In the footsteps of the infamous Tik Tok bot campaign in Romania, internal stir follows in the Tempi train crash, the deadliest rail accident in Greek history. Europe is again suffering gross and fake campaigning on Tik Tok, writes Paul Halloran.

On February 28th, 2023, a head on collision occurred in Greece between a passenger train and a freight train. 57 were killed, making it the deadliest rail disaster in Greece and among the biggest in European history.

The crash was the last domino in a long line where EU mandated measures were not implemented, GSM communication network and proper rail signaling were uninstalled and many other failures. The Tempi Train Crash, as it came to be called, has sparked a long series of protests, vigils, and investigations. 43 Greek state officials have been implicated so far, and public outrage is aimed at the Greek Ministry of Infrastructure, which was accused of not carrying out necessary upgrades to the rail system. The Greek press has also accused the Greek government of “covering up” the subsequent investigative efforts.

Exactly two years later, a massive demonstration and general strike are planned for February 28th, 2025. The general strike is being promoted by a wide coalition including politicians, unions, and social media influencers.

However, unbeknownst to the public at large, their anger and concerns about the handling of the Tempi Train Crash have been hijacked by predatory entities seeking to advance their own personal agendas.

Bots, bots, bots

Since December 2024, an army of thousands of “Bots”, inauthentic users, acting in a coordinated and fraudulent way, and promoted by Tik Tok’s and other social networks’ controversial algorithms, has acted as part of a campaign to divert the public focus in Greece and increase the visibility of posts promoted by the more extreme elements of the popular protest.

In Romania, as recently as two months ago, the EU has opened a formal investigation into TikTok because of "serious indications" of foreign interference in the recent Romanian presidential election. The second-round vote was cancelled earlier this month after intelligence documents revealed 25,000 TikTok bot accounts were suddenly activated weeks before polls opened in the first round.

“Bots” are social media accounts that do not belong to a real person, they are “shell” accounts that are being controlled and weaponized by their owner for a specific purpose. Their first break into the public’s purview was when the Internet Research Agency, a Russian “troll farm” owned

by Putin’s crony in Saint Petersburg, was uncovered as a pivotal element promoting distrust, polarization, and conflict in the 2016 US elections.

American Cyber Security researcher, Chris Watts, has testified to US Congress: “American looking social media accounts, the hecklers, honeypots and hackers described above, working alongside automated bots further amplify and disseminate Russian propaganda amongst unwitting Westerners.”

What the public should know about bots

The typical identifiers of a bot are a suspicious and outwardly ratio between the number of an account’s interactions such as likes on the bot’s messages, compared with its huge number of posts – ranging up to the thousands in a period of mere days or weeks. Sometime posting more than once a minute for many hours or doing so for 16 to 24 hours each day. Most bots fail to get significant traction, and resort to a status where they have a very low number of followers, sometimes in the single digit range, all the while following other users by the hundreds or thousands.

For example, the following two bots (picture 1 and 2) have been created a few weeks ago but have already gathered cumulatively over 10,000 posts. That is non-human behavior. Most of these posts deal with the Tempi protest. US Senator Mark Warner, speaking in a Senate intelligence committee hearing on the Russian interference emphasized that bots are “mixing pop culture references and radical political discourse to influence young minds, using bots and trolls for inorganic amplification”.

Another issue with these bots is that often they are solely focused on a specific campaign. The US Cybersecurity Agency, CISA, has published in its official guidelines an established bot influencing technique “…involves spamming social media posts and comment sections with the intention of shaping a narrative or drowning out opposing viewpoints”. In this case, all the single purpose bots recently created and activated are promoting issues to do with the Greek railway disaster.

Tik Tok and its own breed of bot farms – the Greek example

Tik-Tok however might be a different issue altogether. According to the Romanian constitutional court, the 2024 elections were annulled due to gross manipulation taking place mostly on Tik Tok, in the first and most major instance of political interference by nefarious actors using Tik Tok.

When analyzing the “engagement” [comments and reactions] of two dozen specific posts on Tik Tok related to the Greek February 28th protest, identifying that many of the reactions made to those posts came from accounts created not earlier than December 2024. The volume of obvious bots in these posts amounts to above 1000, many of which have not even changed their automatically generated names (UserXYZ) and some have previously been active in other languages (than Greek), mostly Russian, Turkish, Arabic and Chinese, bearing the hallmarks of a coordinated international campaign, where bots can be produced in specific countries and bought and reused to intervene in issues in other countries.

One example is the catchy user known by his handle user8497952733626, which has 0 likes and 5 followers, when commenting on an AI produced picture of Greek prime minister Mitsotakis he used Russian, and his previous posts were in Russian.

Another example is a bot called user3185725362210, which commented in Greek in English letters on one of the posts in this specific campaign, but in the past shared Chinese and Russian content.

Reposted Russian Content

Even more abhorrent, pages promoting the protests are being run over by bots, damaging their presence and appearance to the platforms they are hosted on, and creating a false representation of consensus.

For example a TikTok page called 'Eyes on Tempi', is being promoted and followed by many bots, including evident ones with AI generated pictures, and unchanged, automatically created, names such as user11497508707533 and userz1ktjup46o.

As Greece approaches the two-year anniversary of the Tempi train, the convergence of genuine public grief and a planned general strike is being overshadowed by a disturbing digital manipulation, revealing a broader pattern of exploitation across Europe. These inauthentic accounts are not just amplifying extreme voices - they’re drowning out the authentic outrage of a nation still mourning 57 lives lost to systemic failures.

This hijacking of a tragedy underscores a chilling reality: in an age where social media shapes narratives, the line between grassroots movements and orchestrated agendas blurs, leaving the public to question what’s real amid the noise. As investigations into Tik Tok and others lags, the Tempi disaster serves as both a memorial to the fallen and a stark warning of how easily democracy and dissent can be hijacked in the digital era.

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