Moldova may be small, but sandwiched between Ukraine, and EU-member Romania, it has strategic significance for both Europe and the Kremlin, experts say.<\/p>\n
The World Service infiltrated the network – co-ordinated on the messaging app Telegram – through a link sent to us by a whistleblower.<\/p>\n
This gave us a crucial insight into how an anti-democratic propaganda network operates.<\/p>\n
Our undercover reporter Ana, and 34 other recruits, were asked to attend secret online seminars which would “prepare operatives”. With titles like “How to go from your kitchen to national leader”, they seemed to serve as a vetting process. Ana and the others had to pass regular tests on what they had learned.<\/p>\n
Our reporter was then contacted by a network co-ordinator called Alina Juc. Ms Juc’s social media profile says she is from Transnistria, a separatist region of eastern Moldova loyal to Moscow, and her Instagram shows she has made multiple trips to Russia over the past few years.<\/p>\n
Ms Juc told Ana she would be paid 3,000 Moldovan lei ($170, \u00a3125) a month to produce TikTok and Facebook posts in the run-up to the election, and that she would be sent the money from Promsvyazbank (PSB) – a sanctioned Russian state-owned bank which acts as the official bank for the Russian defence ministry, and is a shareholder in one of Ilan Shor’s companies.<\/p>\n
Ana and the other recruits were trained to produce social media posts using ChatGPT. Content “attracts people if the picture contains some satire\u2026 over reality”, they were told, but that too much AI should be avoided to ensure posts felt “organic”.<\/p>\n
Inside the Telegram group, Ana and the BBC had access to previous instructions issued to participants. Initially, they had been asked for patriotic posts about historical figures in Moldovan history – but gradually the demands had become overtly political.<\/p>\n
Ana was asked to post unfounded allegations – including that Moldova’s current government is planning to falsify the election results, Moldova’s potential EU membership is contingent on its citizens becoming LGBTQ+, and that President Sandu is facilitating child trafficking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Moldova may be small, but sandwiched between Ukraine, and EU-member Romania, it has strategic significance for both Europe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":440676,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-440675","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115241755884633897","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/440676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}