TikTok Denied Researchers Data Access Before Flagging 27,000 Fake Accounts Tied to Romanian Election

Adriana Iamnitchi wanted to know who was making money off a political ambush.

As chair of computational social sciences at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, she leads research into disinformation campaigns. In the final weeks before Romania's presidential vote in November 2024, she watched TikTok accounts that had spent years posting about manicures and fashion pivot overnight to promoting Calin Georgescu, a fringe politician who had been polling in the single digits.

Georgescu's posts pushed hard-line immigration views and anti-Semitic tropes. They were viewed 120 million times before the vote. He stunned observers by winning the first round with 23 percent of the vote.

On October 28, 2025, a month before Georgescu won that first round, Iamnitchi's team applied for access to TikTok's Application Programming Interface under the European Union's Digital Services Act, the law meant to force large platforms to open their data to vetted researchers. TikTok denied the request. The company said the team had failed to prove they were established researchers, failed to explain their commercial interests, and failed to meet security requirements, according to Iamnitchi's own account of the rejection, published in a blog post.

What TikTok Found Two Months Later

Two months after denying Iamnitchi's request, TikTok flagged 116,000 accounts as potentially compromised and took action against more than 27,000 fake accounts. The company said these accounts were part of 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 first round of voting was annulled. Declassified Romanian intelligence indicated Georgescu had "benefited" from massive exposure and preferential treatment by TikTok, and alleged that Russia had coordinated the online campaign to elect him. Georgescu has disputed the entire process.

In the runoff in May 2025, independent candidate and former Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan defeated AUR's George Simion, who had taken over the party after Georgescu was barred from running again. Georgescu called the annulment "practically a formalized coup d'état" by Romania's Constitutional Court, according to comments he made on his YouTube channel.

The Access Problem

Iamnitchi's core complaint isn't about who won or lost. It's that her team was legally entitled under EU law to get platform data and still couldn't get it in time to matter. "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."

She 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.

Iamnitchi is one of several misinformation researchers who say that despite being legally entitled to obtain platform data under EU law, they face obstacles, obfuscation, and sometimes court battles to obtain it. Application forms differ by platform, but most require data to be stored on infrastructure that cannot be compromised — such as a machine physically disconnected from the internet — a resource most universities lack, Iamnitchi said.

What Happens Next

The Digital Services Act was meant to let vetted researchers at credible institutions access platform data if they could show it would help study systemic risks, from illegal content to threats to fundamental rights. But researchers say that, two years after the law took effect, they struggle to meet its security requirements and face narrow interpretations from platforms of what qualifies as a systemic risk. The gap between what the law promises and what a researcher can actually obtain in a live election cycle is real, and on this evidence, cost researchers lead time they didn't get back.

TikTok did eventually find and act on the fake account network, removing over 27,000 accounts on its own initiative. The unresolved question is whether TikTok could have found and removed that network faster, or whether independent researchers with earlier data access could have surfaced it before ballots were cast. Iamnitchi's account suggests she thinks so. TikTok has not addressed that specific counterfactual on the record.