BERLIN — Is a bit of money and a successful promotion campaign on TikTok enough to win an election?
This question is at the core of a debate that’s currently raging in Romania, where authorities believe that TikTok played a key role in boosting the popularity of right-wing populist candidate Călin Georgescu, who won last month’s first round of presidential elections, with 22.9% of the vote.
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Known for his admiration of Vladimir Putin and outspoken criticism of the European Union Georgescu ran his campaign almost entirely through social media platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube. Neither the Romanian media nor local polling agencies had predicted such strong support for him.
Then last Friday, those election results were annulled by Romania’s highest court after a trove of declassified intelligence alleged Russia was behind the social media campaign to promote Georgescu.
Romanian influencers close to Georgescu were believed to have been paid to spread misinformation. And more and more, TikTok is being accused of doing nothing to counteract disinformation. The video platform has 175 million users in Europe, and even though many of them are too young to vote, TikTok is an important part of the political debate.
Since right-wing populists, including Germany’s AfD, have been especially successful at using TikTok to reach voters, the debate in Romania has implications for elections in other countries, including February’s national campaign in Germany.
A clear protocol?
TikTok has strongly denied any involvement in these claims. In fact, just last week, the company opened the doors to its European headquarters in Dublin, offering a glimpse into the rules and mechanisms it uses to manage political content during elections.
TikTok’s office, located in Dublin’s docklands — an area home to other tech giants like Google, X, and Meta — was the setting for a press event in which the platform’s managers answered questions. Among those present were TikTok’s chief lobbyist for Europe, Christina Grahn, and Brie Pegum, who leads the company’s internal election campaign monitoring efforts. Pegum, whose official title is Global Head of Authenticity and Transparency, oversees a team tasked with tracking down covert propaganda and influence campaigns.
TikTok stated that it found no evidence of a covert campaign supporting Georgescu.
“We have a clear protocol for how we handle elections,” says Pegum. He explained that four weeks before every election in Europe, TikTok sets up an “election center” in Dublin, where employees from various departments work together to monitor which election-related topics are gaining traction on the platform, identify covert influence campaigns, and coordinate with local fact-checkers. Civil society organizations, including local fact-checking agencies, analyze the posts that circulate on social media platforms, sometimes working directly with the platforms themselves. In Germany, for instance, the news agency DPA is TikTok’s official fact-checking partner, and if their journalists prove a post to be false, TikTok usually agrees with the assessment and removes it from the platform.
In a letter to the European Commission, TikTok pushed back against the accusations that it didn’t act on reports regarding Georgescu’s account, which allegedly lacked the required mark identifying him as a presidential candidate under Romanian law. The company claimed it had removed 66,000 fake accounts before the election and identified another 216,000 suspicious accounts as soon as they were created. TikTok also stated that it found no evidence of a covert campaign supporting Georgescu, either from domestic or foreign sources, in the run-up to the election.
Facebook did it first
Still, there are bigger questions about how well TikTok can moderate its massive global platform. Marcus Bösch, a social scientist from the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg, and an expert on TikTok, sums it up with a rhetorical question: “Can TikTok really moderate the sheer volume of videos it gets every day and keep them free from propaganda and misinformation?”
It’s a dilemma faced by all major social media platforms. Some critics argue that platforms aren’t doing enough to prevent the spread of harmful content, while others accuse them of overreaching and silencing legitimate opinions in the name of moderation.
TikTok has become the platform of choice for political videos.
In any case, the major platforms have been trying for more than ten years to identify and delete content that is illegal or undesirable according to their own rules. Initially, Facebook employed just a few dozen moderators, but over time, the company grew its moderation team to tens of thousands.
Still, even with over 20,000 moderators, Facebook was unable to keep up with politically sensitive content, especially during volatile times like elections. As a result, Facebook decided to limit the reach of political content by changing the algorithm that controls what users see, effectively reducing the visibility of political posts. Since TikTok handles this differently, it is now not only the most popular social network in many countries, but also the platform of choice for political videos.
The platform currently employs 6,000 moderators across Europe, with 600 of them focusing on German-speaking countries. However, TikTok’s moderation efforts are often met with criticism. For example, in the first half of this year, TikTok claimed to have removed 22 million posts across Europe due to rule violations, but around 10 percent of users disputed these removals — and in half of those cases, TikTok reversed the decision. This suggests that the quality of moderation can sometimes be questionable in a task that is rife with gray areas.
The oil spill
The moderation process could be likened to trying to clean up an oil spill in the ocean — no matter how hard you try, you’ll never get everything, and in the process, you may end up losing valuable elements of the ecosystem, or in this case, legitimate posts.
TikTok’s moderation efforts are increasingly automated. According to the company, 80% of deleted posts were flagged, evaluated, and removed automatically by its computer programs, a significant jump from the 62% of the previous year. But even as the company gets better at using AI, there’s still a question of whether computers can truly handle the nuances of moderating political content.
Valiant Riley, who works with non-governmental organizations at TikTok, points out that while human experts can usually make a quick call on whether a post should stay or go, “writing a set of rules that a computer can follow is incredibly difficult.” This challenge becomes especially important in the context of elections, where the consequences of missing or incorrectly deleting posts are much higher.
Failure to comply and penalties
At this point, it is worth going over the boundaries within which TikTok’s moderators and computer programs are supposed to operate: The big tech platforms actually attach great importance to the fact that they are not responsible for what their users publish. They rely on a U.S. law, the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and its Section 230. This largely relieves the platforms of responsibility for dealing with the posts.
However, this year The EU’s had demanded that platforms remove criminal content, including hate speech and Holocaust denial, as soon as they become aware of it. Failure to comply can result in hefty penalties.
At the same time, TikTok and others claim a right to have their own house rules, the extent of which is repeatedly brought before the courts. Each platform gets to choose, to a certain extent, what they will or will not tolerate. TikTok bans nudity, offensive alcohol consumption, violence against people and animals, among other things.
The EU Commission wants answers
The company explains the basic principles in its community guidelines, in which one chapter deals with “civilized behavior” and a second chapter states that they do not allow “hate speech, hateful behavior or the promotion of hateful ideologies.” They want to “find the right balance between preventing harm and free expression.“, but the vagueness of these rules leaves room for interpretation—although a better method for dealing with the evils of social networks is not yet in sight.
TikTok wanted to show a particular willingness to engage in dialogue.
In the context of elections, TikTok has stated that it actively removes videos that could jeopardize the electoral process, such as lies about election day, misinformation about voter eligibility, or false claims about crises surrounding the election. The platform’s partnerships with local fact-checkers, who analyze posts circulating during election periods, are key in maintaining this oversight.
Interestingly, many of the TikTok managers responsible for election monitoring and content moderation have backgrounds outside the tech world. Brie Pegum, for example, has been working for TikTok for almost two years. Before that, she worked for a smaller video platform in the UK, where she was responsible for cooperation with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights Violations, among other things.
Her current colleague Valiant Riley was a public prosecutor and later worked for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in the fight against human trafficking. And the manager responsible for child protection, Chloe Stetter, spent more than a decade fighting child trafficking and slavery in smaller organizations before joining TikTok.
These people are not technology enthusiasts. They do not take criticism of the platform as an insult. They are aware that there is still a lot to be done, and they are used to the fact that the world is not perfect and can only be changed in small steps.
The EU Commission has now stepped in, seeking answers from TikTok regarding the allegations in Romania. The Commission is asking how the platform tracks covert influence campaigns, particularly those involving paid influencers. TikTok has until December 13 to respond.
