What can we observe in the case of the 2025 presidential elections in Romania?

The era of fake news is history. Not that we should no longer be concerned about fake news, which is a matter of content; combating it remains important. But the stakes in the 2025 campaign have become the ability to flood the digital space with oceans of information, memes, and videos about one’s own candidate, plus negative propaganda about opponents, much more so than in the past.

In other words, it is about exploiting platform algorithms, to the limit or beyond the provisions of Romanian law, which are restrictive but outdated, lacking effective enforcement mechanisms. Because it is one thing to put false or manipulativ narratives in the virtual space, but whose source can be identified – and another to create from scratch tens of thousands of supporters who do not exist, i.e. accounts based on bot networks, which fill the public conversation with duplicate posts and comments, giving the impression of popularity and mobilisation.

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