In the weeks before Romania's November 2024 presidential vote, something unusual happened on TikTok. Accounts that had spent years posting nail-art tutorials and outfit ideas suddenly pivoted to promoting Călin Georgescu, a previously obscure politician whose content mixed hard-line nationalism with anti-Semitic tropes. Those posts were viewed 120 million times. Georgescu, who had been polling in the single digits, won the first round with 23 percent of the vote — a result that stunned political observers across Europe.

Adriana Iamnitchi, who chairs computational social sciences at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, had been watching the campaign closely. She wanted to understand how pro-Georgescu content was being funded and amplified through hidden influencer marketing. On 28 October 2024, her team formally requested access to TikTok's data through the European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA) — a law specifically designed to give vetted researchers the tools to scrutinise platforms for systemic risks. TikTok refused.

The company claimed that the team had not adequately demonstrated its research credentials, had failed to explain its commercial interests, and had not met security requirements. Two months later, TikTok itself disclosed that it had identified 116,000 potentially compromised accounts and removed more than 27,000 fake accounts belonging to a coordinated network that a third-party "fake engagement vendor" had been operating to boost Georgescu and his party. The company admitted it did not know who had run the network or where it had originated. Declassified Romanian intelligence subsequently alleged that Russia had coordinated the online campaign, and the first round of the election was annulled entirely.