In November, the European Commission unveiled the European Democracy Shield, aimed at enforcing and implementing the EU’s draconian online censorship regime, codified in the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The continent-wide initiative includes:
- A new “Digital Services Act Incidents and Crisis Protocol” to ensure the EU can rapidly coordinate with tech platforms to take down offending content.
- A €5 million call for proposals to grow the new European Network of Fact-Checkers.
- An estimated €9 billion in projected spending on EU-aligned media through the AgoraEU programme.
- Expansion of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) to conduct “independent monitoring” of elections, crises, and online content patterns.
- The creation of a new European Centre for Democratic Resilience, where EU and Member State authorities will jointly pool resources to track and neutralize emerging “threats.”
All three components slot neatly into existing EU efforts to formalize platform-government cooperation, turning content moderation into a compliance obligation, as well as the top-down astroturfing of “independent” media and fact-checkers.
Expanded Foreign Interference Mandate
A mid-November Commission statement made clear that the Democracy Shield is not limited to Europe’s internal information space:
“The Commission will step up its work to combat foreign information manipulation and interference beyond our borders… Capabilities in EU Representations and Delegations abroad will be reinforced.”
This external mission mirrors the U.S. State Department’s long-standing approach, projecting “disinformation countermeasures” outward through diplomats, NGOs, and aligned civil-society groups.
Henn Virkunnen, Executive Vice President for Technological Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy, was even more blunt: the EU intends to “demonetize disinformation,” working with signatories of the Code of Practice on Disinformation to strip advertising revenue from content deemed false or harmful.
One of the signatories of the Code of Practice, NewsGuard, is both U.S. government-funded and a pioneer in the technique of financially throttling tech platforms and online news websites through advertiser boycotts. This is one of the organizations that EU officials are now pledging to work with to demonetize disfavored online speech.
A €5 Million Boost to the Fact-Checking Industry
In May, the Commission launched a €5 million call for proposals to grow the new European Network of Fact-Checkers. This network is designed to extend the reach of EDMO and the European Fact-Checking Standards Network—two bodies that already exert outsized influence over the content-moderation policies of major platforms through “trusted flagger” status and coordinated assessments.
The “trusted flaggers” system can be understood as the eyes and ears of the EU’s censorship regime, making sure that prohibited speech is detected and passed on to transnational censors.
As the Foundation for Freedom Online previously exposed, almost two dozen U.S. government funded organizations are directly involved in enforcing the EU’s counter-disinformation initiatives, including through participation in EDMO.
This means the U.S. government’s proxies are still directly involved in the enforcement of a digital censorship regime whose primary target is U.S. tech companies.
It follows the prediction of censorship industry professionals ahead of the 2024 election – that the EU and its Digital Services Act would be their main hope for major institutional support if the U.S federal government cut off their support (which it did, immediately following President Trump’s inauguration in January.)
The U.S. State Department’s Hand in Europe’s ‘Media Literacy’ Agenda
The Democracy Shield’s literacy focus closely resembles the Biden-era State Department’s approach. For years, the State Department (specifically the Bureau of Europe and Eurasia) has exported media literacy and digital literacy frameworks across Europe.
Its 2022 Media Literacy Design Manual openly framed media literacy not as child protection, but as a tool to delegitimize “propaganda, conspiracies, rumors, hoaxes, [and] hyper-partisan content”—a sweeping category that includes wide swaths of mainstream political dissent.
The manual’s author, Martina Chapman, has advised both the EU and European governments on literacy and digital policy. Chapman has long argued that insufficient “media literacy” explains political outcomes disliked by transnational institutions. In 2017, she blamed both Brexit and Donald Trump’s election on citizens believing “fear and blind optimism” instead of “facts and figures.”
This framing—treating populist voter sentiment as a cognitive deficiency—has now made its way into the EU’s Democracy Shield initiative, which declares “the Commission will roll out measures to foster media and digital literacy for all ages”, including an “EU citizenship competence framework along with guidelines to strengthen citizenship education in schools.”
