The Georgescu phenomenon
Aggregated review and translation of journalistic investigations by the Romanian group Snoop. Materials used to prepare this review. Material 1. Material 2. Material 3. Material 4.
Note from me as the author of this article:
From the information provided by popular European publications, it may seem as if Calin Georgescu, as a presidential candidate, appeared out of nowhere and somehow managed to gain unexpectedly high popularity in just a few weeks.
However, I think it would be important to follow the chronology of events and explore the very “soil” from which this controversial candidate grew.
Prologue.
“The candidate on the side of Russia” was the headline in the Russian press about Călin Georgescu on the night of the first round of the Romanian presidential election. His victory on November 24 was enthusiastically welcomed by several Russian propaganda media channels, including Sputnik, Russia Today, and RIA Novosti. But the Georgescu phenomenon was not born overnight, as his reappearances in moments of crisis over more than a decade show. On June 14, 2016, Sputnik wrote: “Dr. Călin Georgescu will be the future Prime Minister of Romania”.
Russian influence on the Romanian Internet did not start recently either, but has been purposefully built up over the years, through campaigns to attract both well-known news sites and controversial influencers or to promote alternative medicine. This is compounded by waves of well-organized disinformation (fake news) that can lure the public into conspiracy theories.
While AdNow was conducting a “massive fraud campaign against the elderly” in Romania, the Ministry of Health was launching a vaccination campaign. Klaus Iohannis was vaccinated on January 15 and assured the population that it was a safe and effective procedure. The day before, Călin Georgescu, nominated by the AUR party as prime minister, filmed himself in an Austrian forest under the snow and said things like “This is a pandemic of fear and stupidity (...).” Then he swam in a lake, looking at the camera and saying: “I trust my immune system because I fully trust and believe in its Creator. My immunity depends on the sovereignty of my personality. My immunity is supported and trained only by nature, (...) not in a laboratory.”
The video itself is titled “Dr. Călin Georgescu - The Path to Your Universe!”, where the “Dr.” part hints that he has a certain authority in the medical field. Călin Georgescu is a doctor, but a doctor of pedology, a field that deals with the study of soils. His partner describes herself on her website as “an experienced holistic teacher specializing in natural health, [...] clinical iridology, energy balance therapy”. Cristela Georgescu thus covers a wide range of alternative medicine, which the Georgescu-favored POT (Young People's Party), which just entered parliament with over 6% of the vote, promises in its election program to legalize and integrate into official health care methods.
AdNow and their connection to Moscovia
According to statistics from the AdNow platform, Russian ads on Romanian websites had 441 million views in the last month alone. The number is about four to five times higher than the average monthly traffic of some of Romania's leading news sites (e.g., Digi24.ro) and is comparable to that of international platforms such as CNN or the New York Times.
In 2021, influencers Leo Grasset from France and Mirko Drochmann from Germany were contacted by an employee of the marketing agency Fazze, who offered them money to publish content questioning the effectiveness of Covid vaccines. The employee explicitly asked them not to mention that they were creating paid content. He did not want to disclose the source of the money and emphasized the client's desire to remain anonymous.
In May 2021, a joint investigation by several international media outlets, including the BBC and The Wall Street Journal, revealed that Fazze is owned by AdNow, a PR company with offices in London and Moscow. Fazze, together with AdNow, organized a disinformation campaign that fueled the anti-vaccination movement around the world.
The press discovered that a Russian woman, Yulia Serebryanskaya, was behind AdNow. According to her online biography, Serebryanskaya is a Moscow businesswoman known for her involvement in the election campaigns of Dmitry Medvedev in 2007 and Vladimir Putin in 2012. According to the Russian branch of Radio Liberty, she held positions in the political advertising department of the Edinaya Rossiya party. French authorities launched an investigation. Meta then closed 65 Facebook accounts and 243 Instagram accounts associated with Fazze and AdNow.
