(Adnkronos) – The BBC managed to infiltrate a network for the creation of false content against the pro-European PAS coalition on Telegram, in view of Sunday’s legislative elections in Moldova. Participants in the initiative, attributable to the pro-Russian oligarch Ilan Shor, who fled to Moscow, were also paid to conduct a survey on the streets to search for and select supporters of the pro-Russian opposition.
The result of this fake survey would have been used to challenge the election result. The survey results, according to which the PAS will lose the elections, have already been published online and relaunched by several news sites around the world. (Real polls indicate the opposite, that the Party of Action and Solidarity is leading the pro-Russian Patriotic Electoral Bloc.
The network is linked to Shor through the NGO Evrazia, sanctioned in the European Union, the US and Great Britain for distributing money to voters to vote against the referendum on rapprochement with the EU proposed together with the vote for the presidential elections last year, a referendum approved but by a very narrow margin. “In 2024, the focus of Shor’s campaign was money, now it’s disinformation,” commented police chief Viorel Cernauteanu.
BBC reporter Ana joined the group with 34 other recruits to participate in secret seminars to “prepare operatives”. After passing a series of tests, Ana was contacted by coordinator Alina Juc, originally from Transnistria, with frequent trips to Russia in recent years, and whose photo appears on the Evrazia website. Alina offered Ana a payment of 3,000 lei (almost 200 euros) per month to produce posts on TikTok and Facebook in view of the elections. The money would have come to her from Promsvyazbank (PSB), a Russian public bank linked to the Ministry of Defense and a shareholder in one of Shor’s companies, which has been sanctioned.
Ana and the other recruits were taught to produce social media posts using ChatGPT, to use satire to attract attention, but not too much. Artificial intelligence had to be avoided to prevent the posts from looking ‘unnatural’. At first, the requested content, in Romanian, was more abstract, about historical figures of Moldova, and then it moved on to politics, with unfounded accusations about plans to falsify the elections, about Moldova’s European future and about Sandu’s involvement in drug trafficking. Hashtags, such as ‘sextrafficking’, and key phrases were suggested in advance ‘Sandu’s regime uses children as currency to survive’. Juc also offered Ana 200 lei per hour in cash to conduct the fake survey “to avoid interference in the elections”.
The network consists of at least 90 TikTok accounts, some disguised as news sites, with thousands of videos published, with more than 23 million views and 860,000 likes since last January. The population of Moldova is 2.4 million people. The wider network, later discovered by the NGO DfrLab, has amassed 55 million views and 2.2 million likes on TikTok since January.
