Update note: 9 April 2026

Action on social media manipulation

TikTok has closed down 34 accounts that it says have been inauthentically boosting a candidate in the Bulgarian parliamentary election. TikTok has told Balkan Free Media Initiative that its investigation and actions followed information provided by BFMI in our recent “TikTokcracy Tracker”.

The full announcement on the TikTok global elections integrity hub reads:

In order to protect the integrity of our platform, we have dedicated expert teams focused on countering deceptive behaviors and attempts to mislead our community. As part of those efforts, in March 2026, we disrupted a network targeting political discourse in Bulgaria. The network, which we assessed to be operating from Bulgaria and targeting a Bulgarian audience, included 34 accounts with 66,763 followers. The individuals behind this network created inauthentic accounts in order to artificially amplify narratives in support of the DPS-NN political party, within the context of the April 2026 Bulgarian parliamentary elections. The network was found to coordinate across multiple online platforms.

Are authorities asleep at the wheel?

The actions taken by TikTok are, as far as has been publicly disclosed, the only ones taken in respect of social media manipulation in the current Bulgarian election round. Whilst the Balkan Free Media Initiative is gratified that its research efforts have helped prompt this response, it is striking that only the detective work of a small NGO has had any results. So who should be acting to prevent election manipulation, and are those mechanisms working?

Bulgaria votes on 19 April in an information environment that has, since the publication of BFMI's first tracker in mid-March, thrown into sharp relief a question that European electoral defence architecture has not yet been forced to answer directly: when responsibility for protecting the integrity of an election is distributed across platforms, regulators, and national institutions, what determines whether any of them actually act?

A Mechanism Running Without Traction

The same question applies to the institutional response. The Bulgarian caretaker government's activation of the Digital Services Act Rapid Response System, following similar requests from Moldova, Romania, and Hungary ahead of recent elections, deserves more attention than it has received. The mechanism was not designed as a standing feature of European electoral administration. Its routine invocation across four consecutive electoral cycles in the region suggests one of two things: either the circumstances it was designed to address are not exceptional but structural, in which case the mechanism is treating a symptom rather than a condition, or it is not working well enough to prevent the same circumstances from recurring, in which case its design requires revision. The Commission has not yet been pressed to choose between those conclusions.

The current inadequate responses in the Bulgarian election point to weaknesses in the systems that the EU’s laws have put in place. The Rapid Response System coordinates rather than enforces directly, and in Bulgaria, there is no designated Digital Services Coordinator operating at the pace the mechanism requires, no national monitoring body generating structured evidence, and no established working relationship between state institutions and the platforms. Bulgaria's Central Electoral Commission has not opened an investigation into the purchase and repurposing of social media pages for electoral purposes, despite that activity raising direct questions under the Electoral Code's prohibition on anonymous campaign financing, and despite the evidence having been public for weeks. The gap between documented evidence and institutional response has, across both platforms and national bodies, remained the defining feature of this electoral period.

Looking Ahead

That gap is unlikely to close before polling day, and its consequences will not be confined to this election. The weeks before 19 April fall within the window that comparable campaigns identify as the period of greatest intensification in coordinated inauthentic behaviour. Displacement from TikTok following the takedowns will not have reduced the overall operational capacity of the networks involved, since activity of this kind migrates rather than ceases, and Facebook's infrastructure remains entirely undisturbed, as far as BFMI understands. What shifts in this final period is the targeting of that activity, from ambient narrative-building toward specific claims designed to suppress turnout or discredit results before they are known.

BFMI's second tracker, incorporating updated data from Sensika, will assess the information environment as it stands in the final days of the campaign. Bulgaria remains a legible illustration of how the distribution of responsibility for electoral integrity across platforms, regulators, and national institutions produces, in the absence of sustained pressure on each of them simultaneously, a situation in which the evidence and mechanisms exist, but the activity continues regardless.

Action and engagement by social media platforms

As noted above, TikTok has taken action following BFMI’s tip-offs. TikTok proactively contacted BFMI to notify us of the action. While there may well be other undetected inauthentic activity on TikTok’s platform, it is showing by its proactive engagement and measures that it wishes to be seen as taking action. It also promotes access to its research tools by academics and NGOs, enabling concerned parties to monitor the platform.

Despite carrying the most extensive inauthentic networks documented in the first BFMI tracker, and despite those networks raising direct questions of compliance with its own community standards and obligations under the Digital Services Act, Meta is not known to have engaged nor has it yet taken action against any inauthentic accounts, as far as is known to BFMI.

What the TikTok engagement demonstrates, whatever its ultimate scope and effect, is that precise and timely civil society documentation can move stakeholders with the capacity to act. The same is not yet proven true of Meta.

BFMI will continue to monitor the Bulgarian election through its tracker and intends to do so for other elections due in the Balkans in 2026.

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