Ownership and control of social media platforms is a first-order concern for both domestic politics and international conflict. The most important battleground in the Russia-Ukraine war is elections in NATO member states.

And there, Russia is clearly winning. Trump, obviously, but yesterday saw the stunning success of formerly fringe right-wing candidate C?lin Georgescu. In an unimaginably large polling error, CG won 22% of the first-round vote (and thus made it into the runoff) after polling at 5% just months prior.

A prescient report by Bucharest think tank Export Forum released shortly before the election details the importance of TikTok in Romanian politics — the platform has 9 million users in a nation of roughly 16 million adults — and the impossibly sharp explosion of pro-CG content produced and consumed in the month before the election: “As of November 18, C?lin Georgescu had 92.8 million views, most of which were in last 2 months. By November 22 it had increased by 52 million views.”

This is, simply, not possible without some good old-fashioned “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The report provides examples of exactly that, using what I now believe to be the most important vector of political influence on social media: paying non-political influencers to create targeted content:

there are Romanian influencers with no affinity to politics, i.e. with exclusive content on fashion, makeup, entertainment, who have started to post under a single hashtag, without naming the recipient candidate. The campaign is promoting C?lin Georgescu under the hashtag #echilibrusiverticalitate and is based on the idea of a president who believes in neutrality, verticality, basically recycling Georgescu’s messages from the TikTok campaign.

Recall the recent revelations that prominent right-wing influencers in the US had accepted money from a shadowy media organization that was later revealed to be part of the Russian state apparatus. They were paid “to churn out English-language videos that were “often consistent” with the Kremlin’s “interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition” to Russian interests, like its war in Ukraine.”

Does the Romanian election fit the pattern? Absolutely. The Expert Forum report notes that “the theme with the highest visibility pushed by C?lin Georgescu on TikTok in the last two months is peace, more precisely the need for Romania to stop its support to Ukraine in order not to involve Romania in the war.” So now CG heads to a runoff election that it looks like he might actually be able to win.

Control of information environments is a crucial component of 21st century sovereignty. I have been arguing for years that the US should ban TikTok; I had a “Ban TikTok Week” this April — and the same applies to other countries. If anything, smaller countries have even more reason to do so. Western media, understandably if regrettably, focuses on things which Western readers click on. But the worst abuses by social media companies has always come from the rest of the world.

Erin Kissane recently summarized the situation well.

First, whatever happens to social media users in the US, it’s much, much worse almost everywhere else. In 2017, Facebook’s years of active damage to the media landscape and startling neglect in the face of increasingly desperate warnings from experts contributed‚ according to the United Nations, to ethnic cleansing and genocide in Myanmar. Sophie Zhang’s whistleblower disclosures reveal the extent of Meta’s longstanding failure to prevent its machinery from being used with impunity to power covert influence campaigns and target journalists and opposition parties all over the world—except in the US, Canada, and parts of Western Europe. Some of Frances Haugen’s disclosures touch on this exceptionalism as well: As of a few years ago, more than 90% of Facebook’s users live outside the US and Canada, but the company allocated that massive global userbase only 13% of its content moderation resources.

Does this imply that other countries should ban Meta products, too? That’s what I would do — and it’s obviously what China has already done. But we’ve let things go so far, Facebook and Instagram have become so deeply entrenched in so many economies, that this seems much costlier. This is the exact logic of the “Palo Alto Consensus” I outlined in a New York Times oped back in 2019.

To be clear, I don’t think there’s evidence that China and Russia are colluding on this; it’s possible, but not necessary. TikTok is just doing what tech companies do: they expand recklessly quickly, setting themselves impossible tasks like content moderation at a global scale; they break local laws or share data with autocrats, as best suits them; they lie about user and viewership numbers to prop up a digital advertising house of cards; they prevent independent oversight of basic descriptive facts, let alone the possibility of legitimate democratic control.

But I do think that this kind of targeted pre-election campaign on broadly overlooked spaces like Romanian TikTok is the most plausible and effective vector for foreign influence. And all TikTok would have to do is get a bit sloppy with their content moderation for a brief period of time — lord knows Western social media has done far worse — to make the campaign doubly effective.

In James Pogue’s stunningly reported Vanity Fair article about resurgent Bannonism in the US, he quotes a former Trump administration official about the true nature of contemporary geopolitics: “From a systemic perspective there are really only two things in politics that really mean something…Elon [Musk] buying Twitter…and for someone to emerge who could make the MAGA into something bigger than the man Trump himself.”

Musk lost billions on the Twitter deal — but has been rewarded tenfold after bending the platform towards Trump. Romanian sovereignty is under threat because they do not control their information environment. If digital media had developed gradually and from within individual countries, they might have been able to adapt proper institutions for moderating its effects. But instead, the US, Russia and China have airdropped this society-shattering technology across the globe and told everyone else good luck — we’ve got ads to sell.

