On World Press Freedom Day, the European Commission performed one of those little acts of moral exhibitionism at which decaying bureaucracies excel. It declared, with the shamelessness of a pickpocket delivering a sermon on private property: “Let the truth be told, let the press be free.” It then informed us that journalists “uncover injustice” and that democracy needs independent media. Lovely. Moving. Almost enough to make one forget the same institutions have spent more than a decade building a continental machinery for disciplining speech, laundering censorship through NGOs, outsourcing repression to platforms, and dressing every muzzle in the pastel language of safety.  

This is the genius of the European Union: it no longer bans speech in the old crude manner of the provincial tyrant. It does not always send the censor in boots. It sends the policy officer in eco-friendly shoes. It does not say “silence your enemy”; it says “mitigate systemic risk.” It does not say “forbid dissent”; it says “counter disinformation.” It does not say “starve the journalist”; it says “apply restrictive measures.” The guillotine has been replaced by the dashboard, the prison guard by the compliance consultant, the censor’s blue pencil by a terms-of-service update written by someone called a trust-and-safety lead, because civilisation, clearly, is progressing.

The Digital Services Act is the crown jewel of this velvet authoritarianism. The Commission sells it as a noble shield against illegal content, manipulation and corporate opacity. But buried inside its benevolent vocabulary is the logic of political supervision. Very large platforms must identify and mitigate “systemic risks,” including risks linked to civic discourse, elections, public security and public health. That sounds harmless until one remembers who defines the risk, who pressures the platforms, who threatens the fines, and who benefits when certain opinions vanish into the algorithmic cellar. The Commission itself says platforms over 45 million monthly EU users fall under the stricter regime. In other words, the public square is now a regulated zone, and Brussels holds the fire extinguisher, the fire alarm and the matches.  

The next frontier is already visible: VPNs. Europe may not formally “ban” them, because even Brussels occasionally notices when a technical and legal wall is made of concrete. But the age-verification regime now being pushed across the continent creates the obvious next problem for the censors: users can bypass it. A senior Commission official has already acknowledged that the EU’s system can be circumvented with a VPN, while the Commission is urging member states to roll out age-verification tools linked to national schemes and the coming European digital identity wallet. The likely solution will not need to criminalise VPNs. It will simply make websites, apps and platforms refuse to work properly unless the user submits to verification. Not a ban on privacy, then, but the construction of an internet where privacy makes you functionally invisible, excluded, suspicious. Subtler. More efficient. Much harder to protest. And absolutely totalitarian.

The first great rehearsal came in 2022, at the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war. The EU’s instinct was not to trust citizens to read critically, compare sources and make up their own minds, because apparently Europeans are adult enough to be taxed, conscripted into opinion and lectured about democracy, but not adult enough to watch a television channel without Brussels holding their hand. RT and Sputnik were suspended across the EU by Council measures, including online distribution. The justification was propaganda and manipulation. Perhaps it was. But the question is not whether Russian state media are innocent little lambs skipping through the meadow of truth. The question is whether a democratic order should arrogate to itself the power to decide which foreign outlet may exist on European screens at all.  

Once that line is crossed, every censor discovers his inner philosopher. Every prohibition becomes a hygiene measure. Every banned voice is a pathogen. Every dissenting citizen becomes an infection vector. This is how politics dies: not under the jackboot, but under the laminated flowchart.

And then there is Ursula von der Leyen, the high priestess of antiseptic empire, standing amid flags and acronyms like a CEO of moral superiority; unelected by any direct vote of the European peoples, yet forever addressing them as if they were disobedient interns in her private compliance department. Under her Commission, Europe has perfected the art of speaking like Voltaire while behaving like a bank manager closing the account of a dissident. The case of Hüseyin Doğru is particularly grotesque. The EU sanctions regime froze the journalist’s bank accounts over his pro-Palestine reporting, and the restrictions extended to his spouse’s accounts, effectively cutting off the family’s livelihood. This is how liberal authoritarianism works now: it does not always drag the dissident to a cell; it locks the bank account, strangles the household, and calls the whole operation a defence of democracy. Starvation by spreadsheet. 

This, too, is modern censorship. The old censor burned books. The new censor freezes accounts. The old censor smashed printing presses. The new censor asks payment processors to discover their conscience at exactly the same moment as the state discovers its enemies. The old censor said, “You may not speak.” The new one says, “Speak all you want, provided you can survive without banking, platforms, employment, reputation or legal defence.” Humanity has invented progress, and naturally turned it into a more efficient cage.

