For years, many of us have warned that the European Union has been constructing a censorship-industrial complex designed to control the public narrative, marginalize critical voices, and interfere in democratic processes. EU elites have largely dismissed such concerns as conspiracy theories, insisting that online speech regulation is merely about protecting vulnerable groups from “hate speech” and safeguarding democracy from “disinformation” and foreign influence operations—with Russia typically cast as the culprit.
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.”