Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

Aspectre is haunting Europe, but it is not the spectre of disinformation or hate speech. It is the spectre of linguistic control and censorship to curb free speech. And it’s not coming from China or Russia but the heart of the EU itself: from the European Commission.

Since 2016, after the Brexit vote and the first election of Donald Trump as U.S. President, the EU Commission, spooked by these developments, has been on a crusade to control Europe’s political narrative. One form of this crusade has been the ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’ narrative, which the EU Commission has argued is a growing threat to social stability and democracy in Europe. Its content, however, is far from the benign act of responsible government the EU Commission would have us believe. Led by its flagship piece of legislation, the Digital Services Act (more accurately the Digital Surveillance Act), the Commission has been engaged in an authoritarian assault on free speech, and the European people, whom they consider lack the moral independence to think and act in their best interest.

This new report from MCC Brussels focuses on the much-neglected means through which the EU Commission realises its narrative objectives. Research has uncovered the staggering fact that the Commission has funded hundreds of unaccountable Non-Governmental Organisations and Universities to carry out 349 projects related to countering ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’ to the tune of almost €649 million. This is thirty-one per cent higher than the money allocated for transnational research and innovation projects addressing various cancer-related objectives (€494 million). The EU Commission regards stemming the cancer of free speech as more of a priority than the estimated 4.5 million new cancer cases and almost 2 million cancer deaths in Europe in 2022. Taxpayers’ money has been consciously used to fund an Orwellian disinformation complex to dictate and control the language of public debate as a result.

This report exposes the fact that taxpayers’ money is being used without any public accountability. This is important to expose. But this report is more important than that. It is an urgent act of democratic vigilance. Because when language is narrowed, softened, obfuscated or stripped of meaning, so is the possibility of resistance and the development of alternatives.

The Ministry of Narrative Control

A previous report published in 2024, Controlling the Narrative: The EU’s Attack on Online Speech, outlined the EU’s Censorship Operating System and how the EU’s Ministry of Truth manages this. But this report uncovers the EU Ministry for Narrative Control, which sustains the most extensive quest to regulate the language of political speech in European history.

What is not fully understood is how the EU Ministry for Narrative Control curates the parameters of the ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’ narrative. The projects funded involve civil society, universities, and research companies who self-consciously legitimise, sustain, and advance the assumptions this narrative subterfuge is built upon. The language and assumptions these uncritically accept and promote establish a recursive self-fulfilling loop that simply ‘proves’ the existence of the ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’ narrative, which then requires further ‘research’ which, unsurprisingly, discovers that more research is needed.

The EU’s success in determining the language of public communications is remarkable. It is a lexicon that has been internalised and never questioned, whether in European Parliamentary debates, online, or in the media. Yet it pervades everything. The Digital Services Act is its crowning glory. Through this, the Commission has not only established its right to determine what can or cannot be said online but also codified the Orwellian newspeak at the heart of the EU language, or what the report refers to as NEUspeak. now on.

The DSA is presented as a milestone legislation aimed at creating a safer digital space where users’ fundamental rights are protected, and social media platforms are obliged to act responsibly. The term ‘service’ is one of the most subtly insidious pieces of bureaucratic NEUspeak. On the surface, it sounds benign, even benevolent, but it is a rhetorical Trojan horse masking an authoritarian, censorious intent.

At face value, calling platforms like Facebook, X, YouTube, or TikTok ‘services’ makes them sound like utilities – passive infrastructures that deliver content like electricity or water—technical and procedural entities rather than inherently political and ideological. This depoliticises the public square of the 21st Century, obscuring the fact that these corporations are private, unaccountable, profit-driven entities with enormous powers to shape public debate through algorithmically enforced speech boundaries. It hides from view that what’s at stake is whether private, unaccountable corporations or the equally unaccountable Commission get to determine the truth and who can utter it.

‘Service’ shifts the relationship between citizens and social media platforms. The user is not an active citizen but a data-producing ‘end-user’ within a tightly regulated commercial framework increasingly dictated by state-aligned priorities. Speech is presented as a commodity delivered conditionally rather than something inalienable. Dissent and anything deemed dangerous becomes a risk factor to be managed. Regulating speech—censorship – is not a political tool but a technical means of service optimisation, the fine-tuning of a technical delivery system. Policy replaces politics, while resistance is isolated as a breach of contract. Terms like ‘illegal content’ and ‘systemic risks’ are never defined but are deliberately vague. This creates an environment of constant doubt where self-censorship by everyone involved becomes the default. The Commission, in turn, avoids the appearance of direct censorship while effectively outsourcing enforcement to private actors, thus excusing itself from responsibility. This is censorship by an unaccountable outsourced proxy.

The technical enforcement through designated ‘trusted flaggers’—entities empowered to report content for expedited removal—is another layer of obfuscation. These are not independent, non-aligned, neutral organisations sworn to enforce objectivity. Often, they are unelected NGOs or state-aligned organisations closely aligned with the Commission’s Federalist ideological agenda. The technocratic language suggests neutral expertise, but deploying these proxies establishes a hierarchy of speech where certain voices are given institutional priority in shaping the information landscape.

In these ways, the DSA doesn’t openly censor but rebrands the regime it enforces as the infrastructure of neutral content moderation. It doesn’t silence voices directly – it builds systems in which silence becomes the safest option for social media platforms and users. And it does all this while speaking the smooth, managerial dialect of EU policy-speak: a language engineered not to alarm but to comfort, confuse, and control.

