Meta didn’t notice major disinformation in Romanian election

US social media company Meta did not notice major incidents on its platforms during the Romanian election, President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg told reporters in a briefing. 

“Throughout the elections we have been in close – almost daily – contact with both government authorities and law enforcement in Romania, including ANCOM, the Ministry of Interior, the Electoral Body, and the Romanian Cybersecurity Agency,” Clegg said.

“⁠We are not seeing any evidence of major incidents on our platforms in Romania,” he added.

Last week Romania’s National Audiovisual Council asked the European Commission to open a formal probe into the role of video sharing platform TikTok in the first round of the country’s presidential elections on 24 November. 

Calin Georgescu, a right-wing candidate who ran independently, emerged as the winner with some 22.95% of the votes mainly because of his strong performance on TikTok. The second round takes place on 8 December. 

In response, the Commission sent additional questions to the platform, and hosted an online roundtable on 29 November, with ANCOM, and platforms including TikTok, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and X.

In a letter seen by Euronews, sent to the Romanian authorities, TikTok said “no evidence of a Covert Influence Operation on our platform within the last several weeks for the ongoing presidential election in Romania, nor evidence of foreign influence [was found].”

Role of AI

In a blogpost published today, Clegg said that throughout 2024, which saw elections in major democracies including India, Indonesia, Mexico and the EU, Meta’s “existing policies and processes proved sufficient to reduce the risk around generative AI content”.

“During the election period in the major elections listed above, ratings on AI content related to elections, politics and social topics represented less than 1% of all fact-checked misinformation,” he wrote.

Around the US presidential election on 5 November, Meta said it rejected 590,000 requests to use Meta’s Image AI to generate images of President-elect Trump, Vice President-elect Vance, Vice President Harris, Governor Walz, and President Biden. 

Clegg said that in general, the company’s policies sometimes lead to curbs of freedom of expression.

“Too often harmless content gets taken down or restricted and too many people get penalized unfairly,” adding that Meta will continue to work on this in the months ahead.