ABSTRACT
Online political communication has played a significant role in presidential elections in Romania in the period following the Revolution of 1989. The moderates, extremists, democrats, and populists have extensively used social media to earn trust and votes. The content analysis method has been applied on the Facebook accounts of the candidates at the 2009 and 2014 presidential elections to establish the modern methods that populists use for manipulating the media and the public. Classic populists are good orators. The neo-populists prefer to replace the already compromised term 'Party' with 'Movement', which suggests the surpassing of the political-social breaches and the unification of the political forces in the name of the same social and national goals. The neo-populist political actors adapted to the new technologies and used social media or digital guerilla tactics to win the elections: Basescu – Liberal Democratic Party (PDL) – in 2009, as well as Victor Ponta – Social Democratic Party (PSD) – in 2014.
