The non-public documents submitted to the Committee demonstrate, according to the authors, that the aim of the European Commission was “to disadvantage conservative or populist political parties”.
According to the report, a month before the 2024 presidential elections, the EU Support Hub for Moldova, which operates under the European Commission, held a two-day summit with platforms on “countering the risks of disinformation through regulation of digital services”.
Among the speakers was, among others, the Prime Minister of Moldova. At the same time, the authors note that “a candidate from the same party as the Moldovan Prime Minister ran in the presidential election, raising serious concerns about conflicts of interest.
“The discussions considered ‘best practices’ for censoring alleged misinformation, with a particular focus on the Digital Services Act (DSA),” the authors point out.
And they note that Moldova is not yet an official member state of the European Union. This, they argue, “raises additional questions as to why the discussion of the DSA in Moldova took place at all, if the Commission claims that the DSA has no extraterritorial effect and does not apply to Moldova”.
The report was published on February 3 of this year. Since then, it has been actively commented on by officials, experts, politicians, and the media.
Position of the European Commission and Romania
The European Commission strongly rejected the accusations made in the US Congress report. “As for the latest accusations of censorship – this is pure nonsense. Completely baseless,” said EU digital affairs spokesman Thomas Renier, quoted by France’s Le Monde. He emphasized that “freedom of information is a fundamental right in the EU protected by the DSA.”
Romania is mentioned 113 times in the report, as counted by Euronews România. Particularly in the context of the presidential elections.
Romanian President Nicusor Dan stated that the decision to annul the election was “an internal legal act of defense of the constitutional order in the face of an asymmetric threat, based on the assessments of the national security authorities and on the authority of the Romanian Constitutional Court.”
Moldova questions the status of the document
Moldovan and Romanian politician Ana Gutu notes that the report “does not represent the official position of the United States, and Jim Jordan, the author of the report, is an American extremist politician, an ally of Donald Trump.”
Public policy and security expert Andrei Curăraru called the report “a political text used as a weapon in an economic dispute.” “It’s not a decision, it’s not a committee opinion, there’s no vote, there’s no institutional endorsement at the committee level.”
Former ambassador and ex-member of parliament Igor Munteanu, a consultant at the New Strategy Center, a Romanian think tank specializing in foreign policy, defense and security, proposed a debate on the report “to refute or confirm the allegations of its authors.”
“Because if there is no such debate, the perception will be that someone wants to take revenge on their political rivals with the same methods used during the period of the captured state,” Munteanu said.
But so far, no Moldovan official has commented on the report. Attempts by Logos Press to get a reaction from the Central Electoral Commission proved fruitless.
If the silence is explained by the desire not to feed the story in the hope that it will “dissolve itself”, this goal has clearly not been achieved. Discussions, especially on social networks, continue to gain momentum, and even this morning’s good news from the ambassador to the United States about the allocation of $36.5 million to strengthen national security could not change the direction of the mainstream.
Link to The Foreign Censorship Threat, Part II: Europe’s Decade-Long Campaign to Censor the Global Internet and How It Harms American Speech in the United States. Interim Staff Report of the Committee on the Judiciary of the U.S. House of Representatives.
