By Thomas Fazi
Nov 15, 2025
I’ve written for UnHerd about Ursula von der Leyen’s latest pet project — the Democracy Shield — and how it represents a dangerous escalation in the EU’s construction of a continent-wide censorship machine. These tools, like the Digital Services Act (DSA), claim to protect citizens and democracy from “fake news”, “disinformation” and “foreign interference”. In reality, their aim is to control the narrative and suppress dissent at a time when Europe’s political elites are facing unprecedented levels of public distrust, by centralising control over the flow of information and imposing a single “truth” defined by Brussels. This isn’t about protecting democracy, but rather about shielding the establishment from democracy itself. When coupled with other initiatives, such as von der Leyen’s plan to create a CIA-like supranational intelligence apparatus, it points to a broader, and deeply disturbing, trend of power centralisation in the hands of the Commission — and of von der Leyen personally. The real war on democracy isn’t being waged by Moscow or Beijing — but by Brussels:
“As one EU diplomat recently put it, in truly Orwellian fashion: “Freedom of speech remains for everyone. At the same time, however, citizens must be free from interference”. But who decides what constitutes “interference”? Who determines what is “true” and what is “fake”? The same institutions and corporate media outlets that have repeatedly engaged in fearmongering and disinformation themselves. Just a few weeks ago, Ursula von der Leyen claimed that the GPS system on her plane had been jammed by Russia — an allegation quickly debunked by analysts. Meanwhile, the BBC, often held up as a paragon of journalistic integrity, was recently caught editing footage of a Donald Trump speech to make it appear more extreme. And what about the wall-to-wall coverage of alleged “Russian drone incursions” across Europe that we have witnessed in recent weeks, for which no evidence whatsoever has been provided?
The EU claims to be protecting citizens from “falsehoods” but on what democratic or moral basis does the Commission assume the authority to decide what is true, especially when it is clear that the EU’s political-media establishment itself engages in disinformation and propaganda on a regular basis? Moreover, when so-called independent fact-checkers are hand-picked and financed by the Commission itself, the result is a closed feedback loop: the EU funds institutions that then “verify” and amplify the EU’s own narratives. The Democracy Shield, like its predecessors, thus institutionalises the power to define reality itself.
This is not a new development. As I have shown in several recent reports, the European Union already operates a vast propaganda and censorship apparatus that spans every level of civil society — NGOs, think tanks, the media and even academia. The cornerstone of this system is a network of EU-funded programmes — notably CERV (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values), Creative Europe and the Jean Monnet initiative — that collectively funnel billions of euros into organisations that are, in theory, “independent” but are in fact deeply enmeshed in the Brussels machine.
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