Last Monday, Romania’s embattled president Klaus Iohannis resigned ahead of an imminent impeachment vote. His opponents had been demanding his resignation since the national constitutional court annulled last December’s presidential election—an election alleged to have been compromised by a Russian influence operation using non-traditional media including TikTok.

Concerns about election interference arose after the first round of voting in November, when far-right independent candidate Călin Georgescu unexpectedly led with 23% of the vote, while the liberal USR candidate Elena Lasconi and Social Democrat Marcel Ciolacu both won 19%, and the President’s National Liberal Party (PNL) candidate, Nicolae Ciucă, trailed at just 9%.

Romanian authorities requested the European Commission investigate TikTok’s role in the election after intelligence reports revealed that 25,000 TikTok accounts had been activated in the weeks leading up to the vote. These reports suggested that TikTok’s algorithm disproportionately promoted Georgescu and that a “highly organized” and “guerilla” campaign had been funded with money of dubious origin, possibly linked to Russia.

It was in this context that Global Witness commissioned us to conduct a poll in Romania ahead of the planned second-round ballot. The survey aimed to explore young Romanians’ experiences with political content on TikTok—specifically, the prevalence of political messaging, suspicious accounts, misinformation, doctored images and videos, and whether certain candidates were being disproportionately promoted. We polled 1,025 regular TikTok users aged 18–35 in Romania and found widespread concern over the political content appearing on their ‘For You’ page in the run-up to the first-round ballot.

The results appear to reflect the concerns held by the Romanian authorities and the European Commission. Georgescu was the most popular candidate among our respondents, with 39% saying they had voted for him and 38% following him on TikTok. However, nearly half (47%) reported seeing content featuring Georgescu “very often” in the two weeks leading up to the first-round ballot—far exceeding the exposure levels of other candidates, whose visibility either matched or fell below their followership and voter base.

Across the board, respondents reported frequently seeing suspicious political content on their ‘For You’ page. Only 11% said they never saw misinformation during the election period, while one in three (32%) said they saw false information a lot. The reported incidence rate of misinformation was higher among voters for the liberal and left-leaning candidates, Elena Lasconi and Ciolacu (whose supporters claimed they saw false information a lot 46% and 43% respectively), but even one in four (28%) of those who voted for Georgescu reported seeing a lot of false information.

Good or bad, it’s clear that TikTok had some role to play in the election: more than two thirds of our sample (69%) said they use TikTok every day, and only 21% respondents told us that political content makes up little or none of what they seek out on the platform.

The overall sentiment we can see from these results is a general lack of trust in the political content found on TikTok, and suspicion among those who this content is geared towards the most.

Observance of misinformation on TikTok was a consensus view, and not confined to highly-educated, liberally-minded voters: whether they described themselves as pro-EU or pro-Russia; supporters of Lasconi or Georgescu, respondents reported seeing suspicious and misleading political content ahead of the election.

60% of respondents said that they think the EU ought to do more to ensure that TikTok protects Romanian democracy, while only 23% believed it should not take any action. Among those who had voted in the first-round ballot, Lasconi voters were most likely to support it (79%), while Georgescu voters were least likely (52%). Remarkably, even the majority (54%) of self-described pro-Russia/sovereigntist respondents said that the EU needs to do more.

The decision to annul last year’s election remains controversial, even if the reasoning behind it does not. On Friday, US Vice-President JD Vance dismissed these as “flimsy suspicions” on the part of the Romanian authorities, under “enormous pressure from its continental neighbours”.

Our survey suggests the situation is more complicated: the talking points of ‘misinformation’ and election interference are still most popular for centre-left voters, but this survey indicates that voters of all kinds are less confident in the veracity and provenance of what they watch and read online – the “flimsy suspicions” were held by the majority of respondents.

The confused picture this paints of TikTok’s political significance, being a problem for the left and the right, is not limited to Romania. TikTok has been accused of boosting the far-right in Europe, and the far-left in the United States; of being a centralised foreign-influence arm of China, and a sprawling, uncontrolled mass of grassroots conspiracy theories and false reporting. Whatever the true nature of the problem, our poll suggests that young Romanians would like something to be done. But Iohannis’ resignation, as well as Trump’s U-turn on the TikTok ban, suggests that such action is not without its political challenges.

Get the data

Survation conducted an online poll of 1,025 Romanian TikTok users aged 18-35. Fieldwork was conducted between 4th – 6th December 2024. Tables are available here.

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