AdNow Llp was founded in London by Russian Stanislav Fesenko and Briton Evan Tolladay. They are also behind a massive identity fraud through games that people installed on their phones without knowing that they were giving them access to personal data. AdNow's headquarters, however, was in Moscow, where the agency was controlled by Yulia Serebryanskaya.
Interestingly, the same address in London was used by:
The companies behind Fazze, AdNow, and AnnGames;
A cryptocurrency exchange owned by Fancy Bears, a hacking unit of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence service;
A lobbying firm with political connections from Donald Trump to the far right in Albania;
A company that was behind a huge campaign in 2017 to infect computers through access to online advertising (malvertising);
A consulting firm owned by one of Vladimir Putin's cousins and suspected of laundering his money.
AdNow's employees in Romania
We found that several of AdNow's employees in Romania, including Catalina Chiper, the head of publishing, were a decisive factor in the company's choice of business partners. She studied public relations and communication at Babes-Boyai University in Cluj and specialized in brand management in Moscow between 2015 and 2017.
Chiper denies any ties to the Russians, as AdNow currently operates under Renodo Media Ltd, a Bulgarian-registered company owned by a Georgian citizen. However, she admits that in 2021, when Western journalists were following influencers' money, “we were told that we should not respond if someone from the BBC or someone who made the material contacted us.”
She insists that “we no longer have any connection with Russia. It's not that we were with the Russians, we never cooperated with Russia. But the owner was Russian”. However, a subordinate of Catalina denies her words and says that all the ads he worked with came directly from Russia, from emails, Skype or Facebook accounts without real names.
Chipper claims that today AdNow no longer places ads in its own products, but only functions as an advertising intermediary. That means, it's just an interface between merchants like Expres Colet and TV station websites like România TV or Realitatea PLUS.
România TV has received hundreds of thousands of lei from AdNow
We obtained financial data showing that the website of the news channel România TV received money between 2016 and 2020 from AdNow, an online marketing agency controlled by the Muscovites. The same amount was transferred to RTV's accounts every month for “online advertising on romaniatv.net and economica.net,” according to the invoices, except during election campaigns, when the rates scaled up along with the revenue.
România TV has always been a platform for pro-Russian and anti-Western voices. It is the most popular news channel in the country, but it is also the media outlet with the most sanctions from the National Council of Audiovisual Media. Since their foundation, they have been fined or interrogated almost three hundred times for disinformation and fake news. They recently received a fine of 100,000 lei for campaigning in 16 shows for Gheorghe Simion before the start of the election period.
Financial documents obtained by Snoop journalists show that 486,242 lei (approximately one hundred thousand euros) from AdNow went to the accounts of the România TV group between 2016 and 2020. According to bank documents, the money was transferred to RTV (romaniatv.net) from two accounts in Latvia and Cyprus.
AdNow's business model involves installing a program on a news site. This allows you to direct Internet users with different types of advertising. The reader does not know who is sending them these ads, or why they appear on a particular website, or what personal data they take from their computer or phone.
According to market data, the owner of an online publication that allows companies like AdNow or Google to show ads to its audience receives a few cents for each reader who clicks on each ad. For example, AdNow currently pays $0.074 per click in Romania and even less per showing the ad.
Examples of prices and countries where AdNow operates
The invoices provided by RTV to AdNow have roughly the same monthly values, but some months are an exception. In April and December 2019, RTV charged significantly higher amounts. This was the time when the election campaigns for the justice referendum, parliamentary and presidential elections were taking place.
Half a million euros from AdNow for a Romanian advertising agency
Between 2016 and 2020, AdNow Llp paid almost 2 million euros to companies registered in Romania. The largest amount, half a million euros, went to the advertising agency Digital Atelier Interactiv SRL, founded by Romanians Alexandru Nitse and Ilies Catalin Straton.
