A real economic problem became fuel for the anti-system narratives that already existed in Romania
Originally published in Global Voices in Spanish
Thumbnails of the YouTube video 'Violent incidents in the protest of the farmers in the Plaza de la Victoria 'in the September 15, 2006 protests in Bucharest, Romania, of Digi24HD. The legend of the screen says:' Violence in the protest in Victoria Square. Confrontations with police, tear gas was used. 'legitimate use.
This article by Matei Vrabie and Calin Georgia Funky Citizens, Romanian NGOs working at the intersection of good governance and active citizenship, is part of the Global Voices Spotlight series of September 2026, "Protest in democracy. " This series seeks to explore the different forms of protests, the tactics that States use to de-legitimize and suppress them, and the complex relationship between protest and democracy. You can support this coverage with a donation.
On 15 September, more than a thousand pastors, farmers and other farmers gathered in Victoria Square, in front of the Romanian government headquarters in Bucharest, to protest against a European Union ban on exports of live sheep and goatsextended until the end of 2026 after outbreaks of pests of small ruminants and sheep smallpox.
They required compensation for slaughtered animals and crops lost from drought. The organizers asked the protesters to bring sheep, tractors and hay bullets to the square, but restrictions prevented the live animals and heavy machinery enter the area of the demonstration.
The demonstration began peacefully before 10: 00. In the afternoon, some protesters pushed police barriers and threw stones, bottles and pieces of sardines. The police responded with tear gas. According to the Bucharest Gendarmerie, 24 people needed medical care that night, including 10 police officers, four of whom were hospitalized; and 47 people were taken to police stations. President Nicușor Dan and Acting Prime Minister Ilie Boojan, condemned violence. Farmers' associations said that there were people in the crowd who are not farmers, and the Prefect of Bucharest said that "sheep farmers are not organized like this."
This is what happened on the street. What happened online, at the same time and before, is the subject of a new Funky Citizens report, a civic organization in Bucharest in which we investigate digital manipulation and disinformation. With other colleagues, we analyzed 1186 Facebook publications and a hundred TikTok videos published in Romanian between September 14 and 15, which track what narratives circulated about the protest, the identical or almost identical phrases between the pages with seconds of difference, and what language accompanied the calls for mobilization.
The most clear finding does not refer to violence. You mean the night before. Between 19: 00 and 19: 15 on September 14, dozens of Facebook pages reproduced, almost word for word, a message that said that "almost 200,000 farmers were expected" to go to Victoria Square a day later. The following day, according to press reports, more than 3000 people attended. With a 300-second window to mark identical or almost identical phrases published on different pages, we draw the resulting coordination network. About 90% of the 2253 pairs of accounts on the final network, which was formed in two full days, was already formed after those 15 minutes the night before the protest began.
Distribution of publications and public care. Graph by Funky Citizens, used with permission.
At 15: 30 on 15 September, the network covered 160 accounts and 12 texts that were multiplied by the network. The structure was very concentrated: two groups of 50 accounts each, built around two almost identical versions of the message of "200,000 farmers," which amounted to a hundred of 160 accounts, and about 90% of all connections. The most visible nodes we could identify by name, pages such as Case de Vis, femina.ro and ROL.ro, are pages that add and spread content, not openly political. Republishing identical texts in seconds is by definition a coordinated distribution in a technical sense. By itself, that does not establish who organized everything or why; our data set does not allow conclusions about intention.
Around this coordination, there were four narrative threads. One concerned the specific economic orders of farmers: to stop the massacres, to take up exports and to set fair prices. The second included the increase with the Police, divided between accounts that blamed the protesters for forcing police lines and accounts that blamed the Police, along with a recurring claim that there were "provocators" planted in the crowd. A third son politicized the protest directly, generated around the calls for calm of the leader of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians, George Simion, and that the Gendarmerie to show controland about disputes as to whether their intervention helped or harmed the farmers' cause. A fourth thread, more disconnected from the events of the day, covered structural problems in Romanian agriculture, from delays in EU funding for machinery to a change to direct sowing.
3D dissemination chronological network. Graph by Funky Citizens, used with permission.
References to the European Union were divided into two registers. Sixty-seven publications mentioned Brussels or the European Union in connection with the protest. Some described specific negotiations on the export ban with the European Commission; others present the European Union as an opponent, with formulations such as "Europe's objective is to leave us without animals, without livestock, without agriculture in Romania," or claims that the "European Union wants to starve Romania."
We traced two Telegram channels we used to have documented the Elie Wiesel National Institute and the GLOBSECas part of pro-Kremlin propaganda networks active in Romania and Moldova. His approach to the protest changed after hours. At 11: 56, a channel described the demonstration, listed the farmers' demands. At 14: 06, a second channel had passed from warning the "usurpers" who would use the protest to mount "provocations, then increase and then a state of emergency." At 1603 hours, after the clashes, the same channel changed to attack how television stations reported on the confrontation. A similar change, from demands to provocation and increase to media mistrust, was repeated in publications using explicit language of mobilization, including calls to "occupy Bucharest" and claims that "REVOLUTION has begun."
In TikTok, where we analyzed a hundred videos of 34 accounts with the hashtag # protest, the same division appeared. Thirty-one videos directly mentioned the Gendarmerie in its description, and only the most widespread video, which announced new clashes and dozens of arrests, had about 30,000 interactions.
None of this tells us who organized the protest, or who benefited from inflating expectations about the protest. What the data show is a pattern known throughout Romania and the region: a true economic claim, amplified after hours of dense groups of accounts that reproduced identical texts, and incorporated pre-existing narratives about stolen elections, illegitimate governments and a "system" that must be confronted.
Distinguishing the farmers' protest from their online amplification, and the amplification of any deliberate political instrumentalization, is not a note to a story to understand what happened in Victoria Square. It's the story.
