DREAM / The Prime Minister resigns and wakes up under the Parisian bridge!

 Kliko këtu për të tjera
Voxpress:

Wins the first round of the presidential election with only Tik-Tok, how the social network helped the far-right candidate: Targeted young people, his videos received millions of views

2024-11-27 08:25:18Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

Wins the first round of the presidential election with only Tik-Tok, how the

Even after all the votes have been counted, experts still can't figure out how Calin Georgescu managed to score a surprise victory in the first round of the presidential election in Romania.

Georgescu, a little-known far-right figure, stunned pundits and pollsters by winning on November 24. He defeated the front-runners, including leftist Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu of the Social Democrat Party, which has dominated Romania for decades.

The main credit for Georgescut's success goes to his social media campaign, which apparently went unnoticed by many analysts. While he was present on Facebook and YouTube, he deftly campaigned on TikTok, where he received huge support and connected with millions of young people.

TikTok, which was launched in 2017, is now among the most popular websites on the Internet, surpassing even Google in 2021. Millions of people have been seduced by the short videos of this application, whose algorithms personalize the content for each user.

Targeting young voters
While most go to TikTok for entertainment, many people, especially the younger generations, also get their news there.

In the United States, about half of TikTok users under the age of 30 say they use the app to keep up with news and politics, according to the Peë Research Center.

As in other countries, the popularity of TikTok has exploded in Romania. In February 2019, there were only 175,000 TikTok users aged 14 to 65 in Romania. By the beginning of 2024, this figure has grown to nothing less than 8.97 million users.

Many of the leading Romanian presidential candidates have TikTok accounts, including Ciolacu and pro-Western liberal Elena Lasconi, the candidate Georgescu will face in the Dec. 8 presidential runoff.

But it seems that only Georgescu managed to fully exploit the potential of the social media platform, which is owned by the Chinese company, ByteDance.

Many of Georgescut's voters were young. In a Facebook post, sociologist Remus Stefureac said polling data showed that "31 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted for Georgescu, while only 8 percent of voters were over the age of 65." .

Stefureac also added that voters up to the age of 44 are more likely to vote for Georgescu, compared to voters over the age of 45, in the runoff.

Georgescu tapped into voter anger at inflation and corruption in the country, blaming the EU and NATO for much of the country's problems and claiming Romania's "sovereignty" was being violated.

He also praised Ion Antonescu, Romania's de facto leader during World War II, who was sentenced to death for his role in the Romanian Holocaust, and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the pre-World War II leader of the Iron Guard—the which was among the most violent anti-Semitic movements in Europe.

During his campaign, he repeatedly criticized the country's membership in NATO and the EU, as well as its support for Ukraine in the fight against Russian occupation forces. In a televised interview a few days before the November 24 presidential election, Georgescu called for an end to support for Ukraine.

Recipe for success on TikTok
One of his most popular videos on TikTok is one falsely claiming that Ukrainian refugee children were receiving more government aid than Romanian children.

"Do you know how much child support is in Ukraine? What does Romania, the Romanian state, offer him? I will tell you: 3,700 lei ($780), and for a Romanian child, the same benefit is 248 lei, for the same age," Georgescu said in a video posted on November 5 on TikTok, which was later proven to be false.

Despite the false claims, the TikTok video, an excerpt from a lengthy interview by Georgescutt on state television, caused a stir after receiving 5.1 million views and more than 213,000 likes.

More than any of his opponents, Georgescu relied on TikTok to spread his message, said Dragos Stanca, a media expert in Romania.

"Calin Georgescu is ideal for digital media, especially for TikTok. Sell ​​a dream, sell a vision", said Stanca in an interview for the Romanian Service of Radio Free Europe (REL).

“Social media was not created to inform us, but to convert us into buyers…. And the object for sale can also be ideas. And, Georgescu sells ideas that attract on social media", Stanca added.

Launched in the fall of 2022, Georgescut's TikTok account now has 260,000 followers and 3.6 million likes.

One of his most successful strategies was to cut short videos from interviews he had given elsewhere, often on television, and post them on TikTok.

An interview on Digi24 on November 13 had just over 70,000 views on the TV news channel's website, but a video cut from the same show and posted by Georgescu on TikTok reached 4.1 million views.

"I am competing for Romania, not for Ukraine. Neither my supporters nor the Romanian people are interested in either Putin or Ukraine. They are interested in Romania. Let's build it well, to have well-being, to be happy, to have stability, to have security," said Georgescu in a video on TikTok, which received 241,000 likes, was shared 14,000 times and received almost 8,000 comments.

Another TikTok video from the same TV interview features Georgescu avoiding a question about his opinion of Putin.

"I see that you are very persistent in this matter. Why don't you insist on the problems of the Romanian people? Why don't you insist on the problem of poverty, on the problems of disabled people, on the problems of people who are selling their kidney?", Georgescu said in the video that had 3.1 million views on TikTok.

Well-coordinated campaign
In addition to expressing his political views, Georgescu also used TikTok to post videos of himself going to church, doing judo and running on the track in an attempt to reinforce his image as a Christian. that leads pure life.

To ensure that his TikTok videos would be seen by as wide an audience as possible, Georgescu called on his followers to share them and promote them with hashtags that included his name.

This appeared to be a very well-coordinated campaign, and short videos containing Georgescut's statements were shared by thousands of other accounts, some with his name in the account title and others simply posting with the hashtag- I #călingeorgescu.

Hashtags and keywords with the far-right populist's name began to spread rapidly as the first round of the presidential election approached.

As Romanian TikTok was bombarded by the term – Calin Georgescu – the social media platform started auto-filling his name in the search bar, a standard TikTok practice for the most popular trending words.

This strategy has worked so far for Georgescu. The question for many Romanians is whether it will work again on December 8, when he faces Lasconi in a runoff./REL/


Në përputhje me standarded JTI

Video

SHIKO KANALIN NE YOUTUBE
×