TikTok Removed 27,000 Accounts Tied to Romania's Election. Two Months Earlier, It Denied a Researcher Access to Study Them.

In late 2025, TikTok flagged more than 116,000 accounts as potentially compromised and removed more than 27,000 fake accounts in a coordinated network promoting far-right candidate Călin Georgescu and the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). Two months earlier, on October 28, 2025, the platform had denied Adriana Iamnitchi, a computational social sciences chair at Maastricht University, the API access she had requested under the European Union's Digital Services Act to study the platform's role in Romania's annulled 2024 presidential election — the same manipulation network TikTok later dismantled on its own.

The denial sat inside a regulatory lane the EU's 2022 content-moderation law, the Digital Services Act, was written to open. Article 40 of the act set up a process by which vetted researchers can apply to large platforms for data access, on the theory that independent outside study is the only credible way to audit how content goes viral, who amplifies it, and whether elections are being distorted. Iamnitchi's request was meant to map the same manipulation network TikTok later dismantled on its own.

TikTok's rejection letter, as Ars Technica reported from Iamnitchi's blog, rested on three filters: Iamnitchi had not demonstrated "established researcher" status, had not adequately disclosed commercial interests, and had not met the platform's security requirements. Each filter is the kind a regulator expects a platform to operate. The three together, applied to one named researcher's request to study one named election, convert a regulatory right into a corporate-controlled screening process.

Ahead of Romania's November 2024 presidential first round, Georgescu's posts drew 120 million views on TikTok, and he moved from single-digit polling to roughly 23 percent of the vote before the result was annulled by Romania's Constitutional Court. In the May 2025 runoff, independent Nicușor Dan, the former mayor of Bucharest, beat George Simion, who had taken over AUR after Georgescu was barred from running again. Declassified Romanian intelligence said Georgescu "benefited" from massive exposure and preferential treatment by TikTok, and alleged that Russia had coordinated the campaign. TikTok said it did not know who operated the network. Georgescu, for his part, called the annulment "practically a formalized coup d'état" on his YouTube channel.

Iamnitchi is a tenured chair at a public European university running a publicly funded research program. The security-requirements bar in her rejection letter is the filter that travels least well: on its face, the bar she is said to have not met looks more like a credentialing filter than a security one. The DSA's research lane was written on the premise that platforms and outside scientists need each other: platforms see the data, but they do not see their own systems from the outside, and outside scientists are the only ones who can publish a finding a regulator can use. When the same access request is denied and the same manipulation network is then found by the platform's own trust-and-safety team, the three filters in Iamnitchi's rejection letter are the regulatory question the law now has to answer.