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Romania’s social media regulator has hit back at Washington’s claims that it is censoring speech, saying it is instead fighting an information war with Russia to stop election meddling.
Pavel Popescu, the vice president of telecom and media regulator ANCOM, told POLITICO in an interview that a “hybrid war” was underway and that “we are fighting it. We are fighting it at the highest level with all the institutions.”
Romania has become ground zero in a global struggle over how speech is regulated online. Its top constitutional court in December canceled the win of ultranationalist Călin Georgescu in the first round of the presidential election after security services warned Russia was mounting “aggressive” hybrid attacks on social media. Georgescu has been barred from running in the do-over election scheduled for May.
ANCOM oversees the Digital Services Act in Romania, the European Union’s social media rulebook that governs how platforms like TikTok and X moderate online speech.
“We’ve never seen something like” what happened in the November 2024 presidential election, Popescu said.
Unsurprisingly, Popescu has drawn the scorn of X owner Elon Musk, who on March 10 posted that “you can tell who the bad guys are by who is demanding censorship,” with a link to a post picturing Popescu. United States Vice President JD Vance also singled out Romania in a February speech in Munich in which he called EU regulators “commissars” for enforcing content moderation policies.
If Musk is going to treat ANCOM “as a threat,” the tech entrepreneur should talk directly with Romanian authorities in the same way he conversed with Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Popescu said. Musk in January interviewed the AfD’s leader in a livestream on X, just six weeks before Germany’s snap parliamentary election.
The spat between the Romanian regulator and the Tesla, X and SpaceX boss comes even though Musk’s satellite company Starlink is testing controversial new applications in Romania — with ANCOM’s approval.
Musk’s company in October reportedly tested changes in the globally agreed limits on power flux density, 25-year-old standards that ensure space objects don’t interfere with each other. SpaceX and Amazon have argued that these limits are outdated and interfere with innovation.
Musk “owes us more than a debate for what we did for him as a country, for his companies,” Popescu said.
SpaceX, which owns Starlink, did not respond to POLITICO’s request for comment.
