There is another war raging in Europe outside of Ukraine. The EU elite are waging it over what can be said, heard and thought. It is a war against “hate speech” and “disinformation,” which the EU claims is an existential threat to democracy. In fact, it is the censorship designs of the Eurocrats that pose the real danger to the freedoms of Europeans, Spiked reports.
The EU stepped up its censorship campaign ahead of the June elections. Last month, several Brussels mayors tried to shut down the NatCon Brussels event. And last week, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pledged to create a “European Democratic Shield” if she stays in power for a second term. She believes it will combat “foreign interference and manipulation” by creating a new unit dedicated to identifying and removing misinformation on the internet.
Von der Leyen’s speech followed a similar speech by EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell in January. He warned that disinformation is “not a bomb that can kill you, but a poison that can colonise your minds … [that] spreads like a cancer and endangers the health of our democracies.”
Věra Jourová, the European Commission’s vice-president for values and transparency, is not far behind, having spoken sharply about “rivers of filth, hatred and lies” at a conference organised by the European Digital Media Observatory last week. She also said the EU should increasingly use artificial intelligence to “detect manipulation” and “better enforce what qualifies as an offence.”
EU’s attack on online speech
Brussels’ warnings about hate speech and disinformation have taken on an almost apocalyptic character. To counter this hysterical narrative, Spiked reporter authored a report for the think tank MCC Brussels entitled Controlling the Narrative: The EU’s Attack on Online Speech. It reveals how, under the guise of defending democracy, EU elites have launched a crusade against free speech that actually threatens European democracy. This follows the publication of the MCC Brussels Declaration on Freedom of Speech earlier this month, which is part of the EU’s ongoing fight against authoritarianism.
The report says the EU’s fight against “hate” and “lies” has a clear political agenda. With elections looming, the EU elite are wary of any open and unpredictable debate that could challenge their right to rule. Especially as polls are now predicting a surge in support for populist and nationalist parties opposed to centralised EU control. Although Brussels claims that its aim is to protect minorities from harm, in reality it seeks to control the speech of the majority.
EU Ministry of Truth
To this end, the EU has effectively created its own “Ministry of Truth.” An unholy alliance of unaccountable groups has taken it upon itself to censor speech – from the European Commission and its network of unelected “experts” and NGOs to the equally unaccountable big tech companies and the EU courts. A range of laws such as the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Media Freedom Act (MFA) and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) underpin all of this. For example, the DSA allows the Commission to determine what users can or cannot say on social media platforms and provides for huge financial penalties for non-compliance.
Similarly, the proposed Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR), which has the supposedly noble aim of protecting children, originally proposed to give officials the power to monitor the private communications of every EU citizen.
Use of AI in EU
This already sprawling network of censorship will become thousands of times larger through the application of artificial intelligence. As Vice President Jourová pointed out, the EU plans to use artificial intelligence to automate and expand the detection and destruction of hate speech. Vera.ai is one such project that aims to “develop and build robust artificial intelligence-based solutions to combat disinformation.”
This will inevitably lead to disaster. Obviously, AI does not understand human communications, context and nuances of meaning. As a result, the use of AI will lower the threshold for understanding what hate speech is. Expanding this threshold to the extent that the EU intends to do so also means that humans – the last bastion of reason in the process – will likely leave the equation in favour of full automation.
This is not a unfounded fear. Automated algorithms have long been used to detect and remove “problematic” online content. In the first quarter of 2019, Facebook reported that 65% of content removed from its platform was flagged by machines, up from 51% in previous months. Similarly, YouTube reported that in 2017, 79 per cent of videos removed for violating its policies were initially caught by automated flagging systems. In the second quarter of 2019, that figure was 87 per cent.
By April 2019, 38 per cent of offensive content that Twitter (now X) took action against was flagged by algorithms for human review rather than based on user reports. The previous year, the figure was 20 per cent. The addition of artificial intelligence will undoubtedly increase that percentage significantly.
Best defence of democracy
The message here is obvious. Eurocrats don’t believe that Europeans are capable of thinking for themselves. Someone – be it an EU content moderator or an artificial intelligence system – should decide what they should read, hear and see. All this talk of defending European values and democracy barely masks the Brussels elite’s contempt for the citizens they lord it over.
In fact, the best defence of democracy is always more freedom of speech. Right now, the biggest threat to European democracy is the EU itself.
