The information environment in Bulgaria is already being shaped by forces that no one controls or investigates, writes EUobserver, BGNES.
Rumen Radev has accumulated 90 million views on TikTok through networks whose behavior can hardly be explained by organic activity, it becomes clear from a report on coordinated election manipulation in Bulgaria, quoted by EUobserver.
“The information environment in Bulgaria is already being shaped by forces that no one controls or investigates, and no one seems to be in a particular hurry to understand them“, the publication writes in its commentary, recalling that the caretaker government has activated the response mechanism under the Digital Services Act, two days after a monitoring report by the Balkan Free Media Initiative (BFMI) and Sensika documented coordinated digital manipulation on a significant scale in the Bulgarian information environment. The mechanism coordinates actions between member states, regulators and platforms ahead of sensitive elections.
The BFMI report says: “How much of this activity is an expression of genuine public support and how much is produced through fake profiles, redirected pages and coordinated posting aimed at mimicking spontaneous civic mobilization remains the central and as yet unanswered question of this campaign.“
“Bulgaria is a small country holding its eighth election in five years, in a spring already saturated with important elections across Europe. The vote in Hungary on April 12 is drawing significantly more attention in Brussels, and with good reason. Viktor Orbán’s fifteen-year rule, his relations with Moscow, the systematic dismantling of democratic institutions – all this is well documented and closely monitored. The capacity of European institutions is not infinite, and Bulgaria, with its chronic political dysfunction, usually remains at the bottom of the list. Bulgaria enters these elections with a burden of real failures. Economic anxiety after the turbulent transition to the euro, institutional exhaustion after a series of inconclusive elections, a political class that has exhausted public trust without resolving the causes of the crisis - in such an environment there is no need to instill fear further. The result is an information environment in which it is truly unclear where the public mood ends and where the artificially created dynamics begin“, states the EUobserver publication.
“The fact that Bulgaria is not the only one that needs this mechanism does not bring much reassurance. Moldova, Romania and Hungary also resorted to it before the elections, which speaks as much about the state of the information environment in Europe as about the countries themselves. Delyan Peevski, an oligarch under “Magnitsky” sanctions, also participating in the elections, maintains parallel activity through a group of almost identical profiles. The platforms have said nothing. There is no reaction from the Central Election Commission either. The activated mechanism implies a level of institutional readiness that Bulgaria does not have. There is no national body to monitor coordinated digital behavior, there are no established working relationships between state institutions and platforms, and civil society efforts are poorly developed and still uncoordinated. The Central Election Commission has not launched an investigation, although evidence has been publicly available for weeks. A coordination mechanism is only as effective as the institutions it works with. In Bulgaria, they are largely absent. In Bulgaria, the evidence is available before the vote. Whether Brussels will act in time, before April 19, will be the real test of Europe's commitment to the sustainability of democracy in a country that has never been easy to keep in the spotlight. “, the media adds.
Meta and TikTok have a legal obligation under European law to identify and limit risks to electoral processes. The evidence from Bulgaria meets this threshold, but parliamentary elections in Sofia will not in themselves become a priority for the platforms. This is what European regulatory pressure should change. The European Commission forced TikTok to provide explanations in the case of Romania (Calin Georgescu was targeted), but this happened after the damage had already been done.
BGNES recalls that on December 6, 2024, the Constitutional Court of Romania annulled the results of the first round of the presidential election, unexpectedly won by the far-right candidate Calin Georgescu, due to evidence of illegal financing and massive vote manipulation through a coordinated campaign on TikTok.