*Romania’s record of colourful revelations during election campaigns: a case seen through Twitter, Google and Facebook

In the context of the following presidential elections that are to take place on the 2nd of November this year, a major political scandal broke out in Romania this week. The nation’s current president (T.B.) made some allegations about a candidate, who is to be further referred to as V.P., and who also happens to be the current Prime Minister. Although the respective spread rumour was not supported by any factual evidence, it mainly generated the assumption that V.P. had been an undercover agent who was involved in espionage affairs. Nevertheless, the Romanian legislation would particularly not allow any past undercover agents to engage in any political activities.

For this analysis, Twitter, Facebook and Google data are going to be taken into account.

1. Twitter

First of all, it is important to mention that Twitter is yet to become popular among the Romanian users, as most of the online population is still active primarily on Facebook; this map of the users should be edifying:

Secondly, by using a software that analyses the ongoing Twitter activity based on hashtags, some interesting findings can be noticed.

As these two graphs show, both participants of this media scandal had an increase of related hashtags on Twitter during the past couple of days. What is more, both of them nearly doubled their previously most popular day on Twitter in the last month, V.P. reaching nearly 1k tweets and T.B. 800.

2. Google



The names of the same Romanian political figures were also analysed through the Google Trends application.

As this visualisation shows, while T.B. has several peaking points that register high amount of google searches (mostly due to him winning twice the presidential elections in 2004 and 2009), V.P. did not actually exist for the online Romanian population until 2009-2010; it is interesting to notice that his most poignant peak refers to an unstable situation in 2012 when he was accused of plagiarising his PhD dissertation. The following visualisation should determine the increase of google searches that occurred in July, 2012, when this particular situation took place.

Now, it would be an engaging exercise to include the actual institutions a potential undercover position could be held for: SIE - Foreign Intelligence Service and SRI - Romanian Intelligent Service.

This graph shows a directly increasing tendency of all searched items (V.P., SIE, SRI) in October, 2014. What is more, by comparing the existent searches from August and October the same year, this trajectory can be proved:

3. Facebook

The platform that engaged the most with the subject has definitely been Facebook. Most of my friends had something to discuss about the subject so my personal News Feed was over flooded with such information. Although they’re in Romanian, I took the liberty to post these screenshots in order to demonstrate the high volume of political engagement on Facebook.

In addition to this range of personal Facebook friends posting about the subject, most Romanian media companies covered the topic as well. What is more, the case also generated international coverage as it was taken over by international news agencies as well like Agence France-Presse or Reuters.

Conclusion

Finally, in order to prove the relevancy of this political subject, I looked into the way the polling votes have changed during this period of time. As such, a mere 2% have moved from V.P.’s account, who before this incident summed up 42% of the entire voting populating, into his main contender’s who now acquires a total of 30% from a previously reported 28%. The little influence on the voters was mainly caused by the fact that, although this is a very serious issue which might cost someone’s political career, the lack of factual evidence provided by T.B. has failed to change the minds of the voting population.