Imagine waking up in a country where you’re not sure the people in power are really listening to you. You scroll through your phone, and the videos you see are not just entertaining—they’re telling you that the system is rigged, that your country has been betrayed, and that only one person can save it. That is not a hypothetical scenario. According to the Global Risk Report, mis- and disinformation threats ranked second among the world’s short-term risks in 2026, after years of rapid growth in organized social-media manipulation since 2017. Disinformation is especially dangerous during elections because it doesn’t just spread false claims; it breaks down the very trust that makes democracy possible. People begin to doubt whether elections truly reflect the will of the people, whether institutions are fair, and whether their vote matters at all. This raises a crucial question: what conditions make disinformation campaigns effective enough to change the outcome of an election? The answer is not just about clever algorithms or foreign hackers. Often, it’s about a society’s underlying vulnerabilities. Two conditions, when they meet, create a perfect storm: low trust in government institutions and low media literacy among citizens. Romania’s annulled first round of the 2024 presidential election shows exactly how this works. A disinformation campaign didn’t just influence voters; it shocked the country, forced a historic court ruling, and left millions wondering whether the election they took part in had ever been real.
Romania was already fertile ground for such manipulation before the election even began. A significant portion of the population felt alienated from their institutions, angry about corruption, and frustrated with the basic failures of public services. In that environment, an outsider candidate like Călin Georgescu could seem refreshing rather than dangerous. His campaign harnessed TikTok, the social media platform most popular among young and first-time voters, to create a wave of ultranationalist and anti-establishment content. What made the campaign especially deceptive was the way it manufactured the illusion of widespread support. Fake accounts flooded the comment sections of opposing candidates’ videos with pro-Georgescu messages, making it seem as though momentum was building everywhere. Other fabricated comments portrayed Georgescu as the “chosen one,” a man destined to rescue Romania from a corrupt elite. These tactics relied on emotional manipulation rather than reasoned debate, and they worked because they tapped into deep grievances. When people already believe the system is broken, a message that validates that anger feels like an antidote. Romania’s Constitutional Court eventually annulled the results, citing evidence of foreign interference and voter manipulation through a coordinated TikTok network. The court said the campaign “skewed voter perceptions, deprived candidates of equitable opportunities, and violated voters’ rights to make informed choices.” It was an unprecedented decision, but for many Romanians, it felt less like justice and more like confirmation that their distrust of the government had always been justified.
The first major condition behind this crisis is public trust, or rather, the lack of it. According to an OECD survey, around 54% of Romanians say they have low or no trust in their government, and only 18% trust political parties. That is ten percentage points below the OECD average. Only 23% of the population believe the government takes their political voice into account. This is not just a statistic; it’s a feeling of being invisible in your own country. Corruption scandals, poor access to healthcare and education, and the perception that politicians look after themselves before their constituents all feed the same narrative: the system is against ordinary people. When trust is that weak, disinformation can easily fill the void. A false story that says “the government is lying to you” already matches what people believe, so it doesn’t have to be persuasive in a traditional sense. It merely has to resonate. It is important to be careful here: low trust is not the direct cause of a successful disinformation campaign, but it creates the conditions in which a campaign can take hold. Georgescu’s team understood this instinctively. A report from the Counter Disinformation Network revealed how influencers, without ever naming Georgescu directly, promoted themes like Romanian neutrality and economic independence under the hashtag “#echilibrușiverticalitate,” or “equilibrium and verticality.” When viewers later saw Georgescu saying the same things, it felt like he was articulating a movement that already existed. Spam accounts posing as his supporters amplified his content and endorsed his platform. The result was a digital echo chamber that artificially inflated his popularity, making it look as though he was far more beloved than he actually was. The court’s decision to annul the election, meant to protect democracy, ended up creating a new crisis of trust, because many people interpreted it as further proof that institutions would always disregard their will.
