The EU’s desire to censor Twitter is an attempt to “steal democracy from the people”, an MEP has told Breitbart Europe.
Nicolas Bay, an EU parliamentarian for Eric Zemmour’s Reconquête party, has warned that the bloc’s attempts to censor Twitter are essentially anti-democratic, with senior officials in Brussels and Paris hell-bent on controlling the views of the general public.
Bay’s warning comes after renewed threats from the Emmanual Macron government in France that Twitter would be banned if it refused to implement European censorship laws.
According to a report by POLITICO, French Digital Minister Jean-Noël Barrot was the one to issue this latest warning against Elon Musk’s platform, arguing that if it failed to censor so-called “disinformation”, it would not longer be permitted in the European Union.
“Disinformation is one of the gravest threats weighing on our democracies,” Barrot said. “Twitter, if it repeatedly doesn’t follow our rules, will be banned from the EU.”
However, speaking to Breitbart Europe, Bay emphasised that attempts to clamp down on so-called misinformation and disinformation are really aimed at controlling public discourse, something he views as anti-democratic.
“The EU claims it is fighting against misinformation, but that is a pretext used by what we call the ‘extreme center’ or the ‘far center’,” the French politician explained, adding that, in reality, “urban elites” just want “to enforce an authoritarian project” on Europe.
“Twitter is a new agora, a digital one, essential to free speech and true democracy,” he continued, describing attempts to censor the platform as an attempt to “steal democracy from the people”, as well as “to promote political correctness and to spread [the EU’s] woke propaganda”.
“Despite claiming to defend fundamental rights, the EU is actually restricting freedom of speech and of thought which are the fundamentals of a real democracy,” Bay went on to say. “This liberticide tendency is aggravating and extremely worrying.”
The threats from France and Bay’s subsequent warning about EU censorship both come at a time of heightened tension between Brussels and Elon Musk’s Twitter.
Although having previously committed the platform to implementing the European Union’s censorship plan, Musk now appears to have u-turned on his support of the bloc’s attempt to control the internet, pulling his social media firm out of a voluntary online speech control project run by the EU last week.
Such a decision prompted much gnashing of teeth from senior Eurocrats, with the bloc’s commissar for its internal market, Thierry Breton, boasting that the union will soon use its Digital Services Act to legally force censorship on Twitter whether Musk liked it or not.
“You can run but you can’t hide,” Breton declared. “Beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will be legal obligation under [Digital Services Act] as of August 25.”