‘We are getting fed up’: EU lawmakers snap at TikTok over Romanian election

BRUSSELS — This was not the reconciliation TikTok had hoped for.
An attempt by the popular video-sharing app to assuage European Union lawmakers’ concerns backfired on Tuesday, as company executives faced hostile — and at times furious — politicians questioning its role in ultranationalist Călin Georgescu’s win in the recent first-round of Romania’s presidential election.
Lawmakers summoned representatives of the app for a hearing before its internal market committee on Tuesday morning, seeking clarity over the company’s efforts to comply with EU social media law. What followed was a fierce exchange that showed how Brussels’ patience with TikTok’s handling of disinformation and elections is running low.
“Honestly speaking, we are getting fed up by the documents and the empty promises,” Swedish center-right European lawmaker Arba Kokalari said near the end of the hearing.
Anna Cavazzini, Greens MEP and chair of the internal market committee, hinted that Parliament wasn’t done with the app just yet: “It was very clear that there’s a lot of dissatisfaction and a lot of questions are still open,” she said when closing the meeting.
The tense hearing, which ran about an hour and a half, came after a week of back-and-forth between Romanian regulators, European Commission services and TikTok over concerns that the app’s algorithm “disproportionally” favored one candidate — Georgescu — and that political content on the app wasn’t labeled correctly.
For years, the Chinese-owned social media app has brushed off security concerns in the United States and Europe that it could be used for mass manipulation and espionage. It now faces an intense regulatory storm in Bucharest over whether it played a role in skewing the democratic process in an EU country and NATO member of 19 million people.
The liberal Renew group also formally asked European Parliament President Roberta Metsola to invite TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew to the Parliament to explain the company’s role in the election.
In their opening remarks to lawmakers, two senior TikTok executives gave an exhaustive list of the efforts to moderate content and secure elections against foreign interference or manipulation.
It sought to convince lawmakers that it’s doing more than other platforms.
The company’s Brussels top lobbyist, Caroline Greer, said TikTok had “the largest number of Romanian moderators among all platforms.”
The executives also revealed that TikTok had taken down several influence campaigns, three of which were directly targeted at Romania, in recent months: one in September, two “very very small” ones just last Friday (launched out of Romania and targeting Romanian audiences), and a known campaign tied to Kremlin-backed media outlet Sputnik, which cropped up again on the platform.
In short, the Chinese-owned app’s message was: We’ve got this.
But lawmakers didn’t buy it.
Romanian lawmakers in particular called out the company’s role in the election and blamed TikTok for not being committed to the EU’s content-moderation law, the Digital Services Act.
“It’s quite obvious to everyone, at least in my country, that TikTok isn’t in the least concerned about respecting their requirements of the DSA,” said Romanian Social-Democrat lawmaker Dan Nica. “Utter contempt and no answers.”
Dutch Greens MEP Kim van Sparrentak echoed those concerns: “TikTok, how can you sit here and pretend you care about election integrity?” she asked.
Others projected other concerns and frustrations on the executives, so much so that Cavazzini had to remind them that the debate was about content moderation and the DSA. Liberal Renew lawmaker Bart Groothuis grilled the executives on TikTok’s ties with Beijing and the Chinese government’s alleged access to Western data.
Several times, lawmakers also expressed concerns about whether TikTok had learned any lessons from past elections to secure upcoming ones — such as Germany’s parliamentary vote scheduled for February.
TikTok faces several key moments in the next few weeks, which will keep the pressure on the company high. It has to respond to a set of questions sent by the European Commission on its handling of the Romanian election by next Friday, and on Dec. 17, European lawmakers and Commission officials will discuss disinformation on the platform in their plenary gathering.