This company was closed in 2021, but on their previous website, they indicated that they had placed ads in Romania's most famous publications, from Libertatea and Antenele lui Dan Voiculescu to culinary blogs, e-commerce platforms, or parenting advice sites.
We were contacted by Alexandru Nitse, who admitted that he was an intermediary in advertising from the AdNow agency, but was unaware of the 2021 scandal when Russians paid influencers to spread disinformation about vaccination.
However, in 2017, the Digital Atelier agency registered two websites (RemediiNaturalePar.biz and LeoAndersLanguage.com) similar to those in the Russian ads with misleading themes, one naturopathic and the other with the name of a scam circulating around the world.
“The web domains were purchased at the request of an external client who intended to use them for an advertising campaign. For various reasons, the campaign was not realized, the domains were not used, and their validity expired in 2019,” says Alexandru Nitse. However, the Romanian public was still exposed to the LeoAndersLanguage fraud, as there are testimonies of victims in Romania.
Fraud via cloned pages
AdNow ads lead not only to “natural cures” sites, but also to clone sites - copies of real news sites. Some examples of fake news published on cloned websites:
“Cristian Tudor Popescu offers business consultations and earns 10,000 lei per day”
“Nicolae Ciucă was kicked out of the Prima TV studio because he explained how Romanians can earn 30,000 lei a month. Romania's central bank called for the program to be stopped”
“Mobilization order issued in Romania. Ministry of Defense, breaking news about a military mobilization order received by Romanians at home”.
This disinformation strategy first involves copying important identification data of trusted publications: brand, logo, fonts, authors. This way, you will be redirected to copies of sites such as Digi24.ro or RFI.ro. An inexperienced eye cannot tell the difference between a real publication and a copy.
An example of a cloned web-site
In January 2024, Transgaz announced a tender for the construction of a gas pipeline that would connect Romania to the BRUA pipeline. A disinformation campaign that copies publications supports the BRUA energy project, but collects valuable data on people who believe they can get rich quick from it. Factual and Recorder widely reported on get-rich-quick schemes with investments in BRUA, and the national company Romgaz made public statements to counteract the fraud.
A representative of our team, as part of an experiment, provided his data to the scammers, saying that he was interested in investing. Less than a minute later, the phone rang. On the other end, a Moldovan citizen tried to convince us to provide him with our card details. We received persistent calls until the day after the election - 18 calls in two weeks.
“It is impossible to estimate the number of victims of online fraud in Romania,” says Michai Rotariu, spokesman for the National Cybersecurity Authority. Many people do not report it “out of shame” and only a few cases are reported to the police. “Some of the victims of the attacks are wanted for the second time and claim to represent a government agency. Under the disguise of the Prosecutor's Office, the State National Security Service or the police, they again ask for the victim's bank details and take the money that they did not take during the first attack.”
In August, DIICOT and its partners from PCCOCS in the Republic of Moldova dismantled a group that had obtained more than €1.2 million from online fraud. Among the images used in these fake advertisements was the former Minister of Energy Virgil Popescu, now a member of the European Parliament for PNL. In 2023, his image was used to promote an investment in Hidroelectrica, a state-owned company recently listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange.
The recipe is simple, according to the former energy minister, who was contacted by the Snoop team. He noted that such frauds always have the same elements: “On the one hand, they use the image of state-owned companies in the energy sector, which are known to have money. On the other hand, they target people who do not know about capital markets, about how to protect your banking data, i.e. people who are easily influenced.”
Virgil Popescu warns that the data collected through online fraud can be used not only for financial but also for electoral purposes. “They create a database of those who fall into the trap and thus can influence these people in one way or another in the future. What happened in the elections in Moldova? They had the data of trusting people and made cards with money for them.”
EU DisInfo Lab has published a detailed report about how disinformation works through clones of fake news sites. The operation is believed to be run by Russian special services, and its goal is to sabotage support for Ukraine and divide the countries that came to help Ukraine.
