Romania’s presidential front-runner Georgescu benefited from Russia-style booster campaign, declassified docs say – POLITICO

But a briefing note compiled by Romania’s interior ministry reveals that so-called social media influencers were recruited by intermediary companies, at least one of which appears to have been a ghost entity, to promote an unnamed “ideal candidate” profile before the election on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. These influencers earned around €80 per post for every 20,000 followers they had.

The influencers were paid to share videos in which they discussed the profile of an ideal Romanian presidential candidate, alongside the hashtag #balanceandverticality. While Georgescu was not directly named, this so-called ideal candidate closely aligned with his own profile. The posts generated between 1,000 and 500,000 views per video.

A Romanian working in cryptocurrency paid $381,000 to some TikTok users who were involved in promoting Georgescu in the month prior to the first round of the presidential election, per the documents. Georgescu claimed in a television interview on Wednesday that he never met this person and that his name didn’t ring a bell.

Several influencers came out after Georgescu’s first-round victory to say they regretted their posts.

The strategy was similar to a campaign deployed in neighboring Moldova that sought to convince people to vote for the pro-Russia candidate in that country’s two-round presidential election, according to the document from the interior ministry. Moldova’s incumbent pro-EU President Maia Sandu, who is also a Romanian citizen, narrowly won last month’s runoff amid warnings that Russia planned to overthrow her government and install its own proxy regime to control the country.

Russia used similar tactics in campaigns the Kremlin ran in Ukraine before launching its invasion of the country, according to the document.