TikTok defends handling of Romania election content in grilling by EU lawmakers

BUCHAREST, Romania -- TikTok took down several networks that tried to meddle in Romania's elections, executives said Tuesday as they defended the company's election integrity measures to European Union lawmakers.

The video-sharing platform is a focus of controversy in the Eastern European country after far-right outsider Calin Georgescu emerged as the frontrunner in the vote, plunging the country into turmoil amid allegations of electoral violations and Russian meddling.

Among the networks that TikTok uncovered were two small groups that it disrupted on Friday, days after the first round of voting, Brie Pegum, the platform’s global head of product, authenticity and transparency, told a committee.

Both networks targeted Romanian users. One had only 1,781 followers and supported Georgescu, who was a little-known independent candidate until he set off shockwaves by convincingly winning the first round of voting, beating out the incumbent prime minister. The other networks supported different candidates, Pegum said.

Many observers chalked up Georgescu’s success to his TikTok account, which now has 5.8 million likes and 527,000 followers.

He gained huge traction and popularity in the weeks leading up to the first vote. But experts suspect Georgescu’s online following was artificially inflated while officials hinted that he was given preferential treatment by TikTok.

The controversy highlights how TikTok has become a key election tool in Romania, an EU and NATO member state that shares a long border with war-torn Ukraine.

TikTok applied its “global playbook” for the Romanian election and took a local approach with staff on the ground, said Caroline Greer, the company's top lobbyist in the EU.

Greer and Pegum were being grilled by EU lawmakers about Tiktok's role in the Romanian vote as well as its compliance with the 27-nation bloc's Digital Services Act, a sweeping set of regulations designed to protect users online from illegal or harmful content.

Greer said TikTok deployed 95 Romanian language content moderators, worked with a fact-checking group and met with political parties and a number of different authorities including the country's electoral authority.

But many lawmakers were not satisfied with their responses.

“The feeling here is that we are losing patience ... and that we need more specific answers,” said Dirk Gotnik, a Dutch member of the European Parliament. He also questioned what the scores of Romanian content moderators were doing during the election, and compared Pegum and Greer to firefighters TikTok sent to put out a fire.

“They come, they let the fire rage online for weeks, months, during an election. And then they send very nice people here into this committee to answer questions in a very polite way," Gotnik said. "But it is simply not convincing — and it also doesn’t reflect what is happening online.”

According to a report by the Bucharest-based Expert Forum think tank, Georgescu's TikTok account garnered 92.8 million views primarily within the last few months, a figure that grew by 52 million views a week later, just days ahead of the first-round vote.

Another TikTok account solely featuring Georgescu content, which had 1.7 million likes on the night first-round polls closed, was removed the day after voting. It had posts with Georgescu attending church, doing judo, running around an oval track, and speaking on podcasts.

In an emailed statement to The Associated Press on Monday, TikTok said the account was one of “more than 150 accounts impersonating Georgescu” to date that has been removed, but added: “We also removed more than 650 additional impersonation accounts belonging to other candidates.”

Georgescu will face reformist Elena Lasconi, of the progressive Save Romania Union party, in a presidential runoff on Sunday.

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Associated Press journalist Kelvin Chan reported from London.