AdNow also launched a food delivery app in Romania that never existed
In 2018, AdNow launched the FoodEx app for food delivery in Romania, advertised under the slogan “Take FoodEx anywhere”. Paid materials appeared in several publications, people installed the app, provided personal data, but the app never worked. A photo of the FoodEx brand published by Romanian news sites was stolen from the Michelin Guide from a restaurant in Singapore. In addition, the claimed FoodEx headquarters was in a hotel in Malta, Valletta, and no one in Romania responded to complaints.
The FoodEx Romania Facebook account recommended only one place: BAZ Bistro&Bar. After some time, this page turned into the page of Matei Sergiu (Nimenidenicaeri), a parliamentary candidate from POT (Party of Young People), a new political party founded by former AUR MP Anamaria Gavrile. The party openly supports Călin Georgescu, “a president who truly values Romania.” According to a G4Media investigation, among the instructions given to Georgescu's supporters was to “prepare the ground” for the parliamentary elections and comment that they were voting for POT.
The hiring of Daniel Starkov, a Russian, was announced on the Facebook page of FoodEx Romania. According to his LinkedIn profile, he has held senior positions at Mail.ru and VKontakte, the largest technology corporations in Russia. His resume also lists Starkov as a graduate of an academic specialization course called the Presidential Program, organized by the Russian Ministry of Economy.
We sent Daniil Starkov a series of questions to his foodex.com email address, but all we received in response was an error message directly from the servers of AdNow.com's parent company. He also did not respond to an interview request via his personal email.
Dr. Andriy Laslau, an influencer who received Russian money during the pandemic
Money from the same accounts also went to influencers such as Andrei Laslau, who calls himself the Romanian Dr. Oz [a comparison to the TV host of a program with medical advice without a scientific basis, nominated by Trump to head the US health insurance service].
In total, over four years, almost two million euros (8,344,250 lei) in taxable revenue from AdNow went to several media institutions and content producers. However, this is only a fraction, as many payments are made in cryptocurrencies or through non-transparent fintech applications such as PayPal or Wirecard, with which the AdNow apparently works.
Description of the “benefits” of working with AdNow (information from LinkedIn)
Some employees of AdNow (information from LinkedIn)
Today, Andrei Laslau links to the noutati.info website from his Facebook page, which has 2.4 million followers, describing it as “The official page of the famous doctor Andrei Laslau.” Every day, the “doctor” posts dozens of links to articles with horoscopes, saints, or various texts on current topics. Every five or six posts, there is news about Călin Georgescu, such as:
What would Romania look like under the leadership of Călin Georgescu? A look at all possible scenarios, from extraordinary opportunities to unexpected problems
Interesting photos of Cristela Georgescu, the wife of Călin Georgescu, in a swimsuit in the snow
His Facebook posts about Călin Georgescu gather hundreds of comments in support of the “independent” candidate in the second round.
During the pandemic, Andrei Laslau was one of Romania's most prominent influencers. According to an analysis by researcher Adina Marincea of the 10,000 most popular Facebook posts about the coronavirus, Laslau and Adina Alberts, promoters of alternative COVID-19 treatments, together had ten times more posts on the pandemic than Raed Arafat, resulting in eight times more interactions than the head of the ambulance department.
AdNow Llp from the United Kingdom sent almost 200 thousand euros to Andrei Laslau Media Services SRL in 2017 and 2018. During this period, Laslau distributed links from the website stiriactuale.net, which collected personal data for hundreds of vendors and then published recipes, horoscopes, and articles about prophetic dreams.
Andrei Laslau himself believes that he was chosen by the Russians at AdNow because he had huge traffic, millions of impressions to an audience he considers uneducated, as he told us. Although he studies medicine, on the website andreilaslau.ro, he provides alternative treatments and explains it this way: “When it comes to miracles, such information circulates everywhere on the Internet. Everyone wants youth without old age and life without death. We are a country of people who believe in alternative medicine, horoscopes, all sorts of things that are not related to science and education.”
