Romania between institutional crisis and attacks on independent media.
An interview with journalist Attila Biro. This interview was made by Giovanni Marenda.
Attila Biro is a Romanian top investigative journalist, currently leading the newspaper Context.ro, partner in the S-Info project. As S-Info Editorial Committee, we felt the urgency to interview him in the light of the turbulent events in Romania in recent weeks, marked by a fierce electoral campaign and the subsequent unprecedented cancellation of the presidential elections of the 24th November, after Călin Georgescu’s disputed victory. Attila’s voice is particularly relevant today not only because of his 20 years of experience as an analyst, but because he was pulled into a slandern media campaign by presidential candidate Mircea Geoană, former NATO Deputy Secretary General. A series of fake news stories have hit Biro, absurdly accusing him of being involved in an assassination attempt on a chief prosecutor in Bulgaria – apparently as revenge for the investigation carried out by Context.ro and OCCRP (Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project) that unveiled Geoană entourage’s ambiguous relations with Aleksei Kozlov, a Russian businessman closely linked to pro-Putin activities in Crimea. But let us leave the floor to the person concerned.
GM: Romania is going through a period of political instability. After the invalidation of the general elections, the President recently resigned. Can you give us an overview of what is happening now and how you think the situation will evolve?
AB: On Sunday 8 December 2024, the second round of the presidential elections should have been held in Romania, which would have marked the end of a long and intense period of voting, characterised by several surprises, a bitter election campaign and the growth of a mostly Eurosceptic right wing. However, two days before the vote, the Romanian Constitutional Court announced its decision to annul the elections, which will therefore have to be repeated starting from the electoral campaign, in May 2025. Before the Constitutional Court decided to annul the elections, there had been some reports from various bodies, including the secret services, which spoke of electoral interference, hinting that it was Russian interference. In addition, there was also massive manipulation through social networks, particularly TikTok. There are criminal investigations going on and we are looking forward to understanding better how the elections were influenced. But yes, this was one of the main topics of discussion.
GM: I was reading that the information is still not very clear. And that is why the President was led to resign.
AB: Well, that is not quite right. In fact, the Constitutional Court’s reasoning was simple, taking for granted that there had been interference, with the support of artificial intelligence. The President resigned because there was an imminent possibility that he would be dismissed. Otherwise, he would have been suspended through parliamentary procedures. So that was actually the trigger for his decision to resign. However, he was already in a prolonged term, he had already finished his term, but it was prolonged automatically because of the cancellation of the election. That is also something important to say. He was supposed to be replaced with the new president in December last year.
GM: I would like to move on to your personal situation now, if you can give us some insights about the investigation you were conducting, which you are still conducting, on the very subject of the manipulation of social media during the electoral campaign. Investigation that turned into a personal attack against you.
AB: Yes, actually we are still in the attack phase these days and I will get to that a little later. So basically, at Context, we have been investigating this topic for the last two years, and what we found out is that in Romania and in the region there is a huge interconnected platform that is spreading a massive amount of disinformation. Mainly, there are conspiracy theories, pro-Russian narratives, all sorts of fake news that is being spread and that some people are profiting from. Last year we started investigating the social network TikTok. What we found out is that extremists are actually weaponizing TikTok. They did it during the European elections and we could see that also during the presidential elections. While we were following the Romanian presidential elections, we also did an investigation on another candidate, not the one who won in the first round. This was the former deputy commander of NATO, Mircea Geoană, about whom we were able to prove that one of his campaign managers had very close business relations with a Russian businessman, who visited Crimea at least 10 times in the last years. After our publication, Mr Geoană, who was a career diplomat, launched a fierce attack spreading false news about me as a journalist and about Context. He claimed that I was involved in a plot to assassinate the former Attorney General of Bulgaria, a conspiracy theory engineered by Bulgarian tabloids in cahoots with shady people. This was one of the most recent episodes. But now we are also accused of having taken part in the conspiracy that stopped the Romanian elections. These accusations come from people with pro-Russian links spreading false narratives, and this is because we denounced the manipulation of TikTok. Since some of our funding comes from the United States, they say that we are part of an anti-Russia huge international conspiracy. Obviously, there is no evidence. These are just absurd arguments, but this is what we are dealing with at the moment.
GM: What kind of methodologies are you employing to analyse social media like TikTok? How are you tackling these kinds of topics?
