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A year or so ago, a video circulated on TikTok that showed various Hollywood stars—Dolph Lundgren, Lindsay Lohan, Kevin from The Office—calling, in Russian, for the ouster of Maia Sandu, the president of Moldova. As you might imagine, the celebrities in question were not actually invested in the politics of Moldova, a tiny former Soviet republic that borders Ukraine to the southwest—but as Morgan Meaker noted in Wired last week, the video did not appear to be the result of any deepfake trickery. Rather, it seemed to have been compiled out of footage sourced from Cameo, an app on which users pay famous people to record video greetings. According to NPR, at least one of the celebrities thought they were talking about “a person named Sandu who was becoming a stuntwoman.”
If it wasn’t quite clear who was behind the video, it was reasonable to suspect the hand of Russia or its associated influence-mongers: for years, the Kremlin and its outriders and sympathizers have been accused of smearing Sandu, who is favorable to the idea of greater European integration, and meddling forcefully in Moldovan politics more broadly. In 2020, the year Sandu was elected, claims of a pro-Russian fake news campaign swirled; in 2022, Russian propaganda surged again around the invasion of Ukraine, as I reported for CJR at the time. As I also noted back then, political interests aligned with the Kremlin controlled swaths of Moldova’s media landscape, particularly in the TV industry. The space for independent journalism was particularly limited in Transnistria, a separatist enclave along the border with Ukraine, where Russian troops have long been stationed.
Fast-forward two and a half years to this past weekend, when Moldova held a pair of crucial votes: one an election for the presidency, the other a referendum on whether to constitutionally guarantee the country’s path toward joining the European Union, a step that would not equate to membership in the bloc (which is typically only granted following a much longer process) but would signal an enduring pivot toward the West. Again, Russian and associated elements have been accused—including by the governments of the US, the UK, and Canada—of spreading propaganda and disinformation, from low-tech street fliers to more sophisticated fake videos of Sandu and other ministers, as well as funding opposition candidates, training potential agitators, and buying votes. In that scheme, Moldovan officials have pointed the finger at Ilan Shor, an oligarch who fled to Moscow and has since been convicted of massive theft from Moldova’s banking system. This month, Telegram suspended Shor’s account after he promised to pay users to sign up to an anti-EU channel, according to the New York Times. (He is, perhaps unsurprisingly, still allowed on X.)
Ahead of the votes, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, took down a cluster of accounts and pages that included a dozen Russian-language fake news sites; meanwhile, Moldova’s security services banned numerous Russian propaganda sites as well as those of a Moldovan media company that officials have linked to Shor. This step did not come without controversy: Reporters Without Borders stressed that Moldova has a “legitimate motive” in fighting Russian disinformation, but warned that unilateral bans risked setting “a dangerous precedent against press freedom.” Nor were these the first such bans that officials have administered (I noted back in 2022 that they had just taken action against various pro-Kremlin sites and broadcasters, citing emergency powers), nor the first time that such action has triggered concerns about censorship. Moldova has a vibrant independent media sector that has done critical reporting on Russian influence—but it is relatively small and has faced a variety of pressures, not least, it would seem, the corrosive effect of Russian meddling on public trust and the denaturing of legitimate political debate.
(In one illustrative, if bizarre, case, Natalia Morari, an independent TV journalist famed for tough coverage of oligarchs who have been accused of corruption, fell in love with one and had a child with him—then ran as a candidate against Sandu in this weekend’s presidential election. A fellow journalist told the New York Times that Morari has damaged trust in the entire profession, adding that while she doesn’t care about Morari’s private life, “if you are sleeping with a politician or an oligarch, you don’t write about politics; you write about flowers or chickens.” Morari has also been accused of doing Russia’s bidding, but she characterized such criticism as an attempt to discredit her on the part of her opponents, complaining to the Times that all the West sees when it looks at Moldova is “Putin, Russian propaganda and hybrid war.” She added, of her relationship, that “life is complicated. I understand that it’s easier in a black-and-white world to talk about that corrupted guy and the discredited journalist.”)
Strikingly similar themes—fears of growing Russian influence, disagreements over future EU membership, sharp popular polarization—have been at issue in another set of elections this week: in Georgia, a different post-Soviet nation, which borders Russia and will go to the polls for parliamentary elections this coming weekend. There, too, the information space and media industry have been central to recent political events. Russia has been accused of various forms of meddling, from sowing propaganda to extensive hacking aimed at media companies alongside many other institutions, as Bloomberg reported yesterday.
And last year, the governing Georgian Dream party, which has been accused of a pro-Russian orientation, proposed a law aimed at forcing certain news organizations and NGOs that receive overseas funding to label themselves as foreign agents and comply with onerous bureaucratic requirements—a mirror image of legislation that has increasingly been used to stigmatize and harass free media inside Russia, as I reported last year. (According to Foreign Policy, the Georgian law contains provisions that could force its subjects’ staff to disclose personal data up to and including their sexual preferences.) The similarities were not lost on protesters, who dubbed the bill “the Russian law” and turned out en masse to oppose it. The government initially withdrew the proposal—but then, earlier this year, reintroduced it with only cosmetic changes. Protests swelled again, but this time the law passed; Georgia’s pro-EU president vetoed it, but lawmakers overrode the veto.
