A leading Eurocrat has called for more controls on speech in order to confront the supposed scourge of “disinformation narratives” within the bloc.
Despite finding that so-called disinformation did not play a major role in deciding the European Parliament elections in June, European Commission Vice President Věra Jourová said that a “whole of society” approach will be necessary to clamp down on speech.
She said in comments reported by POLITICO that this would include “strategic communication, pre-bunking of the disinformation narratives, effective law enforcement for the digital space, strong independent media as well as the research, fact-checking and critical thinking.”
The push for even more censorship by Brussels comes in the wake of an assesment by the suppoedly independent European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), which claimed that in the lead up to the EU elections, there was the highest ever recorded level of EU-related online disinformation.
However, Jourová admitted that the alleged spike did not produce a “major incident… capable of disrupting the elections.”
Elsa Pilichowski, the public governance director for the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), told the news outlet that “we were predicting, you know, more problems this year than there has been,” and that AI had not been a “game-changer” in the European Parliament elections.
Yet she said that government officials are are “discussing policy options” surrounding the advent of AI, including the potential of the technology to be used to hijack ballots.
“They are in the process of getting ready. But I don’t think we are ready yet for the risks that are coming up,” Pilichowski said.
Not long after these stridently authoritarian remarks, Jourová turned the matter into a personal attack, saying social media company owner Elon Musk struggles with evil.
It is unclear what futher censorship measures would be favoured by the powers that be in the European Union, which has already implemented draconian speech restrictions on the internet.
For example, under the Digital Services Act (DSA), large internet firms, with users over 45 million, will face fines from the EU of up to six per cent of their global revenue as well as a potential ban from operating within the bloc entirely if they fail to police “disinformation” and “hate speech” to the satisfaction of Eurocrats.
Social media platforms have already begun to police their users at the behest of requests from EU-related functionaries.
According to the Brussels-backed Elections24Check, out of 1,321 online posts flagged as disinformation by the fact-checking network, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta acted on 80 per cent of cases, TikTok on 40 per cent, Elon Musk’s X on 30 per cent, and YouTube on 25 per cent during the EU elections.
However, despite having helped enact the DSA, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen has demanded that more actions be taken.
Speaking before fellow globlists at the World Economic Forum’s summit in Davos earlier this year she said that businesses and governments must forge “new connective tissue” to “deliver the solutions we need, to fight threats like climate change or industrial-scale disinformation.”
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