Meta's Role in Romania's 2024 Presidential Election
With Reset Tech and EU DisinfoLab, examined Meta's advertising and its influence on public opinion during Romania's pivotal 2024 presidential vote.
Executive summary
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CheckFirst, Reset Tech, EU DisinfoLab, and independent journalists Luiza Vasiliu and Victor Ilie jointly examined political advertising on Meta during Romania's 2024 presidential election, monitoring a coordinated network of Facebook pages linked to the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) and cross-referencing activity with TikTok and Google Ads.
The investigation identified 3,640 political ads from the network, with a combined reach of 148 million and spending between roughly €140,000 and €224,000. The ads were found to repeatedly violate Meta's advertising policies, including transparency requirements and rules against targeting based on protected characteristics, and some candidate-promoting ads reportedly ran during the legally mandated pre-election silence period. Despite public reporting beginning in April 2024, Meta was slow to act on the flagged campaigns.
The authors conclude the case exposes systemic weaknesses in platform ad-transparency enforcement and call for standardized disclosure formats and closer cooperation between platforms and independent watchdogs to safeguard electoral integrity.
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