Hundreds of anti-EU messages, sent to a Romanian Telegram group. “Romanians are the servants of Europeans” and “The EU steals our wealth”
Vlogger Mihai Zmenta drew an alarm about a possible coordinated propaganda action, held on one of his Telegram groups, dedicated to discussions about economy and investments.
The screenshots in the Telegram group. Photo: facebook / zment.ro
According to Zmenta, who told the incident in a Facebook post, starting in March one of his groups has been invaded by suspicious accounts that began to comment aggressively on any post, regardless of its content. The target group brings together over 10,000 Romanians interested in topics such as economics, scholarships and companies.
The comments, he says, were meant to induce fear, frustration and hostility towards the European Union, the Romanian and West authorities. Among the messages conveyed were texts like “Romanians are the servants of Europeans”, “The EU steals our wealth” or “Romania must escape the globalist traitors”, all with conspiracy and nationalist tint.
“At all we post, and if we wrote a recipe for pickles, these accounts left dozens of the kind” Romanians are the servants of Europeans, the EU steals our wealth, the authorities are against the people, the Romanians must wake up and in May not to be coward, so Romania will be reborn and will escape. ” And many other miseries that you surely suspect ”he wrote.
Zment states that most accounts had seemingly Romanian identities, but usernames that betray Russian origins or profile photographs generated with artificial intelligence. An indication of the origin of the messages would have been observed when some accounts were wrong and published comments in Russian, followed by English translations.
Photo: facebook / zment.ro
“It's funny, but sad. That's what the Russians do in a group, but imagine what they do on all social networks. And people really believe what I write accounts directly by Russia.” the former vlogger wrote in the post.
He also published screenshots with examples of comments, which he considers evidence to involve a hostile external structure in the Romanian information space. Mihai Zmenta raises question marks on who could benefit, electoral, from such actions.
