The EU's Digital Dictatorship

'The EU Commission's Faustian pact with social media giants—censorship for immunity—exposes the anti-democratic authoritarianism of the Brussels elite.'

From The European Conservative

By Norman Lewis

The EU Commission's Faustian pact with social media giants—censorship for immunity—exposes the anti-democratic authoritarianism of the Brussels elite.

So, the truth has come to light: the European Commission offered social media platforms secret illegal deals in the run-up to the recent European elections, that if they censored speech without telling anyone, they would be immune from prosecution under the Digital Services Act (DSA). 

This claim, made by X owner Elon Musk in a tweet on Friday, in which he revealed X had refused to cooperate with the deal but that Facebook and Google had, is extraordinary. It is remarkable because, throughout the recent elections, Brussels was constantly warning of Europe being under threat of fake news, disinformation, and hate speech emanating from Russia, while in reality, European citizens were under attack from the anti-democratic and hateful censorious attitude of EU elites. 

Musk has exposed the arrogant hypocrisy of the Brussels elite and their so-called allegiance to defending European values like democracy and free speech. 

However, doing backroom deals with social media platforms to conceal censorship from the electorate is neither an accident nor unexpected. It simply brings into the cold light of day the extent of the EU elite’s contempt for the electorate and democracy. Their institutionalised authoritarianism rests upon a cocky elitist self-belief that they and their experts know what’s best for society and, thus, that they have the right—indeed, the duty—to decide what is acceptable or unacceptable speech. And to what end? Not to serve democracy but their narrow interests, to control the narrative so they can ensure the status quo.

Musk has revealed that the EU’s narrative of hate speech and disinformation is not a well-meaning one but a dictatorial authoritarian bid to control and manipulate outcomes – all in the name of defending democracy. You could not make this up.

These developments have important implications for the EU and its future. The Rule of Law, the much-vaunted core European value cherished by Brussels, is nothing more than a blunt instrument, yielded or ignored, depending upon the needs of the EU elite at any one time. That the EU could propose a deal with Big Tech that would immunise them from prosecution under the DSA, passed to police speech online under the threat of massive fines, demonstrates that the objective of all this was never protection or upholding the law. The DSA is nothing more than a legal charade, a masquerade under which the EU elite exercise their power, in this case by outsourcing its censorship needs. 

Musk revealed in one tweet that the real aim of the DSA has always been for Big Brussels to dictate what can and cannot be said online. Musk shows that the EU has enshrined freedom from speech as an organising principle rather than upholding any modicum of democratic process or accountability.

Anyone familiar with the EU and its roots knows how anti-democratic it is as an institution. My report, Controlling the Narrative: The EU’s attack on online speech, published before the elections, showed how, under the guise of upholding civilised norms of behaviour—in countering ‘fake news’ and ‘hate speech’—the Brussels elite had launched a truly worrying attack on free speech and the foundations of European Democracy. The report reveals that in 2016, when the Commission introduced the Code of Conduct Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online without passing through the European Parliament, a backroom deal had been struck with social media platforms to police online speech. The Code referred to the framework for removing (without due process) what the Commission felt to be the illegal spread of hate speech online. As the report noted, this set the scene for the birth of the most extensive censorship Trojan Horse on the planet.

Big Tech began to use automation and machine learning with help from human ‘fact checkers’ to enforce hate speech laws and the removal of posts deemed to be ‘disinformation.’ Meta, for example, cavalierly boasted that the interaction of human decision-making to train their technology, which then ‘becomes more accurate’, had made their ability to police the online space more efficient. In its Community Standards Enforcement Report (for the third quarter of 2021), the company said its proactive removal rate for hate speech was 96.5 per cent. During the reporting period, 22.3 million pieces of hate speech were removed. YouTube’s enforcement report (Q3 of 2021) records that between July 2021-Sept. 2021, 5,901,241 videos were removed through AI moderation, 233,349 from user moderation, 85,791 from trusted flaggers, 9,471 from NGOs and 30 from governmental agencies. 

The Code of Conduct is important because it shows that the EU’s behaviour has been systematic from 2016 onwards through to the DSA (and it being waved aside). It is a systemic behaviour. This is now in the public domain. Which is why the need to fight for free speech has become so critical and why MCC Brussels launched the Brussels Free Speech Declaration, to start a concerted fightback against EU authoritarianism.

Musk’s tweet has exposed that a core component of the EU elite’s modus operandi lies in bypassing Parliament and member-state scrutiny to effectively outsource censorship in Europe. Through an extra-legal alliance of unelected and unaccountable entities and organisations along with Big Tech, the EU operates a Ministry of Truth, which is wholly unaccountable. While the EU elite screamed from the rooftops about the danger of Putin-inspired ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation’ during the elections, they were acting like Putin as authoritarian gatekeepers dictating what would be acceptable or unacceptable speech in the ‘free’ European elections.

However, there are big questions to be answered. To his credit, Musk refused to comply with the ‘offer you cannot resist’ and exposed its existence to the public. But what about Meta and Google? Did they comply? And if they did, what did they censor during the elections? More importantly, what about the post-election period? Does this hidden censorship continue?

One of the biggest questions now for Big Tech is which side they are on. Will they remain complicit in the EU’s dishonest narrative about curbing hate speech and disinformation, which is a hate campaign aimed at the people of Europe? Will social media companies go along with the façade of EU democracy while hiding Brussels’ contempt for the ordinary people and their assumed inability to think for themselves? Will they, as Musk appears to be doing, declare that free speech, not freedom from speech, is the default democratic starting point? Or will they, driven by their business models, collaborate in the most extensive disinformation narrative in history and perpetuate the idea that the EU elite care one iota about democracy, openness and accountability? 

It is time for Big Tech to be held accountable.