Hey Beeple and visitors to Beehaw: I think we need to have a discussion about !technology@beehaw.org, community culture, and moderation. First, some of the reasons that I think we need to have this conversation.

1. Technology got big fast and has stayed Beehaw's most active community.
2. Technology gets more reports (about double in the last month by a rough hand count) than the next highest community that I moderate (Politics, and this is during election season in a month that involved a disastrous debate, an assassination attempt on a candidate, and a major party's presumptive nominee dropping out of the race)
3. For a long time, I and other mods have felt that Technology at times isn’t living up to the Beehaw ethos. More often than I like I see comments in this community where users are being abusive or insulting toward one another, often without any provocation other than the perception that the other user’s opinion is wrong.

Because of these reasons, we have decided that we may need to be a little more hands-on with our moderation of Technology. Here’s what that might mean:

1. Mods will be more actively removing comments that are unkind or abusive, that involve personal attacks, or that just have really bad vibes. a. We will always try to be fair, but you may not always agree with our moderation decisions. Please try to respect those decisions anyway. We will generally try to moderate in a way that is a) proportional, and b) gradual. b. We are more likely to respond to particularly bad behavior from off-instance users with pre-emptive bans. This is not because off-instance users are worse, or less valuable, but simply that we aren't able to vet users from other instances and don't interact with them with the same frequency, and other instances may have less strict sign-up policies than Beehaw, making it more difficult to play whack-a-mole.
2. We will need you to report early and often. The drawbacks of getting reports for something that doesn't require our intervention are outweighed by the benefits of us being able to get to a situation before it spirals out of control. By all means, if you’re not sure if something has risen to the level of violating our rule, say so in the report reason, but I'd personally rather get reports early than late, when a thread has spiraled into an all out flamewar. a. That said, please don't report people for being wrong, unless they are doing so in a way that is actually dangerous to others. It would be better for you to kindly disagree with them in a nice comment. b. Please, feel free to try and de-escalate arguments and remind one another of the humanity of the people behind the usernames. Remember to Be(e) Nice even when disagreeing with one another. Yes, even Windows users.
3. We will try to be more proactive in stepping in when arguments are happening and trying to remind folks to Be(e) Nice. a. This isn't always possible. Mods are all volunteers with jobs and lives, and things often get out of hand before we are aware of the problem due to the size of the community and mod team. b. This isn't always helpful, but we try to make these kinds of gentle reminders our first resort when we get to things early enough. It’s also usually useful in gauging whether someone is a good fit for Beehaw. If someone responds with abuse to a gentle nudge about their behavior, it’s generally a good indication that they either aren’t aware of or don’t care about the type of community we are trying to maintain.

I know our philosophy posts can be long and sometimes a little meandering (personally that's why I love them) but do take the time to read them if you haven't. If you can't/won't or just need a reminder, though, I'll try to distill the parts that I think are most salient to this particular post:

1. Be(e) nice. By nice, we don't mean merely being polite, or in the surface-level "oh bless your heart" kind of way; we mean be kind.
2. Remember the human. The users that you interact with on Beehaw (and most likely other parts of the internet) are people, and people should be treated kindly and in good-faith whenever possible.
3. Assume good faith. Whenever possible, and until demonstrated otherwise, assume that users don't have a secret, evil agenda. If you think they might be saying or implying something you think is bad, ask them to clarify (kindly) and give them a chance to explain. Most likely, they've communicated themselves poorly, or you've misunderstood. After all of that, it's possible that you may disagree with them still, but we can disagree about Technology and still give one another the respect due to other humans.

Friends, please help me out with this frustrating issue. There are green crosshair highlights showing up every time I click on a cell in an Excel spreadsheet (the row and column corresponding to that particular cell are automatically highlighted). It's extremely distracting, and what baffles me is that many of the online solutions and videos are not helping! I have tried pressing Escape many times, have tried this after rebooting device and Excel application, clear conditional formatting. Further, I am not seeing any of the "Enable Pointer Shadow" or other setting descriptions under my Excel Advanced Display options, contrary to the instructions provided on Chatgpt and Youtube videos. Thank you for any help you can share!

Archived

It's no secret that President Xi Jinping's government uses technology companies to help maintain the nation's massive surveillance apparatus.

But in addition to forcing businesses operating in China to stockpile and hand over info about their users for censorship and state-snooping purposes, a black market for individuals' sensitive data is also booming. Corporate and government insiders have access to this harvested private info, and the financial incentives to sell the data to fraudsters and crooks to exploit.

