BFMI and Sensika’s TikTokcracy Tracker #2
Live monitoring of algorithmic manipulation in Southeastern Europe:
2026 Bulgarian elections
About
Digital manipulation is no longer an exceptional event in European elections. It is a recurring feature with documented precedents in Romania, Moldova, and beyond. What varies is the speed and coherence of the institutional response. With Hungary, Slovenia, and Bulgaria all voting within weeks of one another, Europe’s spring electoral calendar presented both an opportunity for coordinated institutional vigilance and a risk that attention and resources will be stretched too thin to be effective.
This tracker is part of BFMI’s & Sensika's ongoing effort to close the gap between the identification of manipulation and the institutional response to it. It builds directly on Tackling TikTokcracy in the Balkans: A Blueprint for Fighting Algorithmic Manipulation in Europe, produced in partnership with Sensika and presented at the European Parliament in late autumn last year. The report mapped the tactics and infrastructure of algorithmic manipulation across the region, identified Bulgaria as a persistently high-risk environment, and flagged specific dormant networks that had not yet been activated.
The second edition of the current tracker covers the peak of the election campaign, with the Bulgarian parliamentary elections scheduled for 19 April. Bulgarian media and political leaders have speculated about a so-called "Romanian moment."
This report does not find manipulation on the scale of what occurred in Romania in December 2024. It does, however, find a qualitatively different problem, in which the manipulation is distributed across the political spectrum, generated domestically, and embedded within the competitive dynamics of the election itself.
Findings
Coordinated inauthentic activity was documented around DPS-NN, Progressive Bulgaria, and ITN, with anomalous patterns also observed around Revival and GERB-SDS.
TikTok removed 34 DPS-NN-linked accounts, reducing the party’s reach, but suspicious amplification then appeared around other political actors.
Progressive Bulgaria appears to benefit from coordinated TikTok amplification and repurposed Facebook pages and groups built from pre-existing digital infrastructure.
Meta said it had not identified election-targeting coordinated inauthentic behaviour, highlighting inconsistent enforcement standards between major platforms.
Bulgarian voters are entering polling day without a reliable way to distinguish authentic political engagement from manipulated visibility online.
Recommendations
Bulgaria’s Digital Services Coordinator should be urgently operationalised to engage platforms, use DSA data-access powers, and submit structured evidence during elections.
Platforms should apply clearer, more transparent, and more consistent standards for identifying and enforcing coordinated inauthentic behaviour across TikTok and Facebook.
National authorities should activate election-response mechanisms before polling, rather than relying on civil society flagging to trigger platform action.
EU institutions should review whether current tools, including the DSA and European Democracy Shield, are adequate for fast-moving electoral manipulation.