One Day in the Life of Ion Denisescu

When I started writing about the national meltdown in Romania, I didn’t expect censorship to hit so close. Welcome to Europe’s DSA hell.

My name isn’t Ion Denisescu. It’s not even the Russian version of it, Ivan Denisovich.

My name is Stéphane Luçon, and I’m a Frenchman living in Romania. Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s hero, I don’t live in a gulag, and Europe isn’t the Soviet Union. But you don’t reach perfect totalitarianism overnight. If those who see the signs don’t speak up, it advances step by step—each right taken, each person silenced.

Fortunately for our friends in the U.S., America is at least debating how to reconnect with its founding principles, struggling—trying, struggling—to push back against government overreach and recent censorship abuses.

Europe, meanwhile—the birthplace of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes—seems rather eager to revive their tools: censorship, propaganda, denunciation, manipulation. It’s slowly building techno-totalitarian mechanisms that would have delighted the NKVD, the Stasi, or the Securitate.

The Romanian Securitate... people don’t talk enough about it. This control and surveillance structure recruited some 20,000–25,000 informers a year during the 1980s. We don’t talk much about it, just like we rarely mention how Stalin’s Soviet Union installed communism in Romania. The reeducation camps like Sighet, the Pitesti Experiment—read about them if you can stomach stories of torture and martyrdom. Totalitarianism happened in Romania. It was devastating.

In 1989, people felt immense joy as the dictatorship ended. My wife was 17; she ran down the stairs of her block shoutin “Ceaușescu is gone!” My friend Patrick was 15—he joined the street protests and the fighting. Most of my Romanian friends told me how much hope that moment brought into their lives.

The Romanian revolution began in 1989—but it didn’t finish. The Securitate, the Leviathan of the intelligence services, didn’t die. It morphed. It entered business, politics, the media. It kept leverage, created profitable networks. You can get a glimpse in Alexandru Solomon’s documentary: Kapitalism, Our Secret Recipe.

A painful story is that of the Romanian press. I witnessed its decline. I settled in Romania 25 years ago and spent over 20 years here. I shot two documentaries, published the Romanian edition of Le Monde diplomatique, and partnered with one of the best newspapers at the time: Academia Cațavencu (✝︎2013). Cațavencu was a breeding ground for independent journalism—until it joined a media group, Realitatea TV, and everything slowly went bankrupt.

A turning point came in 2014, when Realitatea’s anchorman Robert Turcescu confessed live on prime-time TV that he was an intelligence asset, saying he couldn’t bear the lying and deception anymore. Meanwhile, an NGO had pushed for legislation to remove such assets from newsrooms. A Romanian MEP, Renate Weber, succeeded in introducing Article 22 into the EU Media Charter. The European Parliament passed it:

“[The Parliament] Calls on the Member States to adopt legislation so as to prevent the infiltration of newsrooms by intelligence officers, since such practices highly endanger freedom of expression as they allow the surveillance of newsrooms and generate a climate of distrust, hamper the gathering of information, threaten the confidentiality of sources and ultimately attempt to misinform and manipulate the public, as well as damage the credibility of the media;”

Romania never complied. Two years later, the head of Romania’s intelligence services, George Maior, was bragging about these assets on TV. Two more years, and he was awarded the CIA’s "Earl Warren Medallion". For the record, Romania had participated in the CIA's secret prison network, a fact confirmed by both the U.S. Congress and the European Court of Human Rights, with Romanian losing the case Al Nashiri v. Romania (31/05/2018).

In my article “The Misery of the Romanian Press”, I described how the intelligence services, starting in the 2000s, deployed assets across the media—over 200 journalists, not just in Romania but even in international newsrooms, all to polish President Băsescu’s image.

You can accept this system or fight it. Live as most Romanians do, not thinking about it, or choose a side—join the inner circle, or scream like a “conspiracy theorist” that the intel guys are manipulating public opinion.

