simple as that!

  33. Once again, we know that there’s a manipulation campaign from a state actor that favours the far right, we roughly know how they do it, but will something be done about it?

    Ar we finally going to ban platforms that allow massive bot campaigns to take place until they implement better compliance methods? Are we going to start investigating the funding and rise of those who benefited from the mentioned campaigns and then prosecute accordingly?

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