The Supreme Council for the Defense of the Country: TikTok influenced the Romanian presidential elections

The Supreme Council for the Defense of the Country has no powers related to the conduct of the electoral process, but if there are elements with an impact on national security, these issues should be analyzed at a CSAT meeting.

At Thursday's meeting, representatives of the authorities in charge of defense, public order and national security presented assessments on possible risks to national security, generated by the actions of state and non-state cyber actors on IT&C infrastructures supporting the electoral process.

According to the documents presented, the Council members found that there have been cyber-attacks aimed at influencing the fairness of the electoral process.

It was also confirmed that, in the current regional and especially electoral security context, Romania, along with other states on NATO's Eastern Flank, has become a priority for hostile actions by state and non-state actors, especially Russia, with a growing interest on its part to influence the public agenda in Romanian society and social cohesion.

”From the analysis of the documents it also emerged that, by violating the electoral legislation, a candidate in the presidential elections benefited from massive exposure on the basis of the preferential treatment that the TikTok platform granted him by not marking him as a political candidate, namely without requiring him to mark the video electoral materials with the unique identification code assigned by the Permanent Electoral Authority when appointing the coordinating financial agent, an obligation imposed by the electoral legislation.

Thus, the visibility of that candidate significantly increased in comparison with the other candidates who were recognized by TikTok algorithms as candidates in the presidential elections, and the content promoted by them was massively filtered, exponentially decreasing their visibility among the platform's users.

This preferential treatment was enhanced by TikTok's failure to comply with the decision of the Central Electoral Bureau, which found that, in fact, the Chinese company, contrary to what was officially communicated to the Romanian authorities, did not implement in any respect the provisions of the BEC Decision”, CSAT transmits.

From this perspective, the CSAT took note of the fact that, certainly, the social network TikTok, by not implementing the BEC Decision, did not comply with the legal rules governing the conduct of the electoral process, with an impact on the final outcome of the electoral process.

In this regard, the members of the Council asked the authorities responsible for national security, those responsible for the proper conduct of the electoral process, as well as the criminal prosecution authorities to urgently take the necessary steps, in accordance with their legal powers, to clarify the issues presented at the CSAT meeting.

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