Far-right posts still pushed on TikTok ahead of Romanian election re-run

Ahead of the re-run of Romania's presidential election, Global Witness repeated its earlier testing approach, creating three newly established, politically neutral TikTok accounts that followed both leading candidates, and recorded what content the platform's algorithm served them. Over a combined 30 minutes of use across the test accounts in Bucharest, TikTok displayed 65 political posts, of which 74% promoted or favorably featured far-right figures or viewpoints.

The result echoed findings from Global Witness's earlier investigation into the annulled first-round election, in which test accounts had been shown pro-Georgescu content between roughly 4.6 and 14 times more often than content favoring his rival. Taken together, the two rounds of testing indicated a persistent skew in TikTok's recommendations toward far-right content in the Romanian electoral context specifically.

TikTok rejected the report's conclusions, calling the methodology "unscientific and misleading." Global Witness's findings came as the European Commission was already pursuing a formal Digital Services Act investigation into TikTok's handling of election-related risks in Romania.