Being Online and Writing Whatever Comes to Mind Isn’t Always the Best Option

This is what a Romanian expert, a professor at the Faculty of Journalism and Communication Studies at the University of Bucharest, told us in an interview. RALUCA RADU spoke about how different groups in Romania use social media, the role social media plays in different situations, and other related realities.

- Which social media platforms are most widely used by residents of Romania? And what factors influence people’s choice of these platforms?

R.R. Historically, we are very attached to Facebook because on Facebook you could write very long texts. I know that in Western Europe, people are very attached to the former Twitter, now X, but as Romanians, we did not like the fact that you had to write only a little, so we went to Facebook. Now, Facebook is maybe a network for the older generation, while the younger generation, like my students, are moving to Instagram and TikTok.

TikTok has been on the rise for several years now. Not only young people are using TikTok; it seems that every age group is using it. We have a lot of accounts, and maybe more than half of the Romanian population has an account on TikTok. This is how the data looks.

And another thing that is growing is not really social media. The use of artificial intelligence is growing, so things like Gemini and GPT are becoming much more popular. Some people are even using AI as their main source of access to information. We saw this in the research data, in the Digital News Report, which is published every year and includes Romania. We saw that AI is growing in popularity, first among the younger generation, but I think that in a year or two, many, many other age groups will be asking ChatGPT or Gemini about different things.

- Who is currently winning the competition for public attention: traditional media (television, online/print media) or social networks? Which communication channels do the government, opposition groups, and civil society representatives prefer to use when addressing the public, especially during critical periods such as elections, political and other crises, or when sharing urgent news?

R.R Again, the data shows that newsrooms in Romania are still very important, but they remain relevant because they have understood that their audience is moving from offline to online. The main newsrooms are online as well. They have a presence on Facebook, but also on TikTok and Instagram.

On Instagram, there are newsrooms that produce content specifically for Instagram and specifically for younger generations. I have students who say that they know what is going on because of Instagram and because of these new outlets that use Instagram as their main channel.

So, in short, social media is the main source of information. From social media, people can choose to go to the website of, for example, a former print newspaper that has moved online, or watch something like the full TV broadcast online, either on YouTube or on the newsroom’s website.

So, to go to your second question, everybody is using social media, especially during election periods. We saw this in the last elections. Some presidential candidates force themselves to be on TikTok and create TikTok content. If you are not natural on TikTok, or if you have not used TikTok for a long time, it can seem very strange. The content feels very strange.

This is one thing. Another thing is that, in times of crisis, crisis teams advise people to use social media. And in some cases, it might be a very good choice.

For example, we had a drone incident. A drone from Russia came to Romania, hit a block of flats, and entered an apartment where a mother and her child were sleeping. They were injured. And everybody was asking: What happened? Why was the drone not intercepted? Who owned the drone? How did the drone enter Romania?

There was also a discussion about how to determine whether the drone was Ukrainian or Russian, because both Ukrainians and Russians use drones.

And the crisis communication team that is linked to the presidential palace decided that the president would present the evidence on his Facebook account. And this was very good because everybody could see the evidence and read the text.
Of course, all the newsrooms picked up the information and spread it, but they shared it with a link so that everyone could see the evidence for themselves and comment if they wanted to. And I think that was a very good use of social media in that type of crisis.

- Which groups (government officials, political party leaders, civil society organizations) are the most active users of social media in your country? For whom has social media become a primary tool of communication?

R.R. I think politicians are the main users of social media, but ordinary citizens are also very active users. This can have an effect that is not always very good for politicians, because you can see them as they really are. Sometimes, you might think of them as very smart or courageous people, but when you see how they write, what their opinions are on different subjects, and how they interact with people commenting on their posts or how they block people, you understand more about who they really are.

So maybe it is not always the best option to be online and to write whatever comes to your mind. But now everybody feels the pressure to be on social media.

- How does your country experience Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) and other forms of public opinion manipulation in practice? What role do social networks play in these hybrid attacks and in efforts to counter them?

R.R. Sometimes it is very difficult to prove that there is foreign interference in a communication crisis because you do not have all the data or all the traces, and you do not know where something started. You just see it getting out of proportion.

Sometimes, I think it is simply ordinary Romanians discussing things and not understanding certain issues. But sometimes, it is clearly somebody else, with a lot of money, pushing people in one direction or another. And I am going to give you two examples.

Last weekend, in the Danube Delta, there was supposed to be a festival of traditional food. A lot of people usually gather for this festival, but it did not take place this year because the mayor of the town where the festival is held decided not to organize it because they did not have enough money.

Nevertheless, some people went there because they had asked about the festival using artificial intelligence and social media, and they were told that the festival was taking place. Around a hundred or more peoplewere there, but nothing had been organized.

This would not be foreign interference. It would simply be a case of people not checking information before acting on something they found online. They did not know the source for sure, they did not know how to check it, and what was strange was that even tourism agencies took people there.

We had a sensation during the 2024 presidential elections, when a candidate whom, at first, almost nobody wanted to vote for became the runner-up in less than two weeks. Digital analysts then tried to understand what had happened online, and they found that on TikTok there were a lot of comments coming from many different accounts, all pushing this candidate forward. You cannot do this without a lot of money. The candidate declared that he was not spending any money on his campaign and that all the noise around him was organic. I don't think that was simply normal Romanians discussing the candidate, this is not possible. This may have been a trace of foreign interference.

And sometimes you can see things that are not normal. For example, people who declare themselves to be Orthodox - we are a majority Orthodox country - and talk about Romanian politics or about God, but they use a profile picture of an elderly woman and their location is shown as being somewhere in China.

That is not normal, but people don’t stop to verify everything. They don’t go from account to account. They see that there is a discussion and they stay there, trying to understand what is going on without verifying the information. And this is because sometimes we use social media for entertainment or simply to pass the time, and this affects the way we make decisions.

In my opinion, that would be the first step in trying to identify traces of foreign interference: looking for things that don’t add up, things that cannot be explained through normal patterns of behaviour.

This video was produced with the financial support of the European Union and the German Marshall Fund of the United States Transatlantic Foundation (GMF TF). Its contents are the sole responsibility of the “Region” Research Center and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union or the GMF TF.