European researchers want to study social media’s harms but can’t get the data
In the final weeks before Romania’s presidential vote in November 2024, TikTok accounts that had previously spent years posting about manicures or fashion suddenly started
In the final weeks before Romania’s presidential vote in November 2024, TikTok accounts that had previously spent years posting about manicures or fashion suddenly started promoting a little-known politician named Calin Georgescu. His posts, espousing hard-line views on immigration and anti-Semitic tropes, were viewed 120 million times before the vote. Georgescu, who had previously been polling in the single digits, stunned observers by winning the election’s first round with 23 percent of the vote. In the Netherlands, Adriana Iamnitchi was watching closely. As chair of computational social sciences at Maastricht University, she leads the research into disinformation campaigns. She wanted to know how pro-Georgescu content was being monetized on TikTok through hidden- influencer marketing and livestreamed political content.
On October 28, 2025, a month before Georgescu won the first round, she and her team applied for access to TikTok’s Application Programming Interface (API) under the EU’s recent Digital Services Act (DSA). Their request was denied. TikTok said they had failed to prove they were established researchers or to explain their commercial interests or to meet security requirements, Iamnitchi wrote in a blog post. But two month’s later, TikTok flagged 116k accounts as potentially compromised before taking action against more than 27,000 fake accounts in a coordinated network run by a third-party “fake engagement vendor” that was promoting Georgescu and his party, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR).
TikTok said it did not know who operated the network or where it originated. The the first round of voting was annulled and in the runoff in May 2025, independent candidate and former Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan beat AUR’s George Simion, who took over the party after Georgescu was barred from running again. Georgescu said on his YouTube channel that annulling the 2024 results was “practically a formalized coup d’état” by Romania’s Constitutional Court. Declassified Romanian intelligence showed he “benefited” from massive exposure and preferential treatment by TikTok and that Russia had allegedly coordinated the online campaign to elect Georgescu.
Calin Georgescu Photograph: Getty Images Iamnitchi believes her team might have been able to identify who created and profited from the pro-Georgescu content had they gained access to the data. “If you are a scholar interested in how social media shapes society, the past years have been tough,” she wrote. “When you need data to investigate that impact, and that data is privately held, it can become practically impossible to research this space.”
The BriefWire