Digital Rights Review: AI-Driven Violations Go Unchecked in South-East Europe

The EU holds major platforms legally accountable through its Digital Services Act, DSA. Investigations have been launched into the Romanian elections. The conclusions are still awaited. Roxana Radu, associate professor of Digital Technologies and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, warned that timely action is needed to prevent the “next electoral crisis”.

Although fewer cases were documented in Croatia’s recent presidential elections in one case, TikTok removed more than 7,000 fake followers from a leading candidate’s account. Notably, Croatia, an EU member state, began implementing the DSA with delays, and only after the European Commission initiated infringement proceedings.

In Albania, the self-regulation of digital campaigns did not work. Ahead of the May 2025 parliamentary elections, BIRN Albania documented 349 violations of the Code of Conduct for Digital Campaigns – a voluntary agreement signed by political parties.

These findings are based on limited data from Meta, to which BIRN had access, and did not cover other platforms such as Google, which does not provide transparency on spending on political ads. Also, the data only covers the official accounts of candidates and political parties, excluding third parties.

Even within this narrow scope, 43 per cent of the documented violations involved the unethical use of technology and AI: from disinformation targeting  opponents and bots inflating post engagement to political ads disguised as news content.

Fifty-eight anonymous third-party social media pages were identified, unaffiliated with any official political party, pushing disinformation, AI‑manipulated media, diaspora‑targeted ads and bot‑driven engagement, mainly favouring the ruling Socialist Party. These posts often went unchecked and were not labelled as political ads, as platforms largely failed to recognise them as such. Without DSA implementation in Albania, these violations went unchecked.

The 2025 election cycle in south-east Europe exposed the vulnerability of democratic safeguards to AI-driven manipulation and platform failures, experts argued.

AI enables cybercrime and abuse