...

"The data is being collected by rich and powerful people that control technology companies and work in the government, but it can also be used against them in all of these scams and fraud and other low-level crimes," [SpyCloud infosec researcher Aurora] Johnson says.

...

To get their hands on the personal info, Chinese data brokers often recruit shady insiders with wanted ads seeking "friends" working in government, and promise daily income of 20,000 to 70,000 yuan ($2,700 and $9,700) in exchange for harvested information. This data is then used to pull off scams, fraud, and suchlike.

Some of these data brokers also claim to have "signed formal contracts" with the big three Chinese telecom companies: China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom. The brokers' marketing materials tout they are able to legally obtain and sell details of people's internet habits via the Chinese telcos' deep packet inspection systems, which monitor as well as manage and store network traffic. (The West has also seen this kind of thing.)

Crucially, this level of surveillance by the telcos gives their employees access to users' browsing data and other info, which workers can then swipe and then resell themselves through various brokers.

...

"There is a huge ecosystem of Chinese breached and leaked data, and I don't know that a lot of Western cybersecurity researchers are looking at this," Johnson continued. "It poses privacy risks to all Chinese people across all groups. And then it also gives us Western cybersecurity researchers a really interesting source to track some of these actors that have been targeting critical infrastructure."

> Apple's initial AI features were met with lukewarm reception, but the upcoming iOS 18.2 update promises a more substantial AI experience for iPhone users.

TikTok's bid to overturn a law which would see it banned or sold in the US from early 2025 has been rejected.

The social media company had hoped a federal appeals court would agree with its argument that the law was unconstitutional because it represented a "staggering" impact on the free speech of its 170 million US users.

But the court upheld the law, which it said "was the culmination of extensive, bipartisan action by the Congress and by successive presidents".

[...]

The court agreed the law was "carefully crafted to deal only with control by a foreign adversary, and it was part of a broader effort to counter a well-substantiated national security threat posed by the PRC (People's Republic of China)."

> One reason hyperlinks work like they do – why they index other kinds of affiliation – is that they were first devised to exhibit the connections researchers made among different sources as they developed new ideas. Early plans for what became the hypertext protocol of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web were presented as tools for documenting how human minds tend to move from idea to idea, connecting external stimuli and internal reflections. Links treat creativity as the work of remediating and remaking, which is foregrounded in the slogan for Google Scholar: ‘Stand on the shoulders of giants.’ > > But now Google and other websites are moving away from relying on links in favour of artificial intelligence chatbots. Considered as preserved trails of connected ideas, links make sense as early victims of the AI revolution since large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others abstract the information represented online and present it in source-less summaries. We are at a moment in the history of the web in which the link itself – the countless connections made by website creators, the endless tapestry of ideas woven together throughout the web – is in danger of going extinct. So it’s pertinent to ask: how did links come to represent information in the first place? And what’s at stake in the movement away from links toward AI chat interfaces?

---

> The work of making connections both among websites and in a person’s own thinking is what AI chatbots are designed to replace. Most discussions of AI are concerned with how soon an AI model will achieve ‘artificial general intelligence’ or at what point AI entities will be able to dictate their own tasks and make their own choices. But a more basic and immediate question is: what pattern of activity do AI platforms currently produce? Does AI dream of itself? > > If Pope’s poem floods the reader with voices – from the dunces in the verse to the competing commenters in the footnotes, AI chatbots tend toward the opposite effect. Whether ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, AI synthesises numerous voices into a flat monotone. The platforms present an opening answer, bulleted lists and concluding summaries. If you ask ChatGPT to describe its voice, it says that it has been trained to answer in a neutral and clear tone. The point of the platform is to sound like no one.

Archived

The Austrian satire magazine 'Die Tagespresse' -comparable maybe to 'The Onion' in the U.S.- is understandably not known for factual reporting.

This week, however, the magazine started a serious research. They did what they called a ‘self-experimentation’ as they described in their magazine:

>"We register [with Chinese platform TikTok] with disposable emails and create nine accounts of fictitious Austrian teenagers [aged 14 to 17] from each of the nine federal states [in Austria]. The app does not require any proof of age or identity."

>"Then we start a screen recording and scroll through the video feed for ten minutes. We forbid ourselves the search function, we like and comment nothing to give the algorithm no information about what we think is good or bad."

>"Only the perfect Chinese code should decide what young Austrians will see."

The article is very long and I don't want to post the whole text here (you will surely find a useful translation), but I provide a summary in English:

• All 9 Austrian teenagers between 14 and 17 years of age see radical right-wing propaganda, "free home delivered from China," as the magazine writes.