Even after the tensions caused by the pandemic stopped, Laslau remained active in the conspiracy market. Less than six months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Laslau began publishing disinformation about how the Romanian state would send men to war.
When our team contacted him, Laslau was not concerned about the origin of the money he received through AdNow. He says that online advertising platforms may have indirect funding from Russia, because “Europeans don't give money for nothing.” “But that doesn't mean that certain news is coming from Putin's phone,” he comments.
“People [at AdNow] actually want to make money. They buy a few commercial spaces and probably pay thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of euros, they want to get their money back, they want to make profit,” Laslau says. He does not believe that there is an “influence on public opinion” here.
“On the contrary,” says Leo Grasset, a French YouTuber who refused AdNow's money and helped fuel the scandal over their disinformation network in France. He believes that repeated exposure to pseudoscience and half-truths can make people change their minds over time. “And this is an extremely dangerous thing that the Russians realized a long time ago,” he emphasizes. Influencers should think, Grasset emphasizes, about the responsibility they have to the public. Otherwise, “your impact on the world will be negative.”
But Laslau summarizes his position as follows: “I suspect that it was someone from Russia, I don't know if there was someone behind them, but that doesn't mean we are Russophiles. Saying that the money is really Russian doesn't mean anything about us.”
Conspiracy blogger Polifrone from AZ News and “Gânduri din Ierusalim”
AdNow money has also gone to Romanian bloggers who publish ultra-conservative propaganda and conspiracy theories. Two of these sites - AZ News and Gânduri din Ierusalim [Thoughts from Jerusalem] — are owned by Daniel Polifrone, a former police officer in Oltenii and a supporter of Georgescu.
Polifrone collected 253,485 lei (approximately 50,000 euros) from AdNow through his company Global Mega Solution between 2017 and 2020. Prior to launching his own fake news site, Polifrone had been a contributor to ActiveNews, another outlet that has been creating conspiracy theories and disinformation since 2013.
During the current election campaign, they published articles with titles such as “ANTIFA brigades at gunpoint of Romanian gendarmerie threatened presidential candidate Călin Georgescu with death” or “Cristela Georgescu, possible future first lady of Romania, in Familia Ortodoxă”.
On his ActiveNews author page, he describes himself as “the author of the well-known Christian blog ‘Thoughts from Jerusalem’. (...) I am 45 years old, a simple citizen, a former policeman, I retired in 2016, after 16 years of activity I briefly flirted with politics, and very quickly resigned from there.”
In 2020, he ran for the mayor of Dragomirest-Vale for ALDE, but, according to his own words, left after three months in the local council.
On the ActiveNews website, Polifrone published several fake news stories about chemtrails, or the “card vs. cash” debate, for several months. He strongly supports the pro-Russian IPS Bishop Theodosius of Constanta and attacks politicians who do not share his radical beliefs.
Polifrone's cooperation with ActiveNews ended on the friendliest of terms in October 2023, when the media outlet announced that “ActiveNews welcomes the emergence of a new conservative publication! Daniel Polifron: We have launched the AZNews news portal”.
Today, AZ News publishes dozens of stories that support Georgescu and demonize Lasconi, while also publishing panic messages:
The more they attack Călin Georgescu, the more determined people will support him! People will not tolerate manipulation and lies anymore!
If the CCR removes Călin Georgescu from the presidential race, a civil war will break out in Romania!
European leaders are on alert: civilians are urged to prepare for war! NATO General: “We are preparing for a conflict with Russia”
An alarming report from European intelligence services: Russia will attack Romania and other European countries
“Thoughts from Jerusalem” is a blog and a YouTube account of Polifrone with 160 thousand subscribers, which has gained over 44 million views. For reference, the most popular video journalism publication in Romania, Recorder, has only three times as many views as Polifrone's page. The most popular videos of this religiously colored channel approach Christianity in a mystical and superstitious way. And when it's not talking about religion, it publishes anti-LGBTQIA+ texts, such as “The Dramatic Confession of a Gay Man Awakened to Life.”
