The relevant part here is how TikTok was used to push an unknown character from a nobody to getting 22% of the votes in the first round, all while no one was aware of this. The polls didn't show him among the favorites. More than that the campaign was so we'll targeted that only people likely to vote for him saw the TikTok content making everyone else completely unaware of his presence.
While we use paper ballots and stamps for the actual voting and hand count every vote, transmiting and centralizing the results is done using IT infrastructure.
The cyber attack and the TikTok manipulation are 2 separate but related things.
Meta, Google, Apple, and Microsoft's algorithms have similar reach.
The real issue here is that afaik no country ever figured out a good way to regulation election speech in a democracy, past social norms and economic realities.
It won't achieve anything. The issue is not about China/Russia/America or mobile apps it's about media and media control.
Even your comment is filled with a negative narrative - Western Democracies VS our enemies ( China, Russia, etc ... ).
> drive out American relationships for China and Russia to take over quietly
Is it bad for a union to have multiple relationships or multiple vectors of development?
> it is creating mayhem in the systems we have grown to trust
I don't see it, but if something can cause a mayhem in the systems this means that these systems are flawed?
“The Romanian intelligence agency says that the 85,000 attacks continued until November 25th, the night after the first presidential election round, and the goals ranged from gaining access to the election infrastructure and compromising it to altering election information for the public and denying access to the systems.
SRI notes in the declassified report that the threat actor tried to breach the systems by exploiting SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities from devices in more than 33 countries.
The agency is also warning that Romania's election infrastructure is still affected by vulnerabilities that could be exploited to move laterally on the network and establish persistence.”
Related:
Romanian court annuls result of presidential election first round
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42339819
Russia and China rigged Romanian Elections using 10M fake TikTok accounts
Actual article:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/romanias-elec...
I think there is even an XKCD about this.
For the current post, we changed the URL above from https://www.techradar.com/pro/romania-cancels-election-after... to the article it points to.
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