• The young people see Herbert Kickl, the current leader of the far-right Austrian Freedom Party, the avatar of Jörg Haider, a former right-wing politician who died in a car accident in 2008, and Alice Weidel, the head of the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany - Alternative for Germany).

• Russian propaganda arises, too, promoting immigration to Russia: "We offer work, a house, a Russian wife and military training," promises a mock Vladimir Putin to a 15-year-old teenager from Styria, one of Austria’s nine states. Teenagers must apply only at "einbürgerung@kreml.ru".

• Donald Trump is doing his 'Trump Dance', anti-EU propaganda and pro-Islamic propaganda are as widespread as Quran videos, and, of course, there’s no lack of China’s Xi Jinping.

The magazine writes:

>Fortunately, the self-experiment is already coming to an end, but it gets wild again.

>The algorithm cannot decide whether Elias [one of the names the magazines used for its teenager accounts] should be radicalized to the extreme right or to Islamism. In between, a video of Andrew Tate, who is serving prison time in Romania for alleged human trafficking and wants to take away women’s right to vote, should not be missed. In the end, only more Quran videos emerge, interrupted by two interspersed clips of the Chamber of Labour, which the Socialists apparently try to pull Elias out of Islamism at the last moment. What a photo finish!

The magazine concludes:

>At the end of this self-experimentation, it’s hard to put into words your own feelings while you’re brushing millions of dead brain cells off your shoulders that have been left out of your ears as you scroll through the app. Our brains feel a few million brain cells lighter, the IQ has dropped by 12 points from scrolling. Alcohol and psychotropic drugs don’t help anymore.

>We can’t decide: Should we quote Quran verses and in the name of Allah blow up the Tomorrowland festival? Or join the Catholic church until Putin provides us with a neo-Nazi bride who is Aries in the zodiac sign?

Among the questions now are:

• Why do Austrian teenagers see this propaganda nonsense and only this propaganda nonsense?

• What kind of algorithm is this?

• What is this aiming at?

[Edit for clarity. Second edit for replacing "German satire magazine" by "Austrian" in the first sentence.]

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17460850

> Archived > > Taiwanese rapper Chen Po-yuan (陳柏源) in a video showed how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bribes Taiwanese online influencers in its “united front” efforts to shape Taiwanese opinions. > > The video was made by YouTuber “Pa Chiung (八炯)” and published online on Friday. > > Chen in the video said that China’s United Front Work Department provided him with several templates and materials — such as making news statements — with some mentioning Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) politician Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) and New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) and asking him to write a song criticizing the Democratic Progressive Party. > > He said he had produced content for China as requested, but did not receive the royalties as promised by a Beijing-based management company for his song Chinese Bosses (中國老總), which is sung in an exaggerated Taiwanese accent with lyrics implying a pleasant life for businesspeople in China. > > Chen said he also founded a company in China jointly with a business partner from the Jinjiang Taiwan Compatriots Friendship Association, who worked as his manager and later poached all his employees and capital invested in the company. > > He was labeled as a fraud and a “Taiwanese independence separatist,” and attacked by Chinese Internet trolls, after he released an online video condemning his former business partner for betraying him. > > “I finally realized the hard way that where I was staying [China] was not a place of democracy,” Chen said, adding that there is a huge difference between democratic Taiwan and autocratic China. > > ...

Archived

It's not just Microsoft and Crowdstrike: Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure giant, experienced a major outage on November 14th, resulting in the irreversible loss of over half of its log data. The outage, which lasted for 3.5 hours, stemmed from a faulty software update that crippled the company’s log service, preventing it from delivering crucial data to customers.

Log services are essential for network operations, allowing businesses to analyze traffic patterns, troubleshoot issues, and detect malicious activity. Cloudflare’s log service, which processes massive volumes of data, relies on a tool called Logpush to package and deliver this information to customers.

However, an update to Logpush on November 14th contained a critical error. As Cloudflare explained in their incident report, the update failed to instruct auxiliary tools to forward the collected logs, leading to a situation where logs were gathered but never delivered. This data was subsequently erased from the cache, resulting in permanent loss.

“A misconfiguration in one part of the system caused a cascading overload in another part of the system, which was itself misconfigured. Had it been properly configured, it could have prevented the loss of logs,” Cloudflare stated in their report.

While engineers quickly identified the flaw and rolled back the update, this triggered a cascading failure. The system was flooded with an overwhelming influx of log data, including data from users who hadn’t even configured Logpush, further exacerbating the issue.

