AGERPRES special corespondent Florin Stefan reports: Both in Romania and at the European level, the investigations currently carried out must present to the people at least preliminary conclusions before the start of the campaign for the presidential elections, because the people must vote knowingly, PNL MEP Siegfried Muresan said on Monday in Strasbourg.
The MEP, who holds the position of vice-president of the European People's Party (EPP) group in the European Parliament, referred to the official investigation launched in mid-December by the European Commission against TikTok for its failure to limit interference in the elections, as well as to the wider investigation announced by the Romanian authorities on this topic, which was also welcomed by the EP president Roberta Metsola.
"I believe that people have the right to know what happened. They have the right to know what were the methods used by those who tried to illegitimately influence the elections in Romania (...) and I hope that the results of the investigations will appear in the following weeks", Muresan told a briefing for Romanian journalists.
He admitted that these investigations launched by the European Commission against TikTok and X may last for months, but he appreciated that "the fact that this investigation has started is a good thing and means that the risk of spreading fake news on this platform is reduced to some extent".
Muresan also admitted that the efforts to combat such interference were more effective in the Republic of Moldova, "because there the authorities were aware before the elections of the risk of interference, they informed and educated the citizens better", including with the help of civil society.
"We believed that this type of interference cannot take place at the level of the European Union, in a member state of the European Union, but in the meantime I think that everyone understood that the Russian Federation wants to weaken the European Union, wants to weaken the institutions at European level and also wants the weakening of institutions at the national level, wants people to no longer trust justice, democratic institutions of the state and, in fact, wants destabilization", explained the vice-president of the EPP group in the EP.
On the other hand, Siegfried Muresan emphasized that it is necessary to publish at least the preliminary results of the investigations before the start of the campaign for the first round of the presidential elections in Romania.
"I think we should at least have preliminary results before people go to the polls. People must vote knowingly. People must be informed, they must know how social networks were used during the election campaign to misinform them and even to manipulate them", he emphasized, specifying that this is valid "both in Romania and at the European level".