Romanian presidential election is anulled

It's scary that apparently russia can significantly alter european elections by running tiktok campaigns
- No, what's actually scary is that we can see brain-washing on social media in realtime for years and you -like a lot of people- are still surprised because you are totally oblivious to what's happening right before your eyes.
  
  That seems like an unnecessarily rude way to put it. A major nation using the full force of its intelligence/military apparatus to manipulate the average person minding their own business using ever evolving forms of propaganda isn't something I really feel a citizen should need to deal with on a personal level. I don't believe most people feel or should feel they are the target of another nation, especially one they are not in a hot war with. Our governments are failing us by allowing it to happen because enough of them don't have the desire to stop it.
  It is people that look like you, talk like you, live where you do, having the support of people and organizations you trust spreading disinformation. It gets rehashed and passed along by people you see and know in your real life. There is a basic level of personal responsibility, but when no one teaches you how to spot it, when it appears in legitimate media vetted by professionals whose job it is to spot this and they all fail you, crapping on an individual just trying to live their life isn't right.
- We’ve known this since they threw the 2016 Brexit referendum, but finally a government has had the balls to call it out and re-do the vote.
- It's scary, because it also shows how much built-up resentment there is.
  
  This. If the people genuinely believed in the current system, there's no way this shit would work.
- Why can't the US do the same to Russia's social media sites? Let them have some political upheaval for a change.
  
  I think this play only works on democratic countries unfortunately.
  
  Russia is very locked down. They regularly ban outside media.
  On top of that, Putin arrests/assasinates political competition, and puts in place a controlled opposition.
  And finally, their elections are fake.
  
  Because Russia controls these sites and wouldn't let any sensible opposition in. Putin is trying to be a dictator for life with illusions of democracy (you need to give ambitious people the illusion that they could do something).
  
  We don't have elections
  
  They don’t even have toilets, let alone internet.

good that democracies start to protect itself from Russia interference... I prefer to have to vote 10 times if needed than having the power in my country in control of Putin
- I agree, elections should be held fairly or should be held again. I'm not sure what to say to naysayers claiming the establishment controls the results. I also wonder how we can ensure this doesn't get misused.
  It would be great to have broad discussions around the topic and apply these measures when things get out of hand.
  I think we must stop personalised automated (selection of) content towards end-users for anything that might be political (and possibly just anything). There could be a place for such systems if the biases and tracking can easily be controlled by end-users such that they could easily apply other points of view.
- That’s not how this works

Wow, didn't expect that. Let's see how this turns out. It's crazy how vulnerable our democracies are towards Russia.

A top Romanian court has annulled the first round of the country’s presidential election, days after declassified intelligence alleged Russia ran a coordinated online campaign to promote the far-right outsider who won the first round.
The constitutional court’s decision – which is final – came on Friday after President Klaus Iohannis declassified intelligence two days earlier that alleged Russia ran a sprawling campaign comprising thousands of social media accounts to promote Calin Georgescu across platforms like TikTok and Telegram.
Despite being a huge outsider who declared zero campaign spending, Georgescu emerged as the frontrunner on 24 November. He was due to face the reformist Elena Lasconi, of the Save Romania Union party, in a runoff on Sunday.
More details soon …
Associated Press, via The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/06/romanian-court-annuls-first-round-of-presidential-election

So now that a cout has ruled that there was foreign interference to such a degree that a presidential election has to be redone: At what point does this get treated as an attack by NATO or the EU?
- I haven't read enough about this, but if this was 1000 accounts convincing a million people to vote for a guy, how is that different from anyone else campaigning? Except if it violates public campaign financing law and you had an unfair advantage from a foreign adversary in what should otherwise be a transparent level playing field...and even then things are never completely level and transparent.
  
  Because a foreign power influencing an election is fundamentally different than a domestic campaign. The foreign power has their own interests, which are potentially at odds with the interests of the electorate.
  Ostensibly, if you campaign in country A and are a citizen of country A, then you're "in the same boat" as the electorate. Of course, with economic stratification this becomes increasingly less true (fast food worker may live in same country as $$$ donor, but they are effectively living under different policies).
- That's very difficult, because there was no violence involved in the interference.
  
