That's certainly easier than sitting down and questioning your own decisions over the last couple of decades and wondering why people are voting in ways you don't like
(For the record I'm not a Tiktok user and I think it's a net negative to society)
In this specific case of the first round of Romanian presidential election the traditional candidates from the bigger parties (PNL/PSD which have a government coalition at the moment) have both admitted to understanding why they lost and that the people's vote was against their policies. Both of these leaders have quit their leadership positions in their respective parties.
There is still a very serious discussion going on about potential foreign powers (China) getting involved in our electoral process with platforms like TikTok, see my other comment in this thread about this.
Since the resignations, the PSD candidate was resurrected and is back on course to become president, after the result of the democratic vote was .. cancelled.
How is that "understanding" looking now ?
I find it so incredibly funny that even questioning western media immediately puts a leader into fascist category but someone loses an election in romania and questioning tiktok is just the wisest more logical and righteous thing to do. "Fascism" exists now in the same space as "communism" did during cold war - easy othering.
EDIT: And may be that is why there is huge distrust against media. It is quite disturbing that tea-party has became the new hippie movement.
Read the article - This is not the EU commission or some bigwig requesting a hearing or an investigation.
Rather there was one delegate from one of the many political groups in the EU Parliament (which has very little authority and power) who made a statement .
In analogy to the US political system: This is not Mark Zuckerberg summoned to a Senate hearing. Rather this is someone of the House of Representatives making some weird proposal or claim.
Maybe I am oversimplifying here, but you get the idea.
The way I see it, it's a parliamentary member from France from the Renew group in the EU parliament who is not happy with the results and thinks that the democracy needs to be saved because the results do not align with their expectations.
The decent thing to do would be to take this vote into account and accept that not everyone wants the same thing.
Read the article. What is concerning is not that some politician with extreme views did well in an election. The concern is that a politician did well because of a large number of votes from people who admit to not even knowing much about him.
For from me to defend any politician but denying the role of social media in shifting public opinion is like sticking your head deep in the sand.
The real culpability of politicians and governments the world over is that they have endorsed this freak development for decades.
They are all present on social media, they are advertising both directly and indirectly, by placing links and "follow us on xyz" on every damn government website.
They have made a faustian pact with the devil and now the devil is extracting his pound of flesh.
So you think amplified disinformation and misinformation, with high frequency per user, play no role in people's perception of reality and their decision-making process?
I agree that politicians in a good chunk of Europe have let their constituents down one one too many times, that the breach has gotten too wide and that protest voting makes perfect sense for a lot of people. But two things can be right at the same time: I also believe it's true that dictators are sabotaging democracies everywhere and that social networks (not just TikTok) are both addictive and a major source of misinformation.
I'm constantly reminded of this bit from [1] (which is a great read):
> Later, when I ask Chase whether he’s ever heard about the QAnon conspiracy, he says no, but explains that the video must be legit because “it’s gotten deleted multiple times off the internet, which is insane.” Epistemologically, this is where we are as a country: when content gets expurgated because of blatant misinformation, it is taken as a sure sign of that source’s truthfulness.
I certainly want more politicians to be afraid of the people they claim to represent, but I also want social networks to stop throwing their hands in the air and pretend they're not responsible for spreading misinformation at an unprecedent scale.
It’s well known that TikTok uses human curation and weighting to a far greater extent than other social media platforms. The others primarily try to hide and remove unwanted content, but TikTok actively picks what gets shown.
(Twitter apparently now has a patchwork of hacks like the famous “author_is_elon” multiplier that slipped into their public source code release, but that’s nothing like TikTok’s meticulous selection process for algorithmic boosting.)
It would be good to have more visibility into this process because it wields massive influence among the 13-28 demographic, roughly.
A bit of context: the presidential candidate in question was predicted below 1% on all polls days before the election. He declared a campaign budget of absolute zero. He had no posters, no tents, no apparitions on TV, absolutely nothing. After a massive presence on TikTok in the last couple of weeks he won 23% of the votes, placing him first and wining a spot in the final elections where just the first two placed candidates run.
Currently the elections in Romania are in an total chaos. The Romanian Constitutional Court ordered an unprecedented recount of the votes, even though the count was sanctioned by all the parties through their observers. Also the country's Defense Council declared they have proof of cybernetic attacks which influenced the elections.