Cloudflare has issued an apology for the incident and the permanent loss of user data.

Do you know how much of a scumbag you have to be to attack a hospital.

>Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely. Disregarding all of bitcoin's shortcomings, a financial instrument that brings out the worst in people—greed—won't change the world for the better.

I use a 1080p monitor and what I've noticed is that once creators start uploading 4k content the 1080p version that I watch on fullscreen has more artifacting than when they only uploaded in 1080p.

Did you notice that as well?

Watching in 1440p on a 1080p monitor results in a much better image, to the detriment of theoretically less sharper image and a lot higher CPU usage.

Archived

U.S. government officials said that the China-backed hacking group dubbed Salt Typhoon are still inside some of the networks of America’s largest phone and internet providers, weeks after the long-running hacking campaign first came to light.

Cybersecurity agency CISA said in a call with reporters the affected telecom giants are still trying to evict the hackers, in part because it’s unclear what the hackers are aiming to accomplish.

News first broke in October that Salt Typhoon was reportedly deep inside the networks of AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen (formerly CenturyLink), among others. T-Mobile said it was targeted but largely rebuffed the attackers. The access allowed the Chinese hackers to access real-time unencrypted calls and text messages, as well as metadata about who the communications were sent to and from, as they traveled over the phone carriers’ networks.

U.S. officials believe the industry-wide hacks may be China trying to carry out a wide-ranging spying operation, as the hackers were found accessing the communications of U.S. officials and senior Americans, including presidential candidates. Salt Typhoon is also believed to be targeting systems that house much of the U.S. government’s requests, which may help to identify Chinese individuals under U.S. government surveillance.

...

“Encryption is your friend; whether it’s on text messaging or if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication,” said the CISA official.

archive.is link

> It’s possible that consumers are happy to have the most minute details of their lives surveilled and monetized in return for seeing ads they might want to click on. This is a hard theory to test, because very few people even know they’re making the trade. However, one organization recently tried to find out. After the European Union’s landmark privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, went into effect in 2018, a Dutch public broadcasting agency started prompting all visitors to its website to choose, in a clear and straightforward manner, whether they wanted their data shared with advertisers. The result? Ninety percent opted out, and the agency abandoned behavioral advertising altogether. (A Google spokesperson notes that all users can opt out of personalized ads, and that Google has long prohibited personalized advertising based on sensitive information.)

Archived

The European Union should guard against Chinese attempts to dominate the bloc’s clean-tech market and make sure its exports aren’t destroying local rivals, the bloc’s new competition chief warned.

...

In her first interview since becoming the EU’s antitrust commissioner, Teresa Ribera told Bloomberg that Europe and the US failed in recent years to anticipate the threat of China’s ambitions for global dominance in those industries and the bloc needs to urgently pay more attention.

“It’s the cheap materials and cheap equipment arriving in this market, then investing to produce them in Europe” with markets then closing to European rivals, Ribera said. She added that it was necessary to probe “how this may have an impact in terms of killing competitors within the same market and then controlling the market.”

Spanish socialist Ribera, who assumed the reins of the EU’s powerful antitrust portfolio on Monday, also suggested the bloc needs to consider issuing joint debt to help bolster its clean-tech transition. In the new European Commission, she has an expanded role that also includes helping to chart the clean-tech transition while defending the EU’s competitiveness against China and the US.

...

“Something which was not sufficiently noticed by western industries and western governments 15 years ago is when China said, ‘We want to be the first producer of green equipments in the world,’” according to Ribera. “The question is not how good this equipment may be. The question is to what extent they respect the level playing field.”

...

Clothing and retailing markets face similar challenges as the likes of Shein and Temu flood the EU with goods that may not align with its green standards. She suggested the bloc needs to see “how we can raise the bar of the standards in other parts of the world through access to a very attractive market.”

...

Romanian civil society is alarmed about political advertisement on TikTok breaching European and national laws and how that benefited an extremist candidate in the elections. EDRi member ApTI with 20 other NGOs from Romania call upon the European Commission and the national authorities to take swift action and investigate, as elections are still ongoing.

Following the role that TikTok has played in the first round of presidential elections in Romania on 24.11.2024, fully ignoring DSA requirements, ApTI, together with 20 other NGOs from Romania rang the alarm. In effect, the civil society organsations demanded rapid reactions that mitigate the risks related to the electoral process, in an open letter sent to the national digital services coordinator (ANCOM) that implements DSA in Romania and to the European Commission as coordinator for the same regulation regarding very large online platforms (VLOPS).

