It is no secret that the EU is an enemy of free speech. But the sheer scale of its censorship activities has largely remained hidden. Earlier this month, think-tank MCC Brussels published my new report, ‘Manufacturing Misinformation: the EU-funded propaganda war against free speech’. It reveals a covert campaign by the European Commission to regulate public debate in Europe under the guise of combating ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’. Indeed, hundreds of unaccountable non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and universities have been funded by Brussels to carry out nearly 350 projects to counter so-called disinformation – to the tune of almost €650million.
Spooked by both the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s first election as US president in 2016, the European Commission has long been on a crusade to control Europe’s political debate. One form this crusade takes is tackling ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’, which the Commission claims are a growing threat to social stability and democracy. This is far from the benign act of responsible government that Brussels would have us believe. With its flagship Digital Services Act (DSA), the Commission has been engaged in an authoritarian assault on free speech and the European demos.
Research has uncovered the staggering fact that the Commission spends 31 per cent more on policing speech than it does on transnational research and innovation projects addressing various cancer-related objectives (€494million). In other words, the EU regards stemming the ‘cancer’ of unregulated speech as more of a priority than the estimated 4.5million new cancer cases and 1.3million cancer deaths in Europe annually. Without any public accountability, taxpayers’ money is being consciously used to fund an Orwellian project that seeks to control how Europeans speak and think.
Officially, the DSA aims to create a ‘safer’ digital space, where users are ‘protected’ and social-media platforms are obliged to act ‘responsibly’. The term ‘service’ in the act’s title is a subtly insidious piece of bureaucratic newspeak. On the surface, it sounds benign, even benevolent, but it is a rhetorical Trojan horse masking a censorious intent. It presents platforms like Facebook, X, YouTube or TikTok, which act effectively as today’s public square, as mere utilities – only delivering ‘content’ instead of, say, electricity or water. It casts speech as a commodity, rather than an inalienable right.
When social media are treated as a mere ‘service’, regulating speech becomes a technical question of optimising the user experience. Policy replaces politics, and resistance can be reframed as a breach of contract.
Under the DSA, firms are obliged to remove ‘illegal content’ and manage ‘systemic risks’. What these terms mean is kept deliberately vague. This creates an environment of constant doubt, where censorship becomes the default.
The European Commission avoids appearing to censor anything directly. Enforcement is outsourced to private actors, known as ‘trusted flaggers’, who then advise the platforms on what to censor. These are not independent, neutral organisations sworn to enforce objectivity. Often, they are unelected NGOs or organisations closely aligned with the EU’s ideological agenda.
The EU’s weaponisation of language is critical to all this. When it calls something ‘hate speech’, ‘disinformation’ or ‘extremism’, it is telling us what can be said, by whom and with what consequences. These terms are not neutral. They carry ideological weight, recoding entire categories of political speech as illegitimate. Most notably, populists – particularly those critical of EU integration, immigration or the Green Deal – are increasingly framed not as political actors to be debated, but as algorithmic vectors of hate, extremism or misinformation.
The EU’s deeply Orwellian crusade is unlike historical attempts to outlaw free speech. It does not burn books or squash dissent with jackboots. Populism is not outlawed directly in Europe (yet). But it is systematically degraded, rendered suspect by default, always placed on the edge of unacceptability. This is a quiet form of de-legitimisation, silently enforced through the language of civility and tolerance. When populist dissent is pathologised as hate or treated as a cybersecurity threat, it no longer needs to be engaged with. It can be monitored, fact-checked, defunded, quarantined and removed.
The EU fears free speech because of its unpredictable energy. It enables alternative narratives to be voiced and considered. Horror of horrors, it allows European citizens to retain their moral independence – to determine what they think without the need to defer to experts or unelected technocrats who allegedly know what’s best for us. No wonder the EU elites are so determined to quash it.
Dr Norman Lewis is a writer and visiting research fellow at MCC Brussels. His Substack is What a Piece of Work is Man!.
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