The right's global techlash gains a cause celebre
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Romania is suddenly commanding the attention of the tech-minded global right.
No, not because of Andrew Tate's mysterious return from Romania to the States today — at least not entirely. It was the arrest and questioning on Wednesday of Calin Georgescu, the far-right presidential candidate who came out of nowhere with a TikTok-fueled campaign that powered him to first place in the first round of Romanian elections in December 2024.
The first people to panic about Georgescu were European liberals, who treated his win as an alarming example of how right-wing insurgents — and potentially foreign actors like Russia — could use social media platforms to gain power. After an investigation by Romanian intelligence that claimed Georgescu was powered by social media campaigns similar to those deployed in Ukraine and Moldova, Georgescu's first-round victory was later annulled on grounds of alleged Russian interference.
Now Georgescu's interrogation and indictment are sparking a mirror-image moment of outrage from politicians on the right. Across the globe, they're holding up Georgescu as the preeminent victim of a conspiracy between liberal governments and tech platforms to silence right-wing voices.
'They just arrested the person who won the most votes in the Romanian presidential election. This is messed up,' Elon Musk wrote on X. At this month's Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance unloaded on the Romanian courts that overturned the election, saying 'When we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we're holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.'
In the global conversation about censorship and tech, the Georgescu case seems to be picking up right where the 'Twitter files' left off. To right-wing tech critics, his pariahdom looks like a perfect example of why the anti-disinformation efforts of the first Trump and Biden eras — whether by tech platforms, governments, or both— pose a grave threat to democracy.
Writing in the socially conservative Compact magazine after last year's Romanian elections, columnist Nathan Pinkoski argued that their annulment was 'a direct application of the anti-disinformation paradigm that politicians and technocrats have promoted for years.'
'When the Romanian Constitutional Court cancelled presidential elections on the basis of a vague intelligence assessment, barely any public justification was provided for this extraordinary action,' Pinkoski told DFD today. 'Skeptics will charge that this looks like a brazen effort of lawfare to strip Romanian voters of the power to make their own electoral decisions. If this is a strategy to defeat populism, it seems doubtful it will succeed.'
What distinguishes the anti-disinformation movement from previous forms of liberal information governance, Pinkoski wrote last year, 'is the claim that the advent of the internet requires a change in the rules.'
Georgescu did, after all, win the election fair and square, as DFD wrote in the aftermath of the election and its annulment.
Despite accusations that Georgescu's campaign was illegally powered by Russia and violated TikTok's own rules about election interference, no votes were tampered with. Nearly a quarter of Romania's voters pulled the lever for him, and even Georgescu's liberal rival criticized the government's cancelling of the election.
The question Romania, and possibly the European Union and global liberal democracy, now face is whether it's even possible to fight what they see as election 'tampering' if it happens at the platform level rather than literally at the ballot box.
Democracies now face a crucial test of whether they can maintain some semblance of legitimacy while attempting to clamp down on false information and conspiracy online, or whether they have no option but to let free speech reign and the chips fall where they may.
For the right, the challenge is far less ambiguous. To them, the silencing of Georgescu's voters is vindication of their long-held belief that a secretive, octopus-like network of tech industry and liberal nonprofit interests are silencing conservative voices — and that now, with Trump and Musk in power, is the time to cut off its tentacles.
'To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don't like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion, or God forbid vote a different way, or even worse, win an election,' Vance continued in Munich.
For its part, Silicon Valley has gone to great lengths to pivot away from the effort to fight 'misinformation' — not just since President Donald Trump won election, but long before it.
Those moves might at least temporarily placate the Trump administration, with its transactional mindset. But longtime tech foes in Washington still say they want to keep the fight alive. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said he wants to haul tech CEOs in front of Congress and interrogate them about allegedly silencing conservative voices. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told NPR today that he's still waiting for the tech titans who lined up behind Trump to 'go out and say now that they're going to stop their censorship against conservatives.' For a once-obscure European right-winger, Georgescu's name is only beginning to echo through the politics of tech.
doge's bite
More Washingtonians are expressing their chagrin with Elon Musk's 'move fast and break things' approach to governance.
POLITICO's Sophia Cai reported today on growing discontent with the Department of Government Efficiency's 'disruptive' reform of the bureaucracy, as 21 veterans of the U.S. Digital Service (now U.S. DOGE Service) resigned this week in an open letter that declared: 'We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans' sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services.'
'When you have a tech company, every day you're failing because you're trying to bring something that doesn't exist into existence,' one anonymous former Trump official turned tech entrepreneur told Sophia. 'In government, you're just trying to deliver legally guaranteed services to the public. You can't fail. You have to succeed slowly.'
This cultural collision has been a long time in the making, and doesn't seem likely to abate anytime soon. A National Park Service ranger warned that DOGE was deactivating critical safety devices, and an anonymous senior Federal Aviation Administration official said the agency is losing critical expertise just as a slew of high-profile aviation incidents have shaken America's confidence in flying. Still, the White House is standing by Musk: 'There is no reason why a CEO's approach cannot work in the nation's capital,' White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told Sophia. 'The majority of Americans would rather have CEOs running the show than career bureaucrats.'
this is your brain on tiktok
A California Democrat wants social media users to see unskippable pop-up ads about the apps' potential harms.
POLITICO's Tyler Katzenberger reported for Pro subscribers on a plan from California Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan that would mandate people see the daily ad explaining the potential risk of social media to youth mental health.
'I wanted a warning that gave readers at all levels enough time to digest — not something that could just be skipped past,' Bauer-Kahan told POLITICO in a statement Wednesday.
The bill, AB 56, was referred to the California State Assembly's Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee, which Bauer-Kahan chairs, and it will likely be heard in the coming weeks.
post OF THE DAY
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Stay in touch with the whole team: Derek Robertson (drobertson@politico.com); Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@politico.com); Steve Heuser (sheuser@politico.com); Nate Robson (nrobson@politico.com); Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@politico.com); and Christine Mui (cmui@politico.com).
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