When asked by Snoop about whether AdNow's ad, shown hundreds of millions of times in the last month before the election, could have an impact on the election, Polifrone said that “neuropathic advertising does not influence political thinking. You make that connection in a biased way.”
Polifrone admits that he “found this advertising campaign on one of the websites of a Romanian TV channel, I also created an account, inserted the code into the site, and the ads were for different creams or some other nonsense.” He refused to say why he stopped working with AdNow at the exact moment when the disinformation campaign scandal broke out in France.
Călin Georgescu’s bot recipe. Or how to get 4.5 million views per day on a new account.
One day, Călin Georgescu announced to his followers that he could now be found on TikTok at a new address. There were many reasons for this, but basically, the audience of the old account decreased after it was affected by measures taken by the social platform (ShadowBan).
Literally in a day, on the night of December 9 - 10, 2024, the new account calin.georgescu.real uploaded a new video of an “independent” candidate in the presidential election. By Monday evening, at 00:00, it had gotten 4.5 million views, 562.4 thousand likes, and more than 44 thousand comments.
TikTok's accelerated growth was revealed in a report by SRI [the Foreign Intelligence Service], declassified after a meeting of the CSAT [Romania's Supreme Council of National Defense]. The document refers to the interaction of 25 thousand coordinated accounts. After the first round of the presidential election, videos with the hashtag #calingeorgescu received almost 100 million views in one day.
Throughout the autumn, from September 7 to December 6, videos with this keyword collected more than 700 million views, but the boom, as seen in the graph, occurred between rounds 1 and 2, which were later canceled.
How the hashtag of Călin Georgescu changed - it peaked after the first round of the presidential election
The main secret is in the comments
Cybersecurity specialist Andrei Busce scanned the comments on the first video posted by Călin Georgescu on the new account and noticed a pattern in the accounts that caught his attention, which he identified as fake. These were profiles that did not post videos but only reposted videos with Călin Georgescu; users with Romanian first and last names; and some that imitated pages with fake names or just a username followed by a long number (code).
“With the help of special tools, I understood the pattern, the model by which this artificial growth is achieved. As noted in an experiment by Recorder, who created a clip with a fake candidate from scratch and uploaded it, getting a million views in just one hour, organic traffic can be generated from fake traffic,” he says.
In other words, a scheme is being created in which bots create a path of access to real people who have been attracted by viral videos. Andrei Busce explained this mechanism in the form of ten steps. Snoop presented the steps without going into technical details to ensure that TikTok users use this article for informational purposes only and not to artificially increase the number of views. The ten steps have been independently verified by five other programmers who have separately stated that this scenario is “very likely”, “feasible”, or “possible”.
The Ten steps
Email addresses are usually created on websites that allow you to obtain a temporary email address. They are valid long enough to create a TikTok account. It is more difficult to use email, for example, from Gmail, because a phone number is required to verify new accounts;
The names of fake users can be automatically added to programs (scripts). They are obtained from lists of names from online sources such as Wikipedia (e.g., a list of Romanian names). Then they are combined in a spreadsheet (Excel): first names in one column (Vasile, Andrea, Mariana, Petre, Evsebiu, Dorina, etc.), last names in another column (Ionescu, Petrescu, Ivan, Niculai, etc.);
Scripts (code written by a programmer to automate a process that would otherwise have to be performed manually) solve Captcha tests (a system whereby a user selects certain images to distinguish humans from bots), as a result of which accounts can be created automatically. This bypasses the security measures implemented by TikTok;
Through web scraping, a process of automatically extracting data from the Internet, relevant videos are identified based on keywords or tags. Links to these videos are then uploaded to the Telegram app;
Using programs available on the Internet, the videos are automatically uploaded or reposted by fake accounts;
This makes it easier for the video to reach millions of views. The Recorder published a report on how a video can get a million views on December 9, in the “News of the Day” section;
The system can be adapted to automatically generated comments or likes. For example, comments can be uploaded to a text file or stored in a database and then automatically republished;
Fake accounts can be identified by certain clues or “misses”. For instance, many accounts have zero likes, but there are dozens of reposts of videos that get hundreds of thousands of views;
TikTok's algorithm sees when a hashtag or topic is posted by thousands of accounts and perceives it as something that users are interested in. It then advertises it on the platform where it is seen by real users, not just bots (fake accounts);
The last aspect is the control of the platform. Andrei Bousce argues that TikTok does not have effective filtering methods. “It doesn't sort out the real content from the fake.” The algorithm promotes any topic that is considered “trending” and “talked about” by thousands of accounts without evaluating its authenticity.
