The Virality of TikTok and New Media in Disrupting and Overturning the Election Cancellation Paradigm in Romania

This study uses natural language processing (NLP) techniques to analyze the political discourse of the surprise presidential candidate, focusing on linguistic patterns, sentiment distribution, and recurring themes. This study addresses the problem of how TikTok virality and algorithmic amplification mechanisms can influence electoral outcomes in Romania, analyzing whether heuristic boosting strategies can distort traditional political paradigms. The text corpus included over 3915 words extracted from the candidate’s speeches, with the most frequent terms being “sovereignty” (271 occurrences), “democracy” (164 occurrences), and “freedom” (80 occurrences). The analysis revealed that 57.8% of the content was neutral, 10% conveyed positive sentiment, and negative sentiment was absent. A word frequency analysis highlighted the candidate’s strategic emphasis on concepts related to national identity and participatory democracy. Sentiment analysis revealed an intentional use of neutral language to maintain balance, with occasional positive terms maintaining confidence and optimism among voters.