JurnalTV channel presented evidence according to which Veaceslav Platon and Ilan Shor intended to discredit President Maia Sandu by launching a fake video in which President Sandu is shown to receive an envelope from the fugitive MP, IPN reports.
According to the information presented by journalists of JurnalTV, Veaceslav Platon created a real network of trolls paid with large sums of money, whose task was to discredit Maia Sandu in the campaign prior to the snap parliamentary elections of July 11. The network was annihilated by the responsible bodies before the dissemination of the fakes.
JurnalTV said the video was designed with the aim of being posted on the Internet before the snap parliamentary elections so as to create the impression that Sandu took money from Shor.
“Something like this is published right two days before the elections so as to prevent the organizations dealing with the identification of such fakes from conducting a technical examination. Such a fake was to be probably published on Friday before the silence day so that the independent media could not present the position of those from the presidential administration or PAS and more people believed those fakes,” political commentator Valeriu Pașa stated in the talk show “Secrets of the Power” on JurnalTV channel.
Lilian Carp, who heads the Parliament’s commission on security, defense and public order, said he has evidence showing that trolls paid by Platon were involved in this operation. If the videos prepared by Platon’s team had been made public before the elections, the election outcome could have been different.
“We are now examining the names of Platon’s trolls who are eight in number. Many of them were born between 1996 and 2004. So, this troll factory involved minors. The news item about the 30,000 Syrians affected the result of the elections of 2016 the week prior to them. A year was needed for the people to realize that it was fake news,” said PAS MP Lilian Carp.
Ilan Shor fled Moldova in 2019, after the former PSRM-ACUM coalition took over. Veaceslav Platon left Moldova immediately after the results of the July 11 snap parliamentary elections were made public.
