EU Summons TikTok CEO After Romanian Election Shocker

Not being a US citizen or living in the US I can still understand how the upcoming president was elected - regardless of how one feels politically about if they should or should not have been.

Reddit has become an extreme echo chamber of a particular ideology to the point I find myself even with agreement on many points leaning the other way out of the exhaustion of the echo chamber. It feels like some amount embrace, get off on the echo chamber and then there are others (myself?) who get so sick of the constant echo chamber end up being just opposed to engaging even in things we normally would support.

It's not a perfect analogy, but it reminds me of kids who left to their own free will, will eat boat loads of candy to the point of being sick of candy and don't want it anymore even though they did/do enjoy candy they're simply maxed out on having it.

This makes us vulnerable and we have to adapt. But hopefully not by banning these things, but by educating ourselves about the risks and gains of using addictive technology. At least that's the theory, I guess.

TikTok should be handled like an addictive substance. It and things just like it should be heavily regulated and watched over (e.g. by protecting and educating our youth).

> The company that it found no evidence of a covert influence operation on the TikTok platform in recent weeks related to the Romanian presidential election and no evidence of external influence.

> "Although it has been alleged that there were 5,000 fake accounts involved in election interference, our investigations have found no evidence to support these allegations," the company said in its letter, which notes that it is "still investigating."

> From September through the beginning of this week, the company has removed more than 66,000 fake accounts, 7 million fake likes and 10 million fake followers from the platform, TikTok says in its letter. The figures refer to posts and activity in English. Note that it does not specify whether they were electoral or in favor of a specific candidate.

> TikTok also says it has prevented 40 million likes and blocked more than 216,000 "spam accounts" before they went online.

Translated with DeepL from https://www.paginademedia.ro/stiri-media/tiktok-scrisoare-au...

It's a bit of "we've investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong".

There's been a huge uproar about this candidate which was polling below 5% reaching the 1st spot in the 1st round of the presidential election in Romania. The candidates need to report spending to a state organization overseeing elections and this guy reported that he spent nothing on his election campaign, which is a bit impossible as there have also been flyers with his name on them, so there's definitely something fishy going on.

There are also a lot of TikTok influencers that have come forward claiming to have received payments through a third party company to present the candidate in a positive light, and the issue is that these videos should have been tagged correctly as "electoral ads" according to Romanian law, which did not happen.

Purely from an observation perspective there has been a huge amount of spam activity on Romanian tiktok, with accounts spamming random videos with copy paste messages similar to "We're massively voting for Calin Georgescu" which led a lot of people to believing there was a massive bot campaign promoting this guy.

A criminal investigation has been requested by The Supreme Council of National Defence, which is the autonomous administrative authority in Romania invested by the Constitution with the task of organising and coordinating, by unanimous decisions, the activities related to the country's defence and national security.

But people are waking up and vote because of what they see with their own eyes.