Romania has suffered a great political shock after an unexpected win in the first round of the presidential elections. A previously unknown candidate has managed an incredible “performance” in the last weeks of the campaign: to grow his audience on TikTok at a pace that seems artificially generated.

...

The platform has catalysed the electoral content of an extremist candidate, allowing posting from coordinated fake accounts and failing to flag its content as election advertising. The winning candidate claimed that he has spent no financial resources during this campaign.

...

Under [EU's Digital Service Act] DSA rules, VLOPS like TikTok would have a legal obligation to be accountable for their role as intermediaries in online activities, in particular in the context of electoral processes. In the context of the elections in Romania, TikTok has implemented almost none of the specific measures identified in chapter 3.2.1. of the European Commission’s Guidelines to VLOPS on mitigating systemic risks to electoral processes under the DSA, published on April 26, 2024.

TikTok’s lack of transparency, public outreach and accountability for its major role in the Romanian digital information ecosystem is unacceptable in the electoral context presented above and in the context of the DSA. Romanian civil society organisations demand swift action

...

Good piece on the intersection between technology and politics, and the influence that the US government has on US-based technology companies.

archive link: https://archive.is/MFa7R

Musk says for-profit OpenAI harms public interest—and his own company, xAI.

> Matthew Hodgson, technical co-founder of the Matrix open standard, told us: "This has nothing to do with the Matrix protocol; it's just an unfortunate naming coincidence."

> And if you don't know who Holthaus is..." > > plays "Thanks Steve".meme.mp4

Oh no😂

Side note: I'm quite skeptical in Intel's future as they really need an engineer to lead them to success right now, not financial and marketing. So while I'm hoping for the best I'm have doubts in Intel's (board of director's) decision for appointing "2 co-CEOs in the finance, sales, and marketing background" paying off in the long-term. In time we'll see how this plays out for the semiconductor manufacturer.

Additional Links:

• Intel announces retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger

> Dutch and French police on Tuesday shut down a major encryption service used by criminal gangs, saying it even outrivalled illegal communication tools previously cracked by law enforcement, the EU's judicial agency said.

> "Made for criminals by criminals", police have been able to read messages sent on the MATRIX chat service for the last three months, Eurojust said in a statement.

Alphabet Inc.'s Google is asking a federal appeals court to throw out a ruling in an antitrust case brought by Fortnite-maker Epic Games that would force the search giant to overhaul its Play mobile app store.

[...]

A San Francisco jury concluded in December 2023 that Google violated antitrust law by blocking rival app stores through a series of revenue-sharing agreements with mobile device makers like Samsung. Following up with a fix in October, Donato ordered Google to allow developers to set up app marketplaces and offer consumers billing options other than its own payment system.

Alphabet Inc.'s Google is now asking a federal appeals court to throw out a ruling in an antitrust case brought by Fortnite-maker Epic Games that would force the search giant to overhaul its Play mobile app store.

[...]

Epic first sued Google and Apple in August 2020, accusing them of blocking competition for rival app stores. The judge in the Apple case largely ruled against Epic, though she directed the iPhone maker to make some changes to its App Store rules. Epic and Apple are currently fighting in an Oakland federal court over whether the iPhone maker is abiding by that ruling.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17343934

Archived version

TLDR:

The Twitter account @whyyoutouzhele has allegedly been shadow banned by X (formerly Twitter) in relation to the 2nd anniversary of the White Paper protests, the rights organization Article 19 says.

The account is run by a Chinese artist living in Europe. It has played a key role in disseminating information about protests and other sensitive topics in China which are subjected to strict censorship by the state.

[...]

Few online actors are more influential in skirting China’s censorship efforts than Li Ying (李颖) who established the @whyyoutouzhele, ‘Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher’, account in April 2022. Having lived in Italy since 2015, he used to post actively on the Chinese platform Weibo. Because he lived beyond the Great Firewall, people in China would reach out asking him to post sensitive content on their behalf. His Weibo account was shut down at least 52 times for crossing the line into social issues, until he was finally purged from the platform altogether.

In April 2022 he switched to X and by November 2022 was gaining hundreds of thousands of followers a week, as he became a clearinghouse for sensitive content, especially for information about the White Paper Protests. As the account became a respected source for disseminating and accessing sensitive information beyond the reach of China’s censors, Li Ying faced increasing digital transnational repression.

[...]

