Author: Mădălina Voinea
CREDITS: Context, PROMPT
Following the elections in the Republic of Moldova, we are seeing surprising reactions in the public sphere regarding the apparent performance of Vasile Costiuc’s Democracy at Home Party, a party that polls show to be below the 5% parliamentary threshold in the Republic of Moldova, somewhere between 1.8-3%.
We recall the small but effective infrastructure identified for Vasile Costiuc in August 2025 on TikTok: 16 million views, 422,000 followers, and 31,000 shares between August 1 and September 28. Let us remember that we are talking about a country with 2.3 million citizens and that the way TikTok calculates these figures is unclear, at least in terms of the equation one view = one play count. We believe there are reasonable indications of inauthenticity regarding the infrastructure of Facebook accounts, but we did not have the resources to cover both platforms at the time.
We do not believe in single causes, such as a TikTok campaign that wins elections. However, we believe it is important to remember one of the factors that increasingly affects the integrity of elections: online election campaigns. In this regard, pseudonymous accounts with a high degree of coordination, i.e., they use identical/similar videos with the same messages, which share their followers, who are themselves suspicious (empty accounts that also post political content), which are frequently redistributed – manage to create an infrastructure that is immune to the transparency of a classic election campaign.
| Data Source: FACTORY. As part of the FACT project, Context.ro uses a tool developed in collaboration with two programmers. It is an artificial intelligence-based tool that detects misinformation in video content on TikTok. The software has been used in several Context.ro investigations, as well as in an international project in partnership with OCCRP-affiliated journalism centers. With the help of this software, a total of 60,000 TikTok posts were analyzed for the Moldovan elections. For the elections in the Republic of Moldova, we developed a system similar to Spotify’s discovery feature. If you see a clip or series of clips trying to convince you that the European Union is destroying Moldova’s economy and bringing poverty, you enter it into the system, add a few parameters, and the software searches for other posts and accounts promoting the same toxic content. |
Whether we are talking about marketing companies that advertise politics, party trolls/fans who do so under pseudonyms, foreign interference, or sometimes even real people, we do not know who is influencing our feeds at critical moments in our lives, moments when we vote and decide the fate of a country. We believe in citizens’ right to free expression on the Internet, including anonymously. Anonymity must not become a pretext for political campaigns that lack transparency, because we will create the opposite of a transparent information space where people express themselves freely.
This phenomenon highlights a fundamental problem in our democracies: the opacity of digital campaigns. When a party with 1.8-3% in the polls can generate 16 million views in a country with 2.3 million inhabitants, questions inevitably arise. Is this a genuine mobilization of citizens or algorithmic manipulation?
Coordinated digital infrastructure, with suspicious accounts, identical content, and artificial redistribution, transforms the digital public space into a gray area where democratic transparency is dramatically diminished. Citizens vote based on the information they receive, but they do not know who shapes this information at decisive moments or how.
Link video – https://www.tiktok.com/@raportdezastru6/video/7549224126515334418
The victimization tactic – The most effective technique used
The peak on September 12 with almost 1 million views on the @raportdezastru6 account
The @raportdezastru account publishes a video that has gone viral. In it, a person wearing a T-shirt with the DA logo – Democrația Acasă (Democracy at Home, AUR partner party) talks about an allegedly illegal fence erected by neighbors. The following posts speculate that they would benefit from the protection and complicity of the authorities, thus being exempt from the rules applied to ordinary citizens.
The narrative quickly escalates: the fence case becomes a metaphor for what the authors consider to be the persecution of the DA party, in contrast to the “immunity” of the privileged. It is a classic formula for manipulation—a minor local incident turned into a symbol of systemic injustice.
Data Source: Expert Forum