Meanwhile, Spain still carries the shame of Pablo Hasél, imprisoned after convictions linked to lyrics and tweets, a case Amnesty International described as an unlawful restriction on freedom of expression. Europe, naturally, can denounce censorship abroad with the theatrical sorrow of a duchess misplacing a pearl, while one of its own member states jails a rapper over words. But do not worry: the brochures remain excellent.  

Nor does the Ukrainian chapter offer Brussels any chance of moral rescue. The EU pours taxpayer money into Kyiv with the mechanical devotion of a casino addict feeding the last coin into the slot, yet it has developed a miraculous blindness before the authoritarian habits of the regime it funds, arms and sanctifies. Journalists have been killed during the war in Ukraine, including many cases attributed to Ukrainian fire, while others have faced detention, pressure, harassment, surveillance and restrictions under the Ukrainian state itself. Brussels weaponises some violations when they serve its geopolitical script, and buries others when they stain its client state.

The real scandal is what Europe permits, excuses and bankrolls in Kiev. Zelensky’s government suspended eleven opposition parties in 2022, including Opposition Platform for Life, a party with forty-four seats in parliament; Ukrainian courts later banned sixteen parties outright; and another seventeen were placed under threat of prohibition. These were not harmless procedural footnotes. These were political forces representing real social constituencies, inconvenient regions and ideological currents that became intolerable once NATO’s favourite morality play required a clean hero and a clean villain. Calling them simply “pro-Russian” is not analysis. It is laundering repression through a label. It is the oldest trick of emergency power: first rename opposition as contamination, then erase it in the name of hygiene.

And still, no reprimand comes from Brussels. No thunderous communiqué. No sanctimonious sermon from von der Leyen about pluralism, democracy or European values. Ukraine has not held national elections since 2019, martial law has become the padlock on the ballot box, opposition parties have been suspended or banned, and media life has been disciplined under wartime command. The European Union keeps wiring money with the serene expression of a priest blessing artillery. This is not solidarity with a people. It is imperial patronage with a blue-and-yellow filter. The same Commission that can hunt a meme, a slogan, a bank account or a dissident journalist across Europe suddenly becomes illiterate when its client state bans parties and postpones democracy indefinitely. Brussels does not defend freedom of speech. It audits it, licenses it and distributes it according to geopolitical usefulness

And Palestine? Here the hypocrisy becomes obscene. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that 129 journalists and media workers were killed in 2025, the highest number CPJ has recorded in more than three decades, and that Israel was responsible for two-thirds of those deaths. The same Europe that can detect a Russian bot from orbit becomes suddenly blind, deaf and spiritually unavailable when its ally turns Gaza into a slaughterhouse for reporters. A continent that can sanction, ban, freeze and regulate at the speed of light develops the reflexes of a dead tortoise when Palestinian journalists are killed.  

The Council of Europe’s own press freedom platform warned this year that journalism across Europe is under sustained pressure from legal threats, physical attacks, intimidation, media capture and transnational repression. Civil liberties groups have also warned of declining media freedom, concentration of ownership, SLAPPs and political interference. So when the Commission tweets about press freedom, it is not speaking from a hilltop. It is speaking from inside the machinery.  

The true scandal is not that the European Union lies. All powers lie. The scandal is that it lies in the vocabulary of virtue. It wraps coercion in the language of care. It calls censorship “safety,” blacklisting “values,” propaganda “strategic communication,” and obedience “resilience.” Its authoritarianism is not theatrical, moustached or vulgar. It is worse: it is administrative. It wears a lanyard. It books stakeholder meetings. It says “fundamental rights” while building instruments to narrow them. It can freeze you, fine you, erase you, de-rank you, demonetise you and then invite itself to a conference on democracy.

World Press Freedom Day should not be an occasion for Brussels to congratulate itself like a corpse admiring its complexion. It should be an indictment. A free press does not need hymns from bureaucrats. It needs protection from them. It needs courts that defend speech even when speech is ugly. It needs citizens treated as adults. It needs journalists who are not financially strangled for reporting the wrong massacre. It needs governments that do not outsource censorship to Silicon Valley and then pretend the platforms acted voluntarily.

“Let the truth be told,” says the Commission.

Very well. Let it be told.

The European Union has not abolished censorship. It has modernised it. It has digitised it. It has given it a legal department, a human-rights vocabulary and a blue flag with yellow stars. And under Ursula von der Leyen, it has learned to do what all declining empires do at the end: preach liberty abroad while rationing it at home.