Representatives of the electoral bloc ACUM said armies of trolls were used in the current election campaign to denigrate the opposition and to sing praises to the regime, trying thus to influence the decision of voters. The bloc’s co-president Maia Sandu said that after the trolls were exposed, the Democratic Party (PDM) made a video and pictures by which it tries to show that she is a lesbian. She noted the woman in the pictures is not she and she has never been in Munich where the filming reportedly took place, IPN reports.
“The closer we come to the election day, the more we realize that these elections look more like charlatanry than free and fair elections. We daily witness numerous abuses committed by the PDM and its satellites – bribery of voters, use of administrative resources and non-declaration of money with which the campaign is financed, obstruction of the vote of an increasing number of people. But the misinformation and fake news are the biggest black spot of this campaign. The government spends millions on the fabrication and distribution of lies to confuse the people and gain their vote by deceits,” Maia Sandu stated in a news conference.
According to her, Plahotniuc’s holding that is financed with money stolen from people works day and night, as the TV channels of Dodon that are financed with funds from offshore areas do. Now the fake news invaded the online space. These manipulation attempts are inspired directly by the fighting arsenal of the Kremlin against democracy in the West. The factory of trolls in the Republic of Moldova works by the same models as those used to influence the election outcome in the U.S. and the referendum in the UK.
“We all knew about the existence of this factory of trolls. Now we know that this is housed by the Government. This was said by Facebook company, which annulled 20 false pages and over 160 false accounts. In a press release, this said that many of these accounts were managed by employees of the Government. The citizens pay employees of the Government to design policies and laws that would make their life better, but they invent lies,” stated the politician.
Sergiu Litvinenko, ACUM candidate in the national constituency, said that a hallucinating use of administrative resources by the PDM has been witnessed in the current campaign. A large part of the state functionaries daily go alongside the leaders of the PDM to localities, financed with public money, during the working hours and with company cars. ACUM will file at least seven challenges concerning such actions to the Central Election Commission and will demand to withdraw the PDM from the electoral race after Facebook company did practically everything the Moldovan authorities were to do and ascertained that it was a network that acted concertedly as part of the Government and representatives of the PDM admitted this themselves.
Ten days before the elections, the social networking site Facebook closed almost 200 accounts and pages that were addressed to the Moldovan public and were managed by trolls, which is persons who hid their real identity. As a result, the Government of the Republic of Moldova reacted, saying it welcomes any initiative to fight the FakeNews phenomenon that is typical of the West, but mainly of Eastern Europe. “As regards the comments or postings made by employees of public institutions, we specify that over 200,000 employees are paid with state budget funds and the Government of the Republic of Moldova does not check its employees’ activity on private accounts of social networking sites. Moreover, these have different political opinions, but the state is obliged to keep the border between the FakeNews phenomenon and the guaranteeing of the people’s freedom of expression. That’s why, in order to combat the FakeNews phenomenon, we will request additional information from Facebook company,” stated the executive.
