Pavel Durov
This statement was made by Telegram founder Pavel Durov on the X network, commenting on the report of the US House of Representatives legal committee investigation. “This is consistent with the French government’s attempts to force Telegram to censor speech in two of those countries,” he wrote.
Background on the issue
Last spring, Durov reported that French intelligence chief Nicolas Lerner had asked him to block Romania’s conservatives on Telegram ahead of the presidential election, but he refused. The French Foreign Ministry denied this, RBC writes.
According to the Committee’s report, the administration of TikTok in a report to the EC failed to confirm the fact of Russian interference in the elections in Romania.
In December 2024, Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the results of the first round of the presidential election, in which Calin Georgescu, who received a reputation as a pro-Russian politician for his criticism of NATO and statements about the patriotism of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was leading.
“The internal TikTok documents presented to the committee seem to refute this version [of interference]. In documents for the EC, which has used repeated allegations of Russian interference to investigate TikTok’s content moderation practices, the social network said it found and received no evidence of a coordinated network of 25,000 accounts linked to Georgescu’s campaign,” the report said.
