Unlike other European countries, which are more lax, Romania has so far stayed away from cricket- or grasshopper-based foods. But who knows what other great danger awaits us in 2024?

At the end of last year, President Iohannis announced a law initiated by Prime Minister Čolaku to ban the use of insect flour in traditional Romanian products such as kozonac.

The law also doesn’t answer the natural question of why a sane baker would use flour that costs 20 times more than regular cake flour, but those are the details. It is good that we have this law, those from AUR and SDP fought for it, in the end the prime minister won and can record his victory on the election campaign flyer.

I brought this up because I recently discovered that in Romania there is a very real fear of accidentally putting insect repellants in your mouth.

Although it all started with the fact that a specialized agency of the European Commission allowed the sale in the EU at the request of some food companies of products made from crickets, grasshoppers or mealworms, people realized that, in fact, a new era had arrived. was the beginning of the meal. One in which the pig or beef leg will be replaced by the legs of other animals. “Let the crickets sing,” former Minister of Agriculture Petre Daea emotionally added fuel to the fire.

People understood this because some politicians told them, and internet algorithms spread the “information” to the farthest corners of Romania.

The other day I met a scribe priest who was very angry because he was going to eat insect foods. To my reply that he has no reason to do so if he doesn’t want to, no one is forcing him to buy them, he replied that “he will be cheated because he does not always read what is written on the label”. product”. Even the higher price argument didn’t convince him, so I had no choice but to leave it alone.

But the last few days I’ve been talking to people from all kinds of backgrounds about more than just insects. I learned, for example, that Black Dan became something of a hero after his trip across the US, where he discovered that Americans do not buy electric cars and continue to pay in cash.

“I was taught that cash disappears in the civilized world. In America, cash is in demand, you pay in cash, you get discounts. They taught me that in the civilized world the future is electric cars. In America, I looked for them with a candle. I didn’t find them,” Dan Negro says in a post that went viral on Facebook.

Well, even though there are still 2.4 million electric cars in America and cash transactions are only 18% of the total, the TV producer’s “revelations” have confirmed to many that they are “being lied to,” that there is a conspiracy against them, that someone wants to shove down their throat measures that are not available in rich countries.

And I also heard the other day that the Ukrainians, with the support of the Americans, flooded our market with their products, and Romanian farmers went bankrupt, and that we are not included in Schengen, because Romania “must remain a market for foreign products.” , and we don’t have to produce anything.

At a time when Romanians, taken as a whole, are living the best lives in their history, you don’t have to look too far to discover that in fact “so much injustice has never happened in this country, and because of that, 2024 will be a great year” as about one shooter pilot who competes in several races a month in Europe and just spoils everything that can’t be said about him (by his work, of course).

There are many things that Romanians have a right to be unhappy about, from incorrect taxation to special pensions or great divisions in society, but we gain nothing by discussing topics like eating insects or the naive conclusions of television. a manufacturer specializing in the organization of New Year holidays.

However, these topics are not accidental. They are the ones who sow distrust of democracy and Western political systems, which they present as offensive: they only impose bad things on us, from insects to food from Ukraine “that no one controls” and “bankrupt Romanian farmers”.

Will they be talked about in the election campaigns of the four rounds of elections that await us in 2024? Of course, yes, we already have a populist AUR party, which in this respect long ago took the lead.

Misreport has identified at least 19 websites and Facebook pages that post propaganda or false content in favor of AUR. In 2023, sponsored content had at least 15,700,000 impressions on Facebook.

What do these so-called independent publications write about? On one such site, economististii.ro, we find an instructive article: “We prioritized Ukraine until we killed Romania’s economy.” Attention to the Romanian companies/Romanian farmers revolt coming from behind!

But not only the elections in Romania are under the sign of fake news.

“In 2024, Elections and Disinformation Collide Like Never Before” is the headline of a New York Times article in which we learn that more than 4 billion people are expected to vote worldwide in 2024, from the US and EU countries to Russia, India or Taiwan. .

The article also quoted Fyodor Lukyanov, an analyst who runs a Kremlin-linked think tank, as saying recently that “2024 could be the year the Western liberal elites lose their grip on the world order.”

Conspiracies to discredit the West are everywhere, from Pakistan to Europe, and experts cited by the NYT predict they will have a big impact on election results.

“Campaigns under the influence of foreign states regularly target domestic issues that polarize society. Artificial intelligence has increased disinformation efforts and distorted perceptions of reality. While large companies that own social media networks have scaled back their security measures and cut back on dedicated teams,” the article said.

“Almost every democracy is under stress, regardless of technology,” said Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s research center. “When you add misinformation to that, it creates a lot of opportunities for harm.”

Recently, I have heard discussions that because of absenteeism in Romania, the results of elections are determined by uneducated people. In fact, this is not the biggest threat, but that the outcome will be decided by fake news and those behind it.

• Read also: VIDEO Why do we decide to believe fake news about Ukraine, as Russia wants? Expert: “There will always be a fight between good and evil in disinformation, just like in fairy tales”