And what’s the best argument for not banning TikTok, exactly? You find the guy arguing that it’s giving teenagers anxiety and ruining their attention spans annoying?

In place of precision-targeted revenue raids, Reeves needs to win a bigger argument about the reason we have taxes

It is hardly advanced political science to observe that governments are more popular when giving people stuff than when taking it away. Junior doctors, who are getting a pay rise, are probably better disposed towards Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves right now than farmers, who are losing a tax break.

Not all farmers. The government says its reforms to agricultural property relief (APR) and business property relief (BPR) will mean inheritance tax is levied on about 500 estates that were previously exempt. Agribusiness lobby groups say many more will be affected, potentially 70,000. Farmers have marched on Westminster to vent their fury.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

'Department of Government Efficiency' expected to do little more than suggest changes, Congress will still decide

Comment  Well, it's official(ish): US president-elect Donald Trump has made good on a campaign promise to appoint Elon Musk to the head of "the Department of Government Efficiency" – or DOGE. …

To navigate the dangerous new era, Keir Starmer must end the culture of denial around the biggest strategic mistake of modern times

The 35th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down was not commemorated much in Britain last weekend. It is no Poppy Day. The unravelling of the iron curtain doesn’t compete with Remembrance Sunday for cultural resonance. But it is more relevant to the world we live in today. More poignant, too, now that Americans have chosen a president who is no friend of what used to be called the west.

Few world leaders will be gladder to see Donald Trump return to the White House than the former KGB officer who sits in the Kremlin, craving vengeance for his Soviet motherland’s humiliating defeat in the cold war.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Downing Street may be making friendly overtures but the cabinet’s stomachs are in knots about the threats to the UK’s security and prosperity

Peas from the same pod they sure ain’t. No one is ever going to think that Keir Starmer and Donald Trump are twins who were separated at birth. In their temperaments, their worldviews and the values of the parties they lead, two human beings could not be less alike than the former prosecutor who heads Britain’s first Labour government in 14 years and the convicted felon whom Americans have returned to the White House for another four. When Trumpites are being polite about the Labour leader they call him a “liberal”; when they are feeling vituperative they brand him “far-left”. The animosity has been mutual. There’s a bulging catalogue of damnatory remarks about the president-elect by members of the Starmer cabinet.

Which is why Sir Keir felt compelled to lay on the flattery with a trowel when, according to the account from Number 10, he telephoned the American to extend his “hearty congratulations”. If that left many Labour people gagging on their breakfasts, they retched even harder when the prime minister went on to claim: “We stand shoulder to shoulder in defence of shared values of freedom, democracy and enterprise.” He also employed a well-worn diplomatic cliche that one of our ambassadors to Washington banned his staff from using because he thought it fed delusional thinking about the extent of British influence over the US. “I know the special relationship will continue to prosper on both sides of the Atlantic for years to come,” said the prime minister, even though he can’t be genuinely confident of any such thing. The foundations of transatlantic relations frequently shuddered during the first Trump term. Britain’s defence and foreign policy establishments are seized with a justifiably deep apprehension that the world will become an even more dangerous place during the sequel.

It's the cruelty that gets you. The policy proposals are obviously insane, but it's the cruelty that ultimately shatters you. 

Cruelty is baked into every part of this project. Donald Trump's plans for mass deportations, for instance, are not just a practical proposition but an emotional one. They thrill supporters specifically because they are cruel. They conjure up images of scared men hiding in flats before the police kick down their door, of families huddled behind wire fencing. These images are not a fantasy. They're the sort of thing we saw when Trump separated children from their parents in detention centres in his first term. They are real. And now they will happen again.

The thing that hurts is that people like it. They enjoy that imagery. They wallow in it. Perhaps it makes them feel strong. Perhaps emphasising the low status of others works to elevate their own.

Trump's cruelty is core to his public persona and presumably his private one. You can see it in his comically absurd handshake, which seeks to mandhandle and force the submission of the other party. You can see it in the dismissive manner in which he comments on his allies, the dreams of violent retribution he conjures against his enemies, the mockery of the physically disabled. He represents cruelty and people voted for it. And god help me that is a hard fact to take on board.

Cruelty seeps down. It is pumped from the leader down through the ranks. From the US, it spreads across the world: a validation of a particular kind of behaviour, a vindication for a particular kind of instinct.

Look at the coverage on right in the UK. "Trump has just handed smug global elites their worst defeat," the Telegraph sneered. As the analyst Tim Bale said, we have serious problems we need to face up to because of Trump - problems over issues the Telegraph purports to care about. What kind of support are we going to have to offer Ukraine? What will we do about tariffs? But there’s nothing about that. Just this wallowing in the brief moment of dominance and in the emotional anxiety of their political enemies.