AB: During our investigations, we realised that we needed a new approach, not just exposing the information, but trying to dig deeper. One of the things we always do when we talk about disinformation is to trace the financial side of it, tracing who is investing money, where the money is coming from, and who is ultimately benefiting from the fact that people’s minds are being manipulated or polluted by false and bad information. We analysed the websites in Romania, in Central and Eastern Europe, that spread disinformation, then we moved on to social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. But then TikTok has become very powerful in recent years in the region, and it is probably at this moment, if not the first, probably the second most popular social media, at least in Romania. We needed a way to analyse the content, and TikTok is video-based. With AI developers, we created a unique tool capable of analysing TikTok videos. And this tool is able to determine whether a video contains disinformation or not. Obviously, it was created with a lot of input from journalists and reporters who are trained in fact-checking. The tool is not a simple AI, but a complex system that uses human input and a lot of human supervision to analyse large amounts of data. We can analyse tens of thousands of TikTok videos and determine if each one contains incorrect information and thus obtain statistical data. We have now analysed over 150,000 videos and the system is showing that TikTok systematically allows the existence of misinformation on its platform. The algorithm rewards people who spread disinformation, and this is something we want to make sure the public is aware of, that different authorities are aware of because it is used as a weapon. It was used as a weapon in the Romanian elections and it is used as a weapon across the EU.
GM: How are social media threatening democratic processes and civil society in general?
AB: Our investigations over the last two years at a regional level in Central and Eastern Europe show that social media algorithms reward extremist content. It is not just one type of extremism, but all extremist content. It is disseminated and most of the time it contains disinformation and incitement to fear or hatred. These algorithms reward it or push it in public. And this is systemic. We need to be aware that the principle of these companies, which call themselves social networks, but are actually e-commerce platforms, is to treat users as a product. Those who control these platforms are not interested in promoting values such as democracy, pluralism, diversity. They just want to sell and capture people’s attention, and use it as a weapon against anyone who pays. Just think about the fact that we have proven that an extremist political party was created in Romania through over 20 fake news websites. And they were paying for Facebook ads with public funds, ads that promoted disinformation and political propaganda, which is not allowed. Algorithms are basically attacking democracies.
GM: So we could say that these types of platforms are promoting polarisation in general, fake news for sure, but they are also following an economic rationale, transforming people into products and selling to the highest buyer. And now, as the public debate is becoming a question of financing TikTok videos and promoting fake news, this is undermining what should be an actual public debate. But I would also like to ask you about freedom of the press, because if on the one hand there is this attack to democratic debate, on the other there are people behind these platforms, politicians who profit from them, clearly attacking freedom of the press. And your experience is clear on this, but it is happening in other European countries.
AB: Elon Musk is doing everything he can to shut down the media because, as I said, the real, independent and free media will be the ones that show the injustice and corruption that is happening in media, in society, in business, and in the world of technology. That is why we see this alliance between politicians and technological oligarchs around the world. They are arming these platforms and they are helping extremist politicians come to power, so that they can write their own rules. This is what they want to achieve, the seat of power to be able to write their own rules and legislation that will obviously make them more money, more power. So once again, it has nothing to do with social or economic justice or fairness in the world, it is about more money and more power.
GM: This is also evident in Italy, for example, where genuine investigative journalism is becoming increasingly rare and increasingly under attack. The feeling is that journalism is becoming a pioneering job, more difficult than in the past. So I would like to ask you what is the role of journalism today, as far as the S-Info project is concerned, how can journalism and civil society build a coalition to fight back?
AB: Well, we now have to be more resilient than ever, when we see that autocrats are redrawing the map of the world. And one way is to join forces with experts from other sectors, as we are doing with AI developers or other types of activists. We need to share resources, share knowledge, create links based on the same values, such as freedom of speech. So we need to act a bit like guerrillas. We have few resources, but we are very capable and what we need is to be effective, tactical, and resilient. These will be very difficult years, but if we apply and exchange the skills we know throughout the civil society sector, in the end, I really believe that we will come out on top. But it takes a lot of solidarity and we need to understand that this is a fight for the fundamental principles of democracy that we have to carry on day after day, and that will last for some years. Projects like S-Info, where we are able to create these cross-sectoral and cross-border networks, are making us more resilient. This is one of the things we should definitely invest more in, because this is how we protect the values of democracy.
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