A small volunteer project built by three Romanians in the diaspora is trying to do something the state has not: turn opaque public data into usable evidence for journalists, activists and citizens, while also flagging coordinated manipulation campaigns on social media.
iGov.ro Tracks Romanian Public Funds and Online Manipulation
The civic platform, iGov.ro, grew out of years of frustration with Romania’s weak transparency standards and, more recently, the political rise of Călin Georgescu in the November 2024 presidential race. Its founders say the goal is not politics but early warning — both on where public money goes and when narratives online appear to be artificially amplified.
The project’s first major case was a civic audit of the Department for Romanians Abroad, built from data collected over roughly a decade by researcher Andra Mironescu. That review found more than 60% of the department’s allocated funds went to Italy and Spain, while sizeable diaspora communities in Germany, Britain and North America were largely bypassed. It also found 45% of funds in 2022-2024 went to religious organizations.
For investors, the story is less about politics than infrastructure: the growing use of AI and data automation to expose weak governance, monitor public procurement and quantify information risk. If such tools gain traction, they can pressure institutions to disclose more, shift how public funds are allocated and give media and civil-society groups a faster way to challenge official narratives.
The platform’s second arm, observator.igov.ro, was created after Romania’s 2024 election experience underscored the speed at which online campaigns can influence public debate. The system pulls data from platforms including X, Facebook, Telegram and TikTok, searches for overlapping themes and keywords, and tries to identify coordinated attacks or manipulation networks before they fully spread.
That capability is increasingly relevant across Europe, where governments, regulators and media groups are watching synthetic content and cross-platform amplification more closely. iGov.ro says its first report from the observatory helped inform coverage of the “Rusia nu e dușmanul meu” campaign, underscoring how civic tech can feed directly into journalism and public scrutiny.
The founders, including social and political science researcher Cornelia German, want the platform to become a practical tool for reporters and activists, and eventually to carry enough methodological credibility to be recognized by institutions such as Romania’s media regulator, CNA. Their longer-term ambition is to measure impact over time — whether a published investigation or report actually changes behavior, reallocates funding or reduces abuse.
That makes iGov.ro part of a broader European trend: civil society using AI not to replace human investigation, but to scale it. The near-term test is whether journalists, watchdogs and public institutions adopt the tool often enough to turn a volunteer experiment into a durable transparency layer.
| Entity | Gains | Losses |
|---|---|---|
| iGov.ro founders | ▲visibility and uptake | ▼limited resources |
| Journalists and activists | ▲faster access to data | ▼reliance on volunteer tools |
| Romanian public institutions | ▲pressure to improve transparency | ▼control over opaque processes |
| Coordinated online campaigns | ▲harder to hide | ▼greater exposure to detection |
