The EU sanctioned me and my media outlet for covering Palestine protests in Germany. It’s part of Europe’s growing authoritarianism and militarism, cloaked in language of fighting disinformation and defending democracy.
by Hüseyin Dogru
Part 5 - How the EU built a censorship regime
The EU has spent the past decade building the legal scaffolding for this crackdown – without a whisper of dissent from Europe’s liberal media or civil society. Warmongers have always used a bogeyman to co-opt its liberal bourgeoisie for its wars on domestic and foreign adversaries, from Communists, to Saddam Hussein, to migrants, to Muammar Gaddafi. Today nothing shakes liberals’ loyalty to their democratic principles faster than one word: Russia.
Craftily situating its disinformation strategy as part of its fight against a fictitious Russian threat, the EU’s foreign policy arm, the EEAS, has gradually reframed dissident journalism as a danger to the bloc’s security. Militarized terms like “hybrid threats” and “foreign interference” are now being stretched to cover domestic dissidents – branded as “proxies” of foreign adversaries based on vaguely defined criteria with no grounding in law.
What has emerged is a full-fledged “war on disinformation” – a rhetorical cousin to the West’s wars on communism, crime, drugs, and terror. Each of those “wars,” even by the admission of their erstwhile champions, produced far more repression and rights violations than they did public safety. This one is no different.
Craftily situating its disinformation strategy as part of its fight against a fictitious Russian threat, the EU’s foreign policy arm, the EEAS, has gradually reframed dissident journalism as a danger to the bloc’s security. Militarized terms like “hybrid threats” and “foreign interference” are now being stretched to cover domestic dissidents – branded as “proxies” of foreign adversaries based on vaguely defined criteria with no grounding in law.
What has emerged is a full-fledged “war on disinformation” – a rhetorical cousin to the West’s wars on communism, crime, drugs, and terror. Each of those “wars,” even by the admission of their erstwhile champions, produced far more repression and rights violations than they did public safety. This one is no different.
This “war on disinformation” hasn’t remained rhetorical, it has been codified into EU policy, but now in an even more broad form so that not just false information or illegal speech are targeted, but even perceived tone and intent. Since 2022, disinformation has gradually been supplanted by Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) which the EU defines as:
“A mostly non‐illegal pattern of behavior that threatens or has the potential to negatively impact values, procedures, and political processes… manipulative in character, conducted in an intentional and coordinated manner. Actors can be state or non‐state, including proxies.”
That same year, the Digital Services Act (DSA) granted the Commission sweeping powers to declare information emergencies and mandate social media platforms to remove content. Digital rights groups are sounding the alarm that the EU is using the DSA for “politically driven interventions” and as a “global censorship tool”.
“A mostly non‐illegal pattern of behavior that threatens or has the potential to negatively impact values, procedures, and political processes… manipulative in character, conducted in an intentional and coordinated manner. Actors can be state or non‐state, including proxies.”
That same year, the Digital Services Act (DSA) granted the Commission sweeping powers to declare information emergencies and mandate social media platforms to remove content. Digital rights groups are sounding the alarm that the EU is using the DSA for “politically driven interventions” and as a “global censorship tool”.
All of this in the name of “defending democracy” in Europe, which according to one EU report, resolution, decision and regulation after another, is threatened by narratives which “[undermine] the European project”, and question the “democratic legitimacy of the representatives of Member States”. According to the bloc’s executives, the EU is so democratic, that the democratic right of its citizens to question how democratic it truly is, must be viewed with suspicion.
Mockery aside, we leftists know well to be suspicious when the powers that be in the West begin to talk about “defending democracy” in the Global South. We have seen the horrors such language has enabled from Latin America to the Middle East. We need to be equally suspicious of it at home, especially at a time when Europe and its leading member states like Germany, are beating the war drums louder than ever before.
Mockery aside, we leftists know well to be suspicious when the powers that be in the West begin to talk about “defending democracy” in the Global South. We have seen the horrors such language has enabled from Latin America to the Middle East. We need to be equally suspicious of it at home, especially at a time when Europe and its leading member states like Germany, are beating the war drums louder than ever before.
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