Earlier this month, a first group of NGOs were added to the new registry—but many others have challenged the law in the courts and otherwise refused to comply. According to a pre-election fact-finding mission undertaken by a coalition of international press freedom groups, only one media organization had so far consented to sign up; at least a couple of independent news outlets have switched the registration of their headquarters to Estonia, a different post-Soviet state far from Georgia, in an attempt to avoid legal reprisals. “For now, this law does not apply to us,” Aka Zarqua, the editor in chief of the investigative outlet Realpolitika, told Voice of America recently—but he warned that the election could change things. “Pressure from the international community and the backlash within Georgian society have both contributed to the government not fully enforcing this legislation before the election,” Zarqua added. “It’s clear that October 26 will be decisive in this regard.”
Like Moldova, Georgia has some aggressive independent journalism, but the sector overall is fragile and subject to various types of political pressure. (Ann Cooper has classified both countries’ post-Soviet media ecosystems as being “midway” between the more developed press freedom enjoyed in the Baltic states, including Estonia, and the outright repression of, say, Belarus; I talked to her about this spectrum back in 2021.) In recent times, the Georgian government has restricted journalism in the country in ways that have gone beyond the foreign agents law: another recent piece of legislation seeks to criminalize the supposed “promotion” of LGBTQ+ relationships and related issues; the pre-election mission found that Georgian journalists are increasingly reporting a climate of fear around their work. The results of the election, of course, remain to be seen, but Georgian Dream is expected to prevail—even, perhaps, if that requires resorting to dirty tricks, as the Financial Times has suggested.
Back in Moldova, Sandu emerged as the clear winner of the first round of the presidential election, though she will still need to navigate a runoff scheduled for early next month. (Morari was eliminated with a very small vote share.) The referendum on enshrining Moldova’s path toward the EU was also approved—but in the end, it was incredibly close, much more so than predicted. Some observers made the case that this was itself a big achievement, given the intensity of the pro-Russian influence campaign. But the slim margin of victory could now “herald a new period of political instability and protests, with calls for recounts and allegations of fraud from both sides,” as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has reported.
Ahead of the pair of votes, Meaker, of Wired, spoke with Ana Revenco, a former interior minister who now heads a new Center for Strategic Communication and Combating Disinformation (and whose appointment to that post was itself procedurally controversial, according to Reporters Without Borders). Pro-Russian information operations linked to the votes were “unprecedented in terms of complexity,” Revenco said. “This shows us our collective vulnerability,” she added. “Platforms are not only active here. If [Russia] can use them here, they can use them everywhere.”
Other notable stories:
- For CJR, Kyle Paoletta spoke with lawyers and legal scholars about the ways in which Trump could stifle journalism in a potential second term, and found that “the Espionage Act offers the clearest path—largely because presidents of both parties have already used it to do just that.” The law has never before been used to prosecute a journalist, but it has increasingly been applied against journalists’ sources and was used to charge Julian Assange, who, in a legal sense, is “very hard to distinguish…from traditional journalists who receive and publish information,” David McCraw, deputy general counsel at the New York Times, told Paoletta. Arguments already made by Trump’s legal team and allies could, if the courts agree, be weaponized not only against defense reporters but the White House press corps.
- For New York magazine’s annual “Power Issue,” Charlotte Klein asked fifty-seven of “the most powerful people in media” whether and how the industry might survive. (Sewell Chan, CJR’s executive editor, was among those with whom Klein spoke.) “All of these media insiders have watched up close as the business that undergirds journalism changed dramatically in the past decade, and almost all of them would agree that it hasn’t, for the most part, been for the better,” Klein writes. They also “struggled to identify how power in the media works now.” And yet “we found a lot of optimism about the media business and its future,” with even gloomy interviewees seeing “a lot of good work being done in their own shops and those of their rivals.”
- Meanwhile, New York parted ways with Olivia Nuzzi, the star political reporter who was placed on leave recently after acknowledging a personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; the magazine said that internal and external reviews found no inaccuracies or bias in Nuzzi’s coverage, but that both parties had agreed that “the best course” was for her to depart. In other media-jobs news, Jemele Hill is launching Above the Fold, a show for TNT Sports aimed at breathing life into the waning sports newsmagazine format. And Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post journalist who was once jailed in Iran, will oversee press freedom initiatives at the paper.
- For CJR, Lucila Pinto examined the anti-press tactics of Javier Milei, the libertarian president of Argentina, who has attacked journalists rhetorically while shuttering a state-owned news agency, slashing government advertising budgets, and limiting journalists’ ability to file public records requests. “Although other administrations have held public and heated political wars against media companies…Milei’s style of persecution feels different,” Pinto writes. “This is aimed at journalism,” Alejandro Alfie, a journalist at Clarín, said. “Milei doesn’t believe in journalism’s role.”
- And the Times and ProPublica are demanding that John Grisham, the prolific author of legal thrillers, make changes to a chapter that he contributed to a new nonfiction collection about wrongful convictions on account of its close similarities to reporting by Pamela Colloff that the two outlets published in 2018. Grisham insists that he fully acknowledged and credited his sources, but the Times and ProPublica say that his use of their work “goes far beyond usual professional practices,” per the Post.
