BANNER: A torn poster featuring presidential candidate George Simion is seen next to one of the newly elected Nicusor Dan, ahead of the second round of the presidential elections, in Bucharest, Romania, on May 16, 2025. (Source: REUTERS/Louisa Gouliamaki)

A network of fifteen websites, three of which actively repost Romanian content emanating from far-right and fringe news outlets, appears to be affiliated with the France-based company DirectWay. The company is connected to a news aggregator called Ziar.com, found to spread disinformation, and an X account, @_Direct_News, which has posted content amplifying claims of election interference from the European Union (EU) and France in Romania’s presidential elections.

Between May 17-18, Romanians went to the polls to elect a new president after the country’s Constitutional Court annulled the first round of the December 2024 presidential elections, citing credible evidence of Russian foreign interference and electoral irregularities that helped elect pro-Russian candidate Călin Georgescu. Two candidates competed during the new presidential elections held in early May; the liberal pro-European Nicușor Dan and his far-right opponent, George Simion, who had presented himself as “the successor to Călin Georgescu.” On May 18, Dan won the election with 53.6 percent of ballots and defeated Simion, who had 46.4 percent of votes.

This investigation reveals that the Romanian news outlet Ziar.com reposted content from far-right and fringe news sources that were previously, and frequently, flagged for posting disinformation. Ziar.com is also linked to a web of Romanian, Asian and African-related news aggregators, in addition to other websites advocating for alternative plant-based medicines.

On May 18, the date of the second round of the Romanian presidential elections, the website Ziar.com republished news content from the far-right Romanian news outlets Realitatea Plus, ActiveNews, and Gândul, including articles that claimed Simion had won the presidential election. Several dozen articles from the Romanian fact-checking outlet Veridica previously flagged Ziar.com as an amplifier of disinformation, conspiracies, anti-vaccine content, and misleading narratives. On its front page, Ziar.com features an embedded YouTube livestream and articles from Realitatea Plus, a far-right TV station and online outlet, according to Media Bias Fact Check.

According to the European Digital Media Observatory, following the May 2025 election, Realitatea Plus was fined 10,000 lei ($2,240) for broadcasting “campaign material for George Simion on election day.” Additionally, in an X post published on election day by DirectNews, the verified X account claimed that “George Simion: the conservative patriot [is] president,” alongside a screenshot of an infographic taken from Realitatea Plus’s YouTube livestream falsely claiming that Simion had won 52 percent of ballots.

After broadcasting Simion’s false victory on X (as shown in the screenshot above), DirectNews claimed that Realitatea’s livestream “was blocked during transmission.” The announcement post also included screenshots of Realitatea’s embed on Ziar.com. The livestream interruption allegation, which has not yet been verified, echoes a December 2024 decision by Romania’s National Audiovisual Council to suspend Realitatea Plus’s broadcasting for “violating the impartiality of candidate coverage,” in favor of Georgescu during the previous presidential election cycle, according to the International Electoral Observation Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to Romania.

At the time of writing DirectNews’s most widespread X post referenced allegations of foreign interference that were made by Telegram founder Pavel Durov. In a series of X posts on May 18, Durov claimed that a “Western European government […] approached Telegram asking us to silence conservative voices in Romania ahead of today’s presidential elections,” and that “[the] head of French intelligence, asked me to ban conservative voices in Romania ahead of elections.” These accusations were amplified in the Romanian press, in the articles posted by Ziar.com, and on X by the DirectNews account. France’s Directorate General for External Security (DSGE) said it “strongly refutes” the allegations.

Using DNSLytics, the DFRLab found that Ziar.com shares a Google Analytics code with a network of fifteen websites, five of which target Romanian audiences. Two of these websites, Romaniapress.com and sportul.com, appear to also function as news aggregators, while mathematiques.com and roumanie.com seem to share Romania-related news content and generic facts about Romania to a French audience.

The French-language websites connect to the news portal africain.info, which appears to target multiple African nations with country-specific news aggregators. At the time of writing, alongside “Africain.info,” only the news aggregator targeting the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) appeared to be active.

However, historical DNSLytics data revealed that the network targeted as many as thirteen French-speaking African countries between 2017 and 2025. At the time of writing, these websites were replaced with news aggregators redirecting to the domain “direct.news,” targeting all fifty-five African states, as well as forty-seven Asian countries.

In addition, the network administers two French websites advocating for homeopathy (homeo.fr) and plant-based treatments (medicinales.fr).

A reverse Google AdSense search revealed that the network was administered by a Romanian national based in Lyon, France, whose personal website also shared a Google Analytics code with multiple Africa-focused websites in the network. The DFRLab confirmed that this individual is also the director of the DirectWay news agency, according to recovered entries of the French public company registry.

The investigation into DirectWay and Ziar.com, and their unsubstantiated claims of election interference in Romania’s 2025 presidential elections, uncovered a web of interconnected news aggregators and websites that previously targeted other continents. The network’s pivot from targeting African and Asian countries to promoting election denialism in Romania raises questions about the actors behind these websites and their motivations in spreading potentially harmful disinformation across multiple regions.

Valentin Châtelet, “Romanian website linked to global news aggregator network amplifies claims of election interference,” Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), May 23, 2025, https://dfrlab.org/2025/05/23/online-network-with-french-ties-promotes-election-interference-claims-in-romania/.