I chose to keep my distance. When Le Monde diplomatique’s French team asked me to republish the Romanian edition, I was thrilled. But I insisted on working alone. I didn’t want a collaborator who might “detonate” the project or subtly align it with the Executive’s interests. I started alone, proud to translate great minds: John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Matt Taibbi, Christopher Mott, Michael Glennon, Charles Glass, Nils Melzer, Aaron Maté, and of course all “my” French badasses, Alain Gresh, Serge Halimi, Pierre Rimbert, Hélène Richard, Anne-Cécile Robert, Benoît Bréville, Charles Enderlin and more.

Translating was a joy. Publishing wasn’t. From the outset, Facebook suspended, reinstated, then permanently censored the “Le Monde diplomatique – ediția română” page, despite brand verification.

I launched a new page—Article 31, named after the Romanian constitutional right to information. There, I posted my "Monde diplo" translations and links to other critical texts, mostly from the “Twitter Files” journalists.

Meanwhile, the world watched Romania descending into a mental breakdown after the first round of the elections, in November. Narratives about some “Russian meddling” spread, mostly driven by the intelligence services, NGOs, and media—without proof, with no critical questions. For them, it was a good versus evil battle. Or better said, it was a matter of survival, that they turned into a good versus evil battle for propaganda purpose. It justified cancelling the most basic element of democracy, the vote, the voice of the people.

What happened is that the media elite had sidelined one candidate, and became terrorized when they saw him leading the first round and leading the polls. Hence the annulment.

When propaganda reaches crazy heights, it’s safer to turn off the TV and seek rational voices. I started documenting what was happening—pointing out a single fact, a single piece of fake news, or one propagandistic narrative isn’t enough. I opened a Substack, created a Twitter account (I had deleted mine in 2020). My posts barely reached anyone—just 1 or 2 views. Still, I wrote, as a way to tell my version of the story and cross-check analyses with others.

About a month after the December meltdown, those hoping to get their “second round back”—a principle I supported—rejoiced when the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission confirmed what rational people already knew: Romania lacked the evidence to annul the election. People never got their second round back, though.

The propaganda apparatus was relentless. Especially buzzing was the push from the NGOs and some French-backed experts to get higher access to social media data. In the name of transparency, they were asking Ms von der Leyen and the local Digital Authority (ANCOM) to grant them those privilege accesses before the next elections. Funnily, all those people from the censorship-industrial complex—mostly funded via Soros Open Society Foundation, USAID, NED, OCCRP, the EU, France or German foundations—chose February 12th to demand those privileges, the same day Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Rupa Subramanya were testifying before the U.S. Congress… about the censorship-industrial complex!

You can read those censors’ open letter, you can try to find any notion of transparency for the users—you won’t succeed. They don’t ask for transparent information about shadowbanning or amplification. They don’t ask for fully open-source algorithms. Nope. Transparency for the experts. It’s “Trust the experts” over and over…

Another driver was disdain for “the deplorables” who voted “wrong”, I wrote about that too.

The most troubling element was the visible role played by Emmanuel Macron. In 2024, he personally called Georgescu’s opponent, Ms. Lasconi, to express support, warned that “the presence of our troops isn’t a blank check,” and sent his ambassador to meet with Romania’s Constitutional Court just days before Georgescu’s second candidacy was cancelled in 2025.

When the elections were held again, Macron once more backed the new rival to the sovereigntist movement, Mr. Dan. His partner, Moldova’s president Maia Sandu, also got involved. A close ally of Macron, she holds Romanian citizenship—as do at least 800,000 Moldovans. This dual-citizenship policy, originally introduced by President Băsescu to foster hopes of reunification, now raises questions about the conflicting aspirations of Moldovans, Romanians, and the broader Romanian diaspora. Interestingly, some of the “experts” I mentioned earlier were also involved in countering Russian influence in Moldova just a few months before, when Maia Sandu was re-elected. While Russian influence may indeed be a factor in Moldova (unlike in Romania), their reinvolvement in a fully pro-EU country like Romania raises serious questions about the weaponization of their tools against ordinary, non–pro-Russia political opponents.