“All other platforms have departments that specialize in political content, elections and governance. You can contact them, get support and dialog. TikTok doesn't have this, because their official policy is that they don't do politics on the platform,” — says Andrei Bousce.
AUR accounts “borrowed” by Georgescu
Context has revealed that the AUR party's network of propaganda pages disguised as news portals also promotes Călin Georgescu, a candidate with zero campaign expenses reports.
This information was confirmed by journalists Luisa Vasiliu and Victor Iliye, who published on their own Substack that “the network, which includes at least 25 Facebook pages and 25 websites, with ads viewed 160 million times, paid between 167,900 and 264,909 thousand euros for more than 4,000 disinformation ads between August and December 2024.”
The ads were also discovered by researchers from CheckFirst and Reset Tech.
The report of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SIE) confirms the data obtained by journalists, showing that Muscovia has flooded the information space with polarizing narratives and support for political actors close to the Kremlin (extremists, nationalists, populists). The report emphasizes the use of local opinion leaders with Eurosceptic views and the promotion of conspiracy theories to influence the electoral process.
PNL's information campaign on TikTok, which resulted in the support of Georgescu
On November 24, 2024, Călin Georgescu wins the first round of the presidential election with 22.94% of the vote, while PNL candidate Nicolae Ciucă receives only 8.79%. But, as it became known later, before that, the PNL party ordered an information campaign, which was presented to the public as “a campaign aimed at raising awareness of the importance of voting.”
For this purpose, they turned to Kensington Communication, a Romanian company that provides political marketing and online campaigns. Kensington Communication provided Snoop with several records, one of which is specifically about the presidential campaign. The analysis shows that the influencers they hired followed pre-established guidelines. What did they advise the influencers to do? “A 30-50-second video like a daily vlog in which you talk to your community about the qualities that are important for someone running for president of Romania.”
Some examples of such scenarios:
Basic scenario “There are 14 presidential candidates, but not all of them are equally experienced or equally prepared for the presidency.” Version from influencer #5: “As you know very well, there are 14 candidates, but obviously not all of them are ready to become the president of Romania”. Version from influencer #7: “We have 14 candidates, but are they all ready for the presidency?”
Scenario “We need a fair person who is not involved in corruption scandals”. Influencer 1: “We need an honest person who cannot be tied to corruption scandals.” Influencer 5: “We need a fair person who is not involved in corruption scandals.” Influencer 2: “Let it be honest, without a questionable past, he should not be involved in a criminal case.”
Scenario “I must have a president who demonstrates patriotism not with words, but with actions.” Influencer 1: “A president who has demonstrated his qualities through actions, not just words.” Influencer 3: “Someone who has demonstrated it with actions, not just words.” Influencer 5: “A president who has demonstrated his qualities through actions, not just words.”
Interestingly, the only scenario that was developed by Kensington Communication, but was not seen in the videos of any of the 9 influencers, is related to a strong party and the United States. The description of this scenario looks like this: “It is important for the president to have the support of a strong party. In all countries, including America. It's hard to run a country if you don't have partners in the parliament, in the government, in the local administration.”
