The European censorship-industrial complex
New US report confirms what many of us have been saying for years: that the EU has built a censorship-industrial complex of massive proportions — and is using it to interfere in democratic processes
I’ve written for Compact about the recent US House Judiciary Committee report and how it confirms what many of us have been saying for years: that the EU has built a censorship-industrial complex of massive proportions designed to control the public narrative, marginalise critical voices — and even interfere directly in elections:
The critics should feel vindicated following the release of an interim staff report by the US House Judiciary Committee titled The Foreign Censorship Threat. Based on thousands of internal Big Tech documents and communications with European regulators, the report confirms in granular detail that Brussels has been engaged in what House Judiciary Republicans describe as “a decade-long campaign to achieve global online narrative control”.
These efforts—culminating in the 2022 implementation of the Digital Services Act (DSA), the most sweeping internet regulation regime ever introduced in the Western world—began as early as 2015, when the European Commission established a series of “codes” and “forums” through which it could pressure platforms to censor speech. These were not isolated initiatives but part of a deliberate strategy designed, in the words of the committee, to “silence political opposition and suppress online narratives that criticize the political establishment”.
Indeed, the release of internal communications from major technology platforms shows how Europe’s regulatory architecture—made up of an interlocking network of unelected EU institutions, Big Tech firms, and NGOs (most of them state- or EU-funded)—has narrowed the boundaries of permissible speech.
The EU leadership’s principal defense has been that its various “codes of practice” are voluntary. Yet the internal correspondence cited in the report challenges this claim. Emails from Google and other technology companies suggest that platforms felt they had to comply with Commission expectations. Companies deemed non-compliant may face fines of up to 6 percent of global annual revenue and, in extreme cases, suspension from the EU market. Such penalties create powerful incentives for companies to adopt stricter, globally applied moderation rules—even when those rules affect users far beyond Europe’s borders.
Internal files further indicate that the supposedly consensus-based forums often operated under “strong impetus from the EU Commission”. Debates on contentious political topics, from migration policy to gender issues, were focal points of regulatory attention.
The degree of interference described is striking, often resembling a granular, real-time supervision of political discourse. As the report highlights, for instance, the EU Internet Forum (EUIF)—officially a voluntary initiative—evolved from a narrow focus on counter-terrorism into a broader remit that included scrutiny of “political satire,” “populist rhetoric,” and even “meme subculture”. In other words, the emphasis slowly shifted from removing illegal content to discouraging politically inconvenient viewpoints. […]
Perhaps the most damning claim in the report is that the EU’s censorship-industrial complex has extended well beyond mere narrative control into direct electoral influence. Since the DSA came into force in 2023, the report shows, the Commission has pressed platforms to take heightened moderation measures ahead of elections in several EU member states, including Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, Moldova, Romania, and Ireland, as well as during the 2024 European Parliament elections. […]
The most damning case is that of the 2024 Romanian presidential election. The first round of voting—in which independent populist candidate Călin Georgescu finished ahead—was annulled after authorities raised allegations of coordinated Russian online influence, and Georgescu was later barred from participating in the rerun. However, no publicly verifiable evidence substantiating the interference claim was produced at the time and an internal document from TikTok explicitly informed the European Commission that it found “no evidence” of such a coordinated network. The annulment makes clear that the “Russian interference” narrative has become a catch-all justification for the suppression or delegitimization of political dissent and for straightforward electoral interference by Brussels.
Read the full article here.
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Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)
Calling this a “censorship-industrial complex” misses what’s actually being built.
This is legibility engineering.
When persuasion failed and institutions slowed, political reality had to be compressed into machine-readable risk categories. “Foreign interference” became a universal error flag not a claim to be proven, but a condition to be mitigated.
The absence of evidence in Romania isn’t a failure of process. It’s a signal that process no longer governs outcomes.
Thanks as always for the reporting and analysis Thomas!
Please consider taking it one step further to where the actual censorship impetus originates: the global techno-totalitarian cartel that has replaced sovereign governments in terms of controlling the world's resources and populations -- and, of course, narratives.
You write so much about how the EU is "vassalized" by the US. But it is not the US government that is in control -- it too is "vassalized" by the same transnational corporations, oligarchs, and international banking system. (Because many of the corporations are in the US, the illusion is created that they are pursuing some kind of nationalist agenda. They are not. They are using the nationalist agenda to subdue populist unrest.)
The transnational cartel is interested in censorship because people have too much access to information on how it is dismantling national sovereignty and constitutional and legal frameworks that protect ordinary people. The US has the best Constitutional free speech protections so it's difficult to directly curtail free speech here. Therefore, the job is carried out by the EU -- and by the other Five Eyes countries (Canada, UK, Australia, NZ). They are not doing this in some kind of imaginary EU-US free speech rivalry. They are doing this at the behest of the transnational vassalizing corporate powers, including Silicon Valley tech and media companies (that pretend to be outraged but have erected enormous AI surveillance and algorithmic censorship mechanisms of their own).
Covid demonstrated this very clearly. When the global governing bodies through which the transnational cartel disseminates and enacts its agenda decided that "misinformation" was the biggest threat to humanity and that national governments were the best positioned to act against it, every national government stepped up to obey the decree: https://brownstone.org/articles/internet-censorship-everywhere-all-at-once/