  It's an attack nonetheless, just on our way of life instead of an actual physical target and there have been plenty of those too.
  I'm getting so fucking tired of Western democracy just eating shit and shrugging in the name of not escalating.
  We keep shrugging and we're all gonna be living in Russian aligned autocracy in the next fifty years.

Wait, how does that work? If the influence was social media messaging it's not like... you now, they are reversing the messaging. The voters who got convinced presumably remain... you know, influenced.
The worry would be that this would prompt people to double down, while normies would stay home because revoting is a hassle, which could backfire.
Of course, Romanians are remarkably detached and cynical about their own democratic process and participation is typically very low, so who the hell knows what happens next. Man, this stupid century sucks.
- Tiktok is only one part of it.
  according to Romania electoral law you need to declare who is financing your campaign
  Georgescu ran videos on tiktok without disclosing who pays for it (or if he paid)
  Georgescu repeatedly said that he doesn't pay anything for the campaign
  the campaign ran by Georgescu was paid by some crypto-bro without dubious ties
  Georgescu and cripto-bro used 20k fake accounts to run the campaign (as per info from tiktok themselves)
  Georgescu ran his campaign in election day (ilegal in romania)
  Now the fun part:
  Georgescu's bodyguards are known Romanian neo-nazies that are French Legion veterans and that have ties to the Wagner group
  
  No, hey, I'm on board. If the court says there were campaign finance violations I'll accept that. Not shocked.
  The questions is more how come the remedy is to run the election again. If Georgescu's campaign was found to have done all that, is that not invalidating or cause for criminal liability for members of the campaign? Will they get to run again? What happens regarding the bunch of people who voted for him on purpose?
  I feel like a lot of the conversation is either about the Russian interference or about USR being pissed about the eventuality of running against PSD instead of being a national unity front for the second run, but there's so little info on the legal framework around the decision.
  
  and that have ties to the Wagner group
  They better not to plan to take plane

Anulled =/= Cancelled
Title make it sound like the country went through an autocoup and there are no more elections, which is not whats happening.
- Thanks! I edited! (Not a native speaker...)

Finally, some good news for once.

I'm really curious about what the hexbear version of this post looks like...
- Posts like this are banned on Hexbear for being propaganda.
  
  Of course, their version must be something like: libs are like "we'll just keep running elections until we get the result we want"

I'm very glad they did that! Now can we please do it here in the US too? We also had a big Russian interference problem.

This made me reflect on multiple interesting ideas.
This has been a case of hidden-intended foreign interference, where foreign interests have supported a candidate without making it openly. Even patriotic people should feel against this… unless may be they have already voted for it, humans are like that.
An interesting alternative would have been that, for example, Elon Musk (which may still be popular among some people) decide from the beginning to openly support such candidate, trying to influence positively the candidate’s success with all his resources. Being an European country, this would be also foreign interference. You may see where this reflections are going…
Lastly, imagine a similar situation to the previous one but with a national powerful lobby. Is not foreign interference, but is the same kind of action in the end, a particular interest investing in a political candidate. This happens everywhere, and has proved to be very successful for them, with grey lines drawn mostly on direct money donations in some countries, which nowadays is a bit of a scarce control anyway.
Now, I find hard to believe that some candidate would be able to convince you that, despite benefit of being openly supported by a particular group of interest, will not represent it but the promises you want to hear once the interference is openly public… yet, considering all the media control those groups of interest invest on, I think we already are in a situation were all candidates of success in democracies around the world have strong conflicts of interest with such groups… and probably has been like that from the beginning of democracies.
It seems easy to imagine that many may find justified such actions (call out invalid the elections) under evidence of foreign interference but I see a grey line on the mechanisms that happened here, and we still do not call on responsibility to the voter on reflecting what is voting, specially when the media is influenced in spread a particular consensus or debate.
I am afraid that hope is only on the voting individual capabilities to react to media and to judge the reach of these conflicts of interest and the intelligence to decide how to vote (even to non favourite candidates or even voting in white), because in the end, a democracy blocking foreign interference can still be in the practice just a national group of interest blocking a foreign one.