The EU's war on free speech
Mass censorship is our desperate oligarchy’s last line of defence
I’ve written for UnHerd about the EU’s crackdown on online free speech and its ongoing battle with Elon Musk, and why this is about much more than just the whim of out-of-control, power-hungry politicians and bureaucrats:
The global attack on free speech is… a systemic problem that relates to the structural decay of liberal-democratic institutions, particularly in the West. As our societies degenerate into de facto oligarchies controlled by increasingly delegitimised political-economic elites, this manipulation of public opinion — not only through propaganda delivered via traditional mass media channels but also, increasingly, by policing and micromanaging the public conversation taking place on social media platforms — has come to be seen as an imperative for keeping the status quo safe from the threat of democracy. This is compounded by the growing militarisation of the geopolitical context, which requires an even more compliant populace given its political and economic consequences.
It’s no coincidence that the censorship-industrial complex started emerging in the second half of the 2010s. This was the time when the West was rocked by an unprecedented “populist” backlash against globalisation and the neoliberal order — Trump, Brexit, the Yellow Vests, and the rise of Eurosceptic parties and movements across Europe.
It was also when the path of future confrontation with Russia was being laid in Ukraine — and when NATO started developing the hybrid or cognitive warfare doctrine, which conceptualises the management of Western public opinion as an integral part of warfare. As Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s former Secretary General, put it in 2019: “NATO must remain prepared for both conventional and hybrid threats: from tanks to tweets”.
Read the article here. If you’re a paid subscriber and you can’t access the paywall write to me at thomasfazi82@gmail.com.
For a very deep dive on this topic, I highly recommend the report written by Norman Lewis for MCC Brussels, Controlling the Narrative: the EU’s Attack On Online Speech.
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Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)
