Big Tech accused of stonewalling European social media researchers

Researchers say TikTok, X, and Meta aren’t providing data they’re legally required to. In the final weeks before Romania’s presidential vote in November 2024, TikTok accounts that had previously spent years posting about manicures or fashion suddenly started promoting a little-known politician named Calin Georgescu. His posts, espousing hard-line views on immigration and anti-Semitic tropes, were viewed 120 million times before the vote. Georgescu, who had previously been polling in the single digits, stunned observers by winning the election’s first round with 23 percent of the vote. In the Netherlands, Adriana Iamnitchi was watching closely. As chair of computational social sciences at Maastricht University, she leads the research into disinformation campaigns. She wanted to know how pro-Georgescu content was being monetized on TikTok through hidden influencer marketing and livestreamed political content. On October 28, 2025, a month before Georgescu won the first round, she and her team applied for access to TikTok’s Application Programming Interface (API) under the EU’s recent Digital Services Act (DSA). Their request was denied. TikTok said they had failed to prove they were e