That sounds like either the pollsters or the people running the election have significantly bigger problems than whatever that candidate might or might not have done. How did they not find any of the people swayed by TikTok? Why are they even looking at TikTok at that point?
> Many of Georgescu’s voters admit to not knowing too much about him.
There seems to be a greater problem than Social Media abuse, to me there's a lack of education around the candidates and the actual meaning & process of voting. That said, everyone can vote for whoever they want so I'm not really sure what can be done.
I'm Romanian, and to add some more context here's what TikTok sent Romanian authorities about the situation:
> 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.
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.
So if we say in almost every country that social media is bad and oh my people are using it wrong and we should change people to better handle social media, could it not be the case that maybe people are not wrong but social media is?
Why do we have to do such amount of change to accommodate the way our current social media works? Could it be that people are using it wrong or that social media is a negative influence and we should fix that.
Readit News
(For the record I'm not a Tiktok user and I think it's a net negative to society)
There is still a very serious discussion going on about potential foreign powers (China) getting involved in our electoral process with platforms like TikTok, see my other comment in this thread about this.
EDIT: And may be that is why there is huge distrust against media. It is quite disturbing that tea-party has became the new hippie movement.
Rather there was one delegate from one of the many political groups in the EU Parliament (which has very little authority and power) who made a statement .
In analogy to the US political system: This is not Mark Zuckerberg summoned to a Senate hearing. Rather this is someone of the House of Representatives making some weird proposal or claim.
Maybe I am oversimplifying here, but you get the idea.
The way I see it, it's a parliamentary member from France from the Renew group in the EU parliament who is not happy with the results and thinks that the democracy needs to be saved because the results do not align with their expectations.
The decent thing to do would be to take this vote into account and accept that not everyone wants the same thing.
To me it looks like the EU wants to become an auditor of the elections of the EU members and is taking sides.
And here I thought that the EU wanted to promote democracy and the will of the people.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8116821/
But people are waking up and vote because of what they see with their own eyes.
The real culpability of politicians and governments the world over is that they have endorsed this freak development for decades.
They are all present on social media, they are advertising both directly and indirectly, by placing links and "follow us on xyz" on every damn government website.
They have made a faustian pact with the devil and now the devil is extracting his pound of flesh.
This would never have happened if it would have been a left wing politician obeying to the EU elites.
I'm constantly reminded of this bit from [1] (which is a great read):
> Later, when I ask Chase whether he’s ever heard about the QAnon conspiracy, he says no, but explains that the video must be legit because “it’s gotten deleted multiple times off the internet, which is insane.” Epistemologically, this is where we are as a country: when content gets expurgated because of blatant misinformation, it is taken as a sure sign of that source’s truthfulness.
I certainly want more politicians to be afraid of the people they claim to represent, but I also want social networks to stop throwing their hands in the air and pretend they're not responsible for spreading misinformation at an unprecedent scale.
[1] https://harpers.org/archive/2021/06/tiktok-house-collab-hous...
(Twitter apparently now has a patchwork of hacks like the famous “author_is_elon” multiplier that slipped into their public source code release, but that’s nothing like TikTok’s meticulous selection process for algorithmic boosting.)
It would be good to have more visibility into this process because it wields massive influence among the 13-28 demographic, roughly.
So not really the people who vote.
Currently the elections in Romania are in an total chaos. The Romanian Constitutional Court ordered an unprecedented recount of the votes, even though the count was sanctioned by all the parties through their observers. Also the country's Defense Council declared they have proof of cybernetic attacks which influenced the elections.
If TikTok (or any other platform) can have this kind of real impact then other political forces should consider using it as well.
There seems to be a greater problem than Social Media abuse, to me there's a lack of education around the candidates and the actual meaning & process of voting. That said, everyone can vote for whoever they want so I'm not really sure what can be done.
> 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.
Does Facebook et all promote / filter political contents different from TikTok?
> Georgescu based his campaign on TikTok
It’s not “singling out” if that’s the principal hub.
So if we say in almost every country that social media is bad and oh my people are using it wrong and we should change people to better handle social media, could it not be the case that maybe people are not wrong but social media is?
Why do we have to do such amount of change to accommodate the way our current social media works? Could it be that people are using it wrong or that social media is a negative influence and we should fix that.