The Photograph of the Protest in Bucharest Was Not Taken in December of 2024

Photo: Paul Arne Wagner, Flickr The first round of the presidential elections held on November 24, 2024, in Romania, resulted in an unexpected victory for Călin Georgescu, who is described by the media as a pro-Russian far-right candidate. The surprise, according to sources cited by BBC Serbian, lies in the fact that election polls indicated Georgescu would receive only five percent of the vote, but he actually received 23%, which was more than the other two candidates. He ran as an independent candidate and primarily conducted his campaign on TikTok. This result led to demonstrations across Romania. However, on December 6, 2024, two days before the scheduled second round of voting, where Georgescu and right-center candidate Elena Laskoni from the “Save Romania” alliance were set to compete, the Constitutional Court of Romania annulled the results of the first round. As reported by BBC Serbian, the court’s decision was based on the need to “ensure the correctness and legality of the electoral process”. The decision was made following a request to annul the results, based on recently declassified intelligence data describing allegations of Russian influence on social media during the campaign. On the day the second round was supposed to take place, December 8, Georgescu and over a hundred of his supporters organized a protest at a closed polling station in Bucharest, as reported by Radio Free Europe. On the same day the Romanian Constitutional Court made its decision, the Instagram account under the name Beograd info published a photo, which, according to the description, shows mass support for Călin Georgescu.

“Romania has once again shown that there is no fooling around with its citizens. The people stood behind Georgescu, the presidential candidate who won. Interestingly, Georgescu had no money for any campaign, so he did everything for his campaign on TikTok for free and won the first round of the presidential election. The same support was given to Laura Kovesi. These people deserve only respect. They are united to protect what they believe in. Source / Author  @whitesnake1004

The post had over 2,000 “likes” at the time this analysis was written. On the same profile, another similar post was shared and gained over 14,000 interactions. The post from Beograd info posted on the social media platform Threads, with the same photo and description, gathered over 1,100 interactions. In addition to posts from this page, several identical posts were shared on Facebook (1, 2, 3, 4).

What are the Facts?

A reverse image search on TinEye shows that the photo has been circulating on the internet since at least February 5, 2017. Therefore, it does not depict the protests in support of Georgescu regarding the results of the first round of the 2024 presidential elections and the Constitutional Court’s decision to annul them. Photo: An identical photo, used to prove the massiveness of the protests in December 2024 was originally published in February 2017. Source: Imgur. In late January and early February 2017, mass protests broke out in Bucharest against a government decree decriminalizing certain corrupt practices, such as abuse of power, conflicts of interest, and negligence at work. The government withdrew the decree after the protests, but anti-government protests continued nonetheless. According to media reports, these protests were the largest in Romania since the fall of communism. A fact-checking analysis by the web portal AFP Provera cinjenica (Fact-Check) also analysed social media posts that insinuated the photo showed protests in Bucharest in 2024. This web portal had previously analyzed claims in 2021 that the 2017 protest photo showed a mass gathering against COVID-19 vaccines in the city. The source listed in the post by Beograd info was the profile @whitesnake1004, but it was not specified from which social network. The AFP’s analysis includes an archived link to a now unavailable post from the X platform, shared by the profile @whitesnake1004. Based on this and the timestamp from the archived link, it can be concluded that this was the earliest post in which the 2017 protest photo was presented as a photo from the 2024 protests. Therefore, posts using the 2017 protest photo and insinuating that it shows a mass gathering in support of Călin Georgescu are considered to be a distribution of fake news. (Author: Amar Karađuz, Raskrinkavanje.ba)