On Wednesday, 27 November, the blue tick verified ‘Teacher Li is not Your Teacher’ (李老师不是你老师) X (formally Twitter) account posted to its 1.8 million followers that it believes it had been shadow banned on the platform. The post speculated that the ban was in relation to the two-year anniversary of the White Paper Movement, a protest wave that rocked through numerous cities in China in November 2022 and saw numerous anniversary protests around the world over the past weekend.

[...]

On 28 November, [the rights organization] ARTICLE 19 ran its own search on X, using the account’s username @whyyoutouzhele and its Chinese account name 李老师不是你老师. The search did not surface the authentic Teacher Li account in either case, however both searches revealed multiple impersonator accounts, with around 20 when searching for the username. The search for the Chinese account name returned over 900 impersonator account results, but not the authentic account.

[...]

Shadow banning occurs when a social media platform intentionally limits the reach of certain content to its users, although platforms often deny shadow banning takes place. In its post, the Teacher Li account shared a screenshot from the platform claiming it had been subjected to a ‘search suggestion ban’.

Sixteen Next Generation Internet (NGI) projects are pleased to announce the transition to Mastodon and PeerTube, two European open-source platforms, for their communication and content-sharing needs. This strategic move aligns with NGI’s commitment to fostering an Internet that embodies European values of trust, security, and inclusion.

"Utilising European-developed platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube enhances digital sovereignty, ensuring that Europe’s digital infrastructure is built on values of openness, collaboration, and respect for fundamental rights. This transition marks a significant step toward a more human-centric Internet, reflecting NGI’s vision for a trustworthy, open, and inclusive digital future," NGI writes on its website.

Analysis written by Anda Iulia Solea, Lecturer in Cybercrime at the University of Portsmouth.

A far-right independent candidate called Călin Georgescu is leading the race to become Romania’s next president. He took a shock lead in the first round of voting by securing 22.9% of the vote, followed by centre-right opposition leader Elena Lasconi with 19.2%. The two are set to face off in the second and final round of voting on December 8.

Georgescu’s unexpected gains are partly linked to his social media strategy. He has used platforms like TikTok effectively to sway voter opinion and spread propaganda. However, allegations that his campaign is using fake accounts to fabricate comments and manipulate social media activity have also surfaced.

Georgescu has pushed back against criticism that he used TikTok illegally to gain an electoral advantage. But the allegations, which have prompted the country’s top court to order a recount, are concerning in such a consequential election.

The race has ramifications beyond Romania, which shares a border with Ukraine and hosts a Nato military base. Following the vote, Lasconi warned Romanians that “Georgescu is an open admirer of Vladimir Putin”. She added that he “is open against Nato and the EU … And without Nato we are at the mercy of Russia”.

[...]

Relatively unknown until the 2024 elections, Georgescu has gained significant popularity on social media in recent years. His TikTok account, which was set up in 2022, has more than 400,000 followers and millions of views. Numerous accounts, groups and pages in his support have also proliferated on Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter).

Georgescu’s campaign has been unconventional. He has no headquarters, has refused to join major TV debates, and has no affiliation with a political party. Georgescu has flooded Romanian TikTok with short clips of himself attending church, running and appearing on podcasts.

[...]

He has also claimed in interviews that women are incapable of leading Romania, and that feminism is “absolute dirt”. In one video, he declared that “only a man can do this”, referring to the presidency. These videos come not only from Georgescu’s official TikTok accounts, but also from unaffiliated accounts using his name in profiles or bios to promote his election.

[...]

Reports suggest that thousands of fake accounts promoted Georgescu through videos and comments prior to Romania’s election. Lasconi also noted her own TikTok comment section was inundated with pro-Georgescu messages.

On November 26, Romania’s media watchdog urged the European Commission to investigate TikTok’s role in Georgescu’s campaign. And Valérie Hayer, a top EU lawmaker, has now called on TikTok’s CEO to appear before the European Parliament and address the platform’s possible misuse in favour of Georgescu’s campaign.

Concerns over manipulative tactics and artificial social media support notwithstanding, Georgescu’s popularity among Romanians is undeniable. It seems to have been driven largely by widespread frustration with mainstream parties, which are blamed for Romania’s economic and political crises.

His performance also underscores the growing role social media plays in shaping public perception – and how it can directly influence the outcome of modern elections.

CAFE by GE for those who are wondering.

We are renovating our house including all new appliances. I have told my partner to make sure we get non smart appliances. This is why.

Yes I can setup a VLAN for it to be on but that's not the point.