Then came the vote, the results that, statistically, shocked David Sacks.

Media unanimity. Public shaming. Pressure from mayors—one mayor in a nearby village cancelled a concert after hearing that the sovereigntists were leading the first round and shouted at villagers. In rural areas, secrecy can be compromised—visible ballots, special ink, no envelopes (as always in Romania). Enough to influence? Sure. Illegal? Seems not. As The Economist puts it, Romania isn’t a democracy anymore—but it’s not a dictatorship either. It’s a hybrid regime, the first of its kind in the EU, slipping to the margins of the rule of law, with journalists censored, people arrested for speaking their minds, and basic rights to privacy stripped away to please the media mobs…

When Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov, raised concerns declaring he had been pressured by France's intelligence services, an idea struck me. If he was pressured by France, could others—like Meta or TikTok—also have been?

And so, my One Day in the Life of Ion Denisescu begins.
The last 24 hours.

Tuesday, 11:30 AM GMT+3 — I appear on Le Monde Moderne, a French podcast, to talk about the crackdown in Romania. I explain that the sovereigntist movement didn’t aim to leave the EU or NATO. Simion wanted a defensive NATO presence, not one dragging Romania into war. I talked about the press being infiltrated, the budget of the Securitate-like institutions, the racism and disdain of the righteous so-called pro-EU crowd.

5:30 PM — I publish my Durov–France analysis on Substack.

Wednesday, 9:30 AM — I post a YouTube link showing President-elect Nicușor Dan admitting Simion wouldn’t have left the EU—just two days after the fear campaign ended. He admits Simion would’ve stopped aid to Ukraine and Moldova and blocked the Macron–von der Leyen ReArm Europe program. (See timestamp 24:38, with subtitles.)

Minutes after sharing this, my Twitter account was labelled and restricted to read-only mode.

I appealed.

It failed.

I’m just one more journalist censored at that point, after so many accounts being taken down, especially on TikTok in Romania.

Was the DSA ever supposed to protect citizens? For sure, in Romania, it protects power. It’s a laboratory of algorithmic control—managed speech, silent bans, invisible opposition. Romania is a hybrid regime—The Economist is right.

My ban isn’t the point, anyway. But if the power have concerns about a near-invisible account, it means this can happen to anyone in Europe. The DSA, in the wrong hands, isn’t a shield for democracy—it’s a weapon against it. Macron, who oversaw the most brutal political repression in the EU (as documented by Amnesty International, David Dufresnes, Foreign Policy, and others), has shown what’s possible.

If we let the Digital Services Act become a blueprint for silencing dissent, Romania won’t be the exception—it’ll be the prototype. And the silence that follows won’t be a bug of European democracy.

It will be its final feature.

There is another path. One that would bring closure, end the Romanian revolution 35 years after it started: remove intel assets from newsrooms in Romania and all over the world, cut the excess budget feeding the Intel Leviathan, provide full user transparency on social media, and enforce equal exposure for political messages—just as the law already demands for legacy media (though nobody enforces it). It would fix Romania. Because only more democracy, only more free speech, can undo this damage.

More democracy, more free speech would fix France too. 20 years ago, after months of debates, the French rejected the EU constitution. The politicians decided otherwise. You can't govern indefinitely against the will of the people and call yourself a democracy. Let’s do what the Americans are doing, let’s at least try to go back to the major founding principles and let’s cut the techno-totalitarian tools flourishing around us.

Stéphane Luçon

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On a side note, less dramatic: two days before my ban, I had shared a caricature of Macron. Credit to me and my buddy Petre Nicolescu. A tiny lèse-majesté, free of rights to share around the world. A reference to the Yellow Vests movement and Macron’s police violence.

“Emperor Macron I, youth portrait"—when he was only the butcher of the Yellow Vests movement and assaulter of the Republic—years before he obtained Suzerainty over the Comptoir of the Danubian Indies"