To hire influencers, Kensington Communication turned to the Romanian platform FameUp, paying 130 influencers through it. Also, as noted in the CSAT document, “the initiators of the campaign presented the influencers with methods to avoid detection of content elements that do not comply with the TikTok platform policies.” Thus, some influencers mentioned Călin Georgescu not in the videos themselves, but in the comments under them.
A screenshot from Silviu Faiăr's YouTube show of November 22. A question in the comments section of the TikTok account of the influencer Natalie Beatrice, who participated in the Echilibru și Verticalitate campaign.
The campaign, run by Kensington Communication, eventually received 2.4 million views. Representatives of Kensington Communication told Snoop that the campaign was hijacked, and that the original title and hashtag of the campaign, “Echilibru și Seriozitate” [Balance and Seriousness], which were intended to promote liberal candidate Nicolae Ciucă, were later replaced with “Echilibru și Verticalitate” [Balance and Verticality] after the hijacking.
On January 13, 2025, the newly elected president of the PNL party, Ilies Bolojan, answered Snoop's question about who in the PNL ordered the TikTok campaign accused in the CSAT documents: “I can't tell you that, please ask the colleagues who were in charge of this issue at the time. Hijacking a campaign is illegal and abnormal.”
“The leaders in charge of the campaign of Nicolae Ciucă, the PNL candidate, were Dan Motreanu, Raresh Bogdan, Lucian Bode, and Cyprian Chuku. Bode was responsible for the organization, Motreanu was away for a long time with Chuku in the country, and Raresh Bogdan stayed in Bucharest, handling communications. He was meeting with FameUp and Kensington Communication,” says one PNL representative who spoke to Snoop on condition of anonymity.
“We don't suspect Raresh Bogdan of doing anything intentional, they just gave up on the campaign, they didn't care about it because it was a failure. They were more interested in the fact that Chuku was flooded with comments on Facebook saying 'we are voting for Călin Georgescu', they were not very concerned about TikTok,” says a PNL source.
Raresh Bogdan repeatedly denied that he ran the TikTok campaign, but admitted that he had met with FameUp representatives and even provided data related to the campaign. “You have to ask Motreana, Chuku, who was the director of the online campaign, and Kensington Communication, the company that had complete freedom in this matter,” says Raresh Bogdan.
Cyprian Chuku, the campaign's executive director, said he joined Nicolae Ciucă's campaign coordination team only three weeks before the final. A Snoop reporter contacted him by phone, but Chuku did not want to give a statement and asked for questions in writing. Although they were sent to him, the PNL first vice president did not provide a response by the date of publication.
Epilogue.
“Democracy is not something natural for us,” says Emilian Mihailov, associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Bucharest and director of the Center for Research in Applied Ethics. He explains the connection between beliefs in alternative medicine, esoteric disinformation, and online slander in the current electoral context as follows: “Where there is no democratic tradition, it is easy to manipulate the mental scheme of religiosity, the mental scheme of distrust, and so on.”
Unlike democracy, “the mental scheme of religiosity is well rooted in our consciousness, it has been cultivated for hundreds of thousands of years. It did not emerge a hundred years ago like freedom of speech. It can take the form of esotericism, astrology, spiritualism, Christianity, Judaism. The same goes for political preferences. Tomorrow there will be no Georghescu, but in five years there will be someone else who will speak not of an eternal Romania, but of an invisible Romania or a spiritual Romania. Even if today the individual whom the population prefers does not pass, it does not mean that in the future there will not be another one who will stimulate this mental scheme of religiosity.”
What makes us vulnerable to disinformation is the sum of our beliefs: “It's about naturism with a lack of information, with a lack of trust in the political class, with a lack of trust in the social class, with lower education, with negative experiences. It's always about a cocktail of beliefs that eventually becomes a Molotov cocktail.”