The writer is a member of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University. She is the author of ‘The Technological Coup’.
Romania shocked the world last month when it voted as president an outsider with ultra-nationalist views. Călin Georgescu was performing poorly in the polls just weeks before the election. TikTok was crucial to his sudden success. It also appears to have been a key facilitator of Russia’s foreign interference.
Since then, Romania’s Constitutional Court chose to annul the results of the first round of elections. All eyes are once again on social media platforms and their ability to influence election results. Until now, extraordinary discretion has been left to the companies that curate our information ecosystem: Romania can turn the tide.
Suspicious online accounts, surveys and paid influencers sharing political content are seen as key online tools to influence Romanian votes.
Inside the country, intelligence services have accused Russia of aggressively using TikTok to promote Georgescu. The US State Department describes “malignant cyber activity.” In Europe, the Digital Services Act (DSA) has been invoked to impose a “retention order” requiring TikTok to retain all data related to the European elections for scrutiny. A representative of the TikTok company emphasized its compliance with EU law at a recent hearing before the European Parliament.
After years of lingering questions about the precise impact of social media platforms on democracy, European research should finally shed light on the details of algorithmic influence. Lessons will be learned around the world.
Most importantly, it will be a litmus test for DSA enforcement. This newly implemented law seeks to minimize harm by establishing content moderation obligations for large online platforms. That includes mitigating systemic risks, such as those that affect the electoral process.
TikTok notes that it does not allow political ads and applies measures against covert influence. However, these corporate rules may not always be followed. Researchers from the nonprofit Reset Tech, Check First and EU DisinfoLab found evidence of coordinated posts about Georgescu on social media and stated that Meta had also failed to enforce its own policies, which “demonstrates Meta’s failure to follow the recommendations of the European Commission”. to comply with the DSA.”
New European law may challenge self-regulation failures. For democracies under attack, avoiding an overestimation of disinformation and manipulation, while ensuring that the risks are not underestimated, is key to policy and policy responses.
Detailed independent research is also crucial to fostering greater public understanding. Society’s resilience in the face of attempts to undermine democracy must be based on facts.
That democracies and electoral processes are under attack it’s clear – from foreign interference to domestically driven efforts aimed at misleading and polarizing voters.
But assessing the exact impact and causality has been a challenge for scholars around the world. Typically, companies don’t want people looking under the hood of their business and having proprietary data protected. The knowledge gained in the Romanian case will indirectly shed light on any manipulation that takes place through social media platforms in other contexts.
Europe’s pursuit of responsibility contrasts with the United States’ hands-off approach to technology regulation. There, social media platforms are now closer than ever to informing Donald Trump’s new technology policy. Elon Musk, a close ally and advisor to the president-elect and owner of X, considers any moderation of social media content “censorship.” Meta has recently stated that he believes it was too much firm hand with some content moderation in the past.
For TikTok and its owner ByteDance, the stakes are high. According to the DSA, the European Commission can impose penalties of up to 6 percent of global turnover.
But events in Romania will go beyond just one company. It will question the practice of allowing corporate rules to act as the best defense of democracy.
Details about the interplay between the Kremlin’s subversion tactics and social media algorithms can be expected to play an important role in ensuring accountability. While Romania is experiencing a terrible political shock from the attack on democratic principles, the facts that will be uncovered about these elections should go a long way toward making democracies more resilient and holding tech platforms accountable.