How a farmers’ protest in Bucharest was inflated online, then hijacked
Hundreds to over a thousand Romanian farmers gathered at Victoriei Square on September 15 to protest an EU ban on live sheep and goat exports, demanding compensation for culled animals and drought losses. The protest turned violent by afternoon, with stone-throwing and tear gas leaving 24 people needing medical attention and 47 taken to police stations; officials and livestock associations both suggested non-farmers had joined the crowd.
A Funky Citizens analysis of over 1,180 Facebook posts and 100 TikTok videos found that the night before the protest, dozens of pages republished a near-identical claim that ‘almost 200,000 farmers’ would show up. Roughly 3,000 did. Ninety percent of the resulting coordination network had already formed in a 15-minute window the evening before anything happened on the ground.
Two Telegram channels previously linked to pro-Kremlin propaganda networks shifted their framing of the protest within hours, moving from listing demands to warning narratives. The report stops short of identifying who orchestrated the coordinated posting or why, noting only that the technical fact of simultaneous republication doesn't establish intent.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.