With elections under way across south-eastern Europe, the Balkan Free Media Initiative (BFMI) has been monitoring election campaigns across the region ahead of polling day. Its report TikTokcracy in the Balkans – a blueprint for fighting algorithmic manipulation in Europe examined how TikTok and other platforms were used to spread misleading information and amplify certain candidates in Romania and elsewhere. At Connecting EU 2026, BFMI Director Antoinette Nikolova presented the organisation’s findings on Bulgaria.

 

The BFMI’s trackers on Bulgaria, produced with its technical partner Sensika, examined how difficult it has become to distinguish genuine political support from coordinated attempts to create an impression of popularity online. According to the report, coordinated networks amplified content supporting Rumen Radev, Bulgaria’s former president and leader of the newly-formed Progressive Bulgaria coalition, ahead of the country’s parliamentary election in April 2026. His coalition went on to win an absolute majority.

The BFMI and Sensika began monitoring the online campaign before polling day. Their first tracker, published one month before the vote, concluded that Rumen Radev already had a commanding presence on social media.

The scale of that online presence was remarkable for a country of just over six million people. According to the report, the hashtag bearing his name attracted 90.4 million views across 2,700 TikTok videos. The report also found that the 30 largest pro-Radev Facebook groups had a combined 1.3 million members, while some were gaining between 4,000 and 6,000 members a week and publishing as many as 130 posts a day.

According to the BFMI and Sensika, much of the online infrastructure supporting Radev did not come from the official channels of a long-established political organisation. The researchers said that it had instead been created by renaming and repurposing existing Facebook pages and groups.

According to the report, one page previously dedicated to second-hand car parts became 'Rumen Radev, the new Prime Minister'. The report said that another was renamed 'Bulgaria and Russia, Slavic Brothers', then became an online village marketplace before eventually re-emerging as a pro-Radev group.

The BFMI describes the practice as 'audience laundering'. It says that when a page changes purpose, it retains its followers, its history and the credibility it has built with the platform’s algorithm, allowing a political campaign to inherit an established audience instead of building one from scratch. According to the report, around 30 Facebook pages and groups feeding the pro-Radev network had been created mainly in this way.

The researchers also identified coordinated and inauthentic activity across several platforms. However, they stressed that the problem was not confined to a single political force. Their second tracker documented such activity involving three parties and serious anomalies associated with two others.

The report also examined what it described as the growing use of hashtags as tools of political manipulation. Rather than simply promoting their own messages, coordinated networks were said to flood opponents’ hashtags with hostile or misleading content. According to the report, the main TikTok hashtag used by PP-DB, Bulgaria’s pro-European, anti-corruption coalition, became so saturated with hostile content that the coalition shifted its communications strategy towards the personal accounts of its leaders, reducing its ability to reach undecided voters. The report also found that critical content linked to GERB, Bulgaria’s main centre-right party, outnumbered favourable posts by approximately 17 to one.

In other cases, the report found that networks flooded hashtags with near-identical positive posts to create an artificial impression of popularity and momentum. According to the BFMI, hashtags are no longer simply spaces for public discussion; they have become contested arenas in which the most organised networks can shape what users see.

The BFMI said the platforms responded differently to its findings. After being alerted to activity the organisation regarded as suspicious, TikTok removed 34 accounts. Meta, by contrast, stated that it had not identified coordinated inauthentic behaviour under its own criteria. The BFMI noted, however, that the company had informally referred to the removal of more than 200 networks.

For the BFMI, these discrepancies point to a broader regulatory weakness. The organisation argues that platforms apply different definitions and standards to similar forms of behaviour, making it difficult for researchers and the public to assess the scale of manipulation.

The report calls for common definitions of coordinated inauthentic behaviour across platforms, fully operational national Digital Services Coordinators in place before elections, and preventive rather than reactive use of the EU’s Rapid Response System. It also argues that civil society monitoring organisations should play a formal role in Europe’s response to threats to democratic debate.

'The manipulation we identified in Bulgaria was generated domestically, distributed algorithmically, and embedded within the very competitive dynamics of the election. The Bulgarian experience shows that timely, contextualised, on-the-ground evidence is the catalyst that moves platforms,' Ms Nikolova said.

She argued that safeguarding the information environment should be treated with the same urgency as protecting other systems on which society depends.

'I believe that the information system must be treated as critical and strategic infrastructure. When there is a problem with the energy grid or the water system, emergency and extraordinary protocols are activated. When we speak of information and elections, the situation is no less strategic,' she said.

The report concluded that by the time voters enter the polling station, the battle for their attention, and perhaps their vote, may already have been fought online.

Antoinette Nikolova is the Director of the Balkan Free Media Initiative (BFMI), an independent Brussels-based organisation focused on media freedom and the structural vulnerabilities that shape the information environment in south-eastern Europe. You can watch her presentation delivered at Connecting EU 2026 here.