The language embedded in the DSA sets the legal terms of speech controls. It frames the public conversation and thus the terms within which the debate about free speech is conceived and acted upon across Europe. The key point, however, is that this is backed by a curated narrative that reinforces the idea that this is the only acceptable way public debate can be conducted. Setting the language sets the terms of the conversation.

What might not be appreciated is that the 349 identified funded projects—involving hundreds of NGOs, universities, and profit-making research organisationsis the tip of an iceberg. These projects are ones only identified on the EU Funding and Tenders Portal and the Horizon Programme database, Cordis. Many more exist which are not designated ‘hate speech’ or ‘disinformation’ but promote the same narrative. The report highlights that the EU has funded 227 ‘mental health’ projects over the past decade, which contain numerous examples of projects with a tangential relationship to mental health but a direct one to the same narrative. Moreover, there is funding for many minority groups who feature in almost every official EU definition of hate speech and are regarded as the victims of hate speech and disinformation. Each group is covered by an EU strategy position, which involves numerous initiatives and funding in multiple areas, making it almost impossible to calculate the extent of the EU’s real spending.

The spending highlights a paradox. The level of spending reveals an inconvenient truth: the EU relies upon the institutionalisation of the very thing it purports to want to extinguish. It is willing to spend over half a billion Euros to legitimise its crusade to control speech and to de-legitimise the rising populist tide.

This should not be understood in any conspiratorial sense. The EU does not promote hate speech or disinformation; its target is free speech. They fear free speech because of its unpredictable energy because it enables alternative narratives to be voiced and considered, and horror of horrors, because it suggests that European citizens still retain moral independence and thus the ability to tell truth from lies and information from disinformation without the need to defer to experts or unelected technocrats who allegedly know what’s best for them.

It is critical to understand that the EU is engaged in a silent war to regulate language and, through this, the de-legitimisation of alternative narratives like the rising tide of populist opposition. This is a battle over language and the legitimacy to dictate the terms of public communications. It is a top-down, authoritarian curated consensus, where expression is free only when it speaks the language of compliance established by the Commission.

This is not censorship in the blunt, authoritarian sense. It is the creation of a discursive architecture that manages dissent through language control—by redefining what counts as acceptable discourse and who gets to shape it. It does not silence voices; it submerges them under waves of euphemism, analytics, and policy. At heart, the battle over narratives is a struggle over meaning. And in this war, whoever controls the language controls the limits of the political imagination.

The battle over language is often overlooked or regarded as of secondary importance. But, as the report highlights through numerous examples of the language used in funded projects, language is not just a technique for communication. It is how we think, imagine, and decide what is real and meaningful. Every society, whether democratic or authoritarian, depends on language to shape its values and meaning, its conflicts, and its limits. The words we are given determine what we can see, what we can name, and what we can challenge. When language is controlled—by states, institutions, or NGOs—so is the range of thought and dissent. A society that redefines surveillance as ‘safety’ or censorship as ‘content moderation’ does not need to silence citizens outright; it simply changes the meaning of their silence.

Language is the EU Ministry of Narrative Control’s software infrastructure of control. When the EU Commission defines hate speech, disinformation, or extremism, they are not identifying problems – they are drawing the lines around what can be said, by whom, and with what consequences. These definitions are not neutral. They carry ideological weight, especially when delivered in the neutral obscurantist tones of policy language. Entire categories of political speech are being re-coded as illegitimate. Most notably, populist political movements—particularly those critical of EU integration, immigration, or the Green Deal—are increasingly framed not as political ideas to be debated but as algorithmic vectors of hate, extremism, or misinformation. Populist language is scrutinised not on ideological or democratic grounds but through technical and moral frameworks that pose rhetorical questions. The answers to these questions are known beforehand, such as whether they promote harmful stereotypes. Or does it erode trust in institutions? Or does it violate community guidelines?

Populism is not outlawed directly (yet). But it is systematically linguistically degraded, rendered suspect by default, always placed on the edge of unacceptability, a quiet form of de-legitimisation, silently enforced through the language of civility and tolerance. And when this becomes the norm, the terrain of democratic contest shrinks. Once populist dissent is pathologised as hate or treated as a cybersecurity threat, it no longer needs to be engaged with. It can be monitored, fact-checked, defunded, quarantined, and removed. Through the vocabulary of public safety and moderation, public debate is increasingly managed like a public health crisis, a hygiene regime that cleanses speech and purges the toxins to promote ‘healthy voices’.

This deeply dishonest Orwellian crusade is unlike historical attempts to outlaw free speech. It does not burn books or squash dissent with jackboots. Instead, it is a silent and focused war conducted in public to control the language of conversation. The Commission rightly understands that controlling the language of communications means controlling the conversation. And if it can control information and the truth, it controls history, the past, and the future.

Exposing how taxpayer money is being used without any public accountability is vital. However, exposing the language war is an even more necessary act of democratic vigilance. The dishonesty at the heart of this crusade is monumental: pre-determined results are presented as if they were the impartial outcome of ‘independent’ research and practice.

Yet, all this serves to highlight weakness, not strength. The need to constantly manufacture an artificial consensus reveals this narrative has no organic connection to the social reality it purports to reflect. It is a top-down conceit, sustained to legitimise the status quo that millions of Europeans are now questioning and speaking out against. €649 million is a lot of money to hide the fact that the Commission can only rule through negative authority and manipulation; indeed, it has no clothes.

Original article: The European Conservative