On Talk TV, a channel so successful it is sometimes watched by more than five people at a time, Julia Hartley-Brewer read out an emotional message from a Green MP and then said: "I've got a box of tissues here. I'm going to send these over to you and you just wipe your little tears away." Needless to say, social media is full of similar sentiments. The worst people, authorised to behave in the worst way, with the sense that millions of others might be just as bad as they are. 

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Most of the commentary attempting to work out what went wrong has focused on the Democrats, for obvious reasons. Did Joe Biden stay on too long? Did Kamala Harris lack a retail proposition to improve people's lives? These are all totally legitimate questions. But they sidestep the bigger one. Regardless of its deficiencies, the Democrat offer was not grounded in hatred of democracy, love of cruelty and wanton idiocy. The correct choice was obvious, on the level of governance or morality. 

The reason this analysis cannot be said out loud is because it blames voters and that has become taboo. The first rule in politics is that voters are never wrong. 

That makes total sense for a party strategist. It's how they need to think. But we are not all party strategists. Some strange process has taken place where everyone is expected to act like they work for a political organisation. But we don't. They're not paying our salary. They're not sending us out on the doorstep. We are not limited by the restrictions they place on their volunteers. 

This cultural change is particularly grievous when it comes to journalism. Reporters and columnists have ingested the taboo on criticising voters and now sound more and more like a party communication department. 

This twists the morality of the situation until it goes into reverse. The voter behaviour must be blameless so the party they voted for must therefore be blameless too. Cruelty is validated by voters which means it is validated by the press, which means that our morsel standards go into terminal decline. 

So just to be clear: the voters were wrong to select Trump. They were wrong on the basis of morality, because he exhibits pathologically sadistic behaviour. They were wrong on the basis of policy, because his plans will not work and are not even intended to work. They were wrong on the basis of governance, because he is demonstrably incapable of discharging his responsibilities. And they were wrong on the basis of the constitution, because they made a mockery of the things their country stands for and the reasons one might sensibly celebrate it.

Obviously they were wrong. This is a man who garbles nonsense about people eating cats and dogs. He cannot really complete full sentences. He celebrates the manner in which he has assaulted women. He gets lost in dreamlike fugue states in which he imagines his political enemies being shot. He is obviously unfit to hold any kind of office and we do not have to pretend otherwise simply because people voted for him. There is no vote on earth with the power to negate moral fact. Things are right and wrong regardless of how many people think they are. 

Is it helpful to the Democratic cause to speak this way? Probably not, but then why on earth would that be of any pertinence to me? I don't work for them. I'm not even American. If I thought this newsletter on British politics had the slightest impact on American elections I would be a much happier person than I am.

This approach does not exempt the Democrat party from blame and it does not remove the need for lessons on how you appeal to voters in future. Obviously you will be looking for ways to peel voters off and earn a hearing, to see if you can ramp up your own vote with a more compelling offer - all the normal elements of political life. But we must urgently rid ourselves of this sacrosanct view of voters, this omerta over the ethical status of their actions. It leaves us with no language to support our values. If you cannot say that something is wrong, you cannot defend that which it attacks.

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Even with that in place, I'm struggling to maintain my faith in humanity a bit. I find myself looking at people in the street - men and women alike - and wondering about the jagged edges of their personality. Seeing cruelty unleashed can do that to you. Seeing the joy that people take in it can degrade your assumptions about the world around you.

For reassurance I kept on going back to Dorian's final chapter in his book on the end of the world. When we imagine the apocalypse - nuclear war, pandemic, zombies, whatever - we tend to think that people will degenerate to a primal state, attacking passers-by, forming gangs, looting shops. The same basic suspicion I now have in my mind about people after the Trump vote, unleashed by the freedoms of a lawless society.

But it's just not true. Or at least, it’s not entirely true. When people really think they are facing the apocalypse, they behave entirely differently. At 8:07am on January 13th 2018, a bomb warning system accidentally went off in Hawaii. "Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii," it screamed. "Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill." A significant number of people believed they were about to die. 

What did they do then? When researchers later interviewed 418 of them, they found that the most common response was a "desire to reach loved ones". People broke the law, yes, but they did so by speeding to reach the people they loved. The messages they sent, the last ones they thought they would ever write, had nothing to do with hate, or cruelty or dominance.

"I'm sorry, Mom." "I love you, baby." "I'm so sorry about the fight. It was so stupid." "You were a great dad. I love you, Daddy."

Even today, even now, we have to cling to this. We are humans. We are obviously capable of terrible things. But when we reach the moment of truth, it is not hate that we turn to, but love. Only love does not decay.

We need to bear that in mind. It does not negate what happened this week. But what happened this week does not negate it either.

Small blessings. But small blessings are all that we can aspire to, on a week like this one.