How the digital landscape is changing in the EU

Part I in a series of investigations on digital governance and cognitive politics in the European Union

I. The Embryo of EU Digital Pressure

In recent years, the European