The short-form video-sharing company TikTok, in an official statement sent on November 28 to Agerpres, assured that no evidence of a "covert influence operation" has been found on the platform in recent weeks related to the presidential elections in Romania, nor proof of foreign influence.

"Although some claimed the existence of 5,000 fake accounts related to electoral interference, our investigations did not find evidence to support this claim," Jakub Olek, TikTok's director of government relations for Central and Eastern Europe, stated, as quoted by Ziarul Financiar.

The statement comes after Romania's Supreme Country Defense Council (CSAT), summoned on the same day, announced that "a candidate for the presidential elections benefited from a massive exposure due to the preferential treatment that the TikTok platform granted him by not marking him as a political candidate."

Most of the candidates for the presidential elections in Romania established a presence on the TikTok social network, and those who won also campaigned on other digital platforms, as well as in traditional media, TikTok representatives said.

"Let me assure you that TikTok has taken exhaustive measures to ensure the integrity of the platform before, during, and after the election," according to Jakub Olek.

As evidence of this effort, TikTok took specific actions during the September-November period of this year, he added, naming some of the actions: removing over 66,000 fake accounts, 7 million fake likes, and 10 million fake followers; or preventing 40 million fake likes and blocked the creation of over 216,000 spam accounts.

So far, no evidence has been found of a covert influence operation on the platform in recent weeks related to the presidential elections in Romania, nor of any external influence, the company representatives concluded.

"In our monthly report on Covert Influence Operations for September, we revealed that we disrupted a network targeting the Romanian public, although it was unrelated and played no role in promoting Georgescu's campaign."

iulian@romania-insider.com

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