French authorities approached the popular end-to-end encrypted messaging app Telegram, asking it to “silence conservative voices in Romania” ahead of Sunday’s presidential election, something company founder Pavel Durov “flatly refused,” the CEO said on May 18th.
“Telegram will not restrict the freedoms of Romanian users or block their political channels,” said the Russian-born billionaire, whose free-speech platform has been a thorn in the side of both Putin and Western leaders for years.
Russia banned Telegram nationwide in 2018, but lifted the ban two years later in exchange for its cooperation against terrorism, while French authorities arrested Durov last year and charged him with allowing the “criminal abuse” of free speech after refusing to give them encrypted user information. He’s currently out on a €5 million bail, awaiting trial.
Still, Durov stayed loyal to his principles. As he explained in his X posts, which amassed over 2.2 million views:
You can’t “defend democracy” by destroying democracy. You can’t “fight election interference” by interfering with elections. You either have freedom of speech and fair elections—or you don’t. And the Romanian people deserve both.
The French foreign ministry has since denied these “completely unfounded” allegations, calling them a “diversion tactic” from the real problem of Russian interference. “To lie about France, to insult it, is to break this history” of friendship between Paris and Bucharest, the ministry added.
However, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that French President Emmanuel Macron did have a stake in the Romanian elections. The winner, Bucharest’s independent mayor Nicușor Dan, was openly endorsed by Macron days before the vote, earning the condemnation of nationalist runner-up George Simion for “interfering” in the elections.
The reason for Macron’s endorsement is simple. USR, Dan’s former party, which he founded in 2016 as a centrist, anti-establishment protest movement, sits in Macron’s Renew Europe group in Brussels, so Dan’s election gives Macron a new ally in the European Council.
Although Dan quit the party after its leadership decided to oppose a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in 2017, USR has since shifted back toward the center-right and formally backed Dan for the presidential seat over its own leader, Elena Lasconi.
Although not on Telegram, social media censorship has become rampant in Romania since the emergency ‘anti-disinformation act’ was pushed through in January, a month after the canceled presidential election in December. Just in the last six weeks, Romanian authorities ordered various platforms like TikTok and Facebook to remove over 4,000 social media posts, the majority of which supported either Simion or the banned nationalist candidate Călin Georgescu.
Some of the banned content includes posts as innocent as a man clapping in his living room, with a caption saying “Clap if you want to come home too, clap for GS and CG”—referring to Simion and Georgescu. The man has less than 150 followers, and mostly posts about his daughter.
According to the emergency rules, anyone can be considered a “political actor” if they endorse a candidate repeatedly on social media, and any content that “directly or indirectly urges voters to choose or not to choose, to vote or not to vote” is considered political advertising. If such material is not properly watermarked, the user can even face fines of over half the average annual salary in the country.
Interestingly, those who primarily raised their voice against this abuse were from the opposite camp: liberal politicians from USR, along with NGOs mostly dealing with Russian disinformation. MEP Dan Barna (USR/Renew) even complained at the European Commission last month about Romania “censoring private citizens’ free speech” under the pretense that they are political actors.
Another problem is that while citizens have 48 hours to appeal such a decision, the process rarely ends favorably for them, and there is no mechanism to hold the authorities accountable. “Even though there are cases in which some of these temporary bodies might be abusive in their conduct, you have no legal way to go against them in a court,” explained Elena Calistru, the president of the anti-disinformation watchdog Funky Citizens.
Despite seemingly benefiting from it in the final round, it’s not really a surprise that USR has come out against censorship. Along with the nationalist parties, it has strongly condemned last year’s election cancellation, and kept demanding the second round be held, in which its then-president Elena Lasconi stood a winning chance.