The second condition that made Romania vulnerable is low media literacy. It’s not that Romanians lack access to information—internet connectivity in Romanian households is around 95.4%, among the highest in Europe. But access is not the same as understanding. Romania ranks last in the European Union when it comes to the share of people with at least basic digital skills. That means many citizens can go online, but they may not know how to evaluate what they see, how to identify sponsored content, or how to recognize bots and coordinated campaigns. In a media landscape where falsehoods spread faster than facts, those skills are essential for survival. This is why comparisons to Lithuania are so instructive. In the Media Literacy Index, Lithuania ranks 18th, while Romania ranks 28th out of 35 countries. Lithuania has spent years building a comprehensive approach to counter disinformation, treating it as a national security issue rather than just a communications problem. The government has implemented an Information Literacy Framework Programme, promoted media literacy and online safety through training, and invested in monitoring and strategic communication capabilities. When a Belarusian Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference operation was discovered during the 2024 Lithuanian presidential elections, there was no evidence that voters had been swayed. That resilience did not happen by accident. It was the product of deliberate policy and public education. In Romania, by contrast, the population has internalized conspiratorial narratives, and the country simply lacks the institutional muscle to push back effectively. People are not stupid; they are under-equipped. And in an age of viral disinformation, being under-equipped can be just as dangerous as being uninformed.
What can be done about this? The usual response to disinformation is surveillance and removal—tracking fake accounts, debunking false claims, and shutting down manipulative networks. Canada, for example, has a Rapid Response Mechanism that monitors the information space, and it has raised awareness internationally about the growing threat. These efforts are important, but they are essentially reactive. They fight fires rather than preventing them. If NATO members, including Canada, want to protect the integrity of their elections, they need to move upstream and address the underlying conditions that make disinformation effective. That means investing in education, especially media literacy, before an election season begins. Lithuania offers a powerful model. Its 2022 National Programme for Media and Information Literacy Education, known as MIRKT, was run through the public library network under the Ministry of Culture. By 2023, more than 1,000 library specialists across 65 regional and municipal libraries had been trained to become media-literacy educators. Libraries became not just places to borrow books, but centers of defense against manipulation. The programme was eventually adopted into the government’s National Agenda for Training Citizens for Civil Resistance. Another example is the Escape Disinfo project, which brought media literacy lessons directly into schools. Students in grades 6 through 12 participated in 90-minute sessions where they solved puzzles, riddles, and tasks designed to build resilience to fake news, propaganda, and disinformation. More than 60 Escape Disinfo projects took place in Lithuanian schools, involving 1,300 students. The results were striking: 85% of the students and 98% of the teachers said they had gained new skills and knowledge. Canada and other NATO members should take note. Media literacy programmes taught in schools and public libraries would equip citizens with the tools to recognize emotional manipulation, verify sources, and resist the pull of engineered consensus. The goal is not to tell people what to think, but to help them think clearly in an environment that is increasingly designed to confuse them.
The deeper lesson from Romania is that disinformation is not just a technological problem; it is a human problem. We like to imagine that facts always win, but in reality, people act on feelings, identities, and trust. When institutions lose credibility, and when citizens lack the confidence to navigate a polluted information environment, democracy becomes fragile. This is especially concerning as AI-generated content becomes more sophisticated and harder to detect. A future may soon arrive where it is almost impossible to tell a real video from a fabricated one, a genuine grassroots movement from a coordinated influence operation. If governments respond only by monitoring and deleting, they will always be one step behind. The cure is to create a citizenry that is harder to fool—not because people are skeptical of everything, but because they have the critical skills to distinguish evidence from emotional manipulation. That requires long-term investment in education, public libraries, teachers, and community programs. It requires treating media literacy with the same seriousness as cyber defense. And it requires a fundamental shift in how we think about elections. Protecting electoral integrity is not just about preventing hacking or ensuring ballots are counted fairly. It is also about protecting the space in which voters form their opinions. Romania’s annulled election was a warning to the entire democratic world. The conditions that made it possible are not unique, and the tools used to exploit them are constantly improving. The only truly sustainable defense is to empower ordinary people with knowledge, resilience, and a renewed sense that their institutions work for them. Without that, every election becomes a vulnerability, and every new technology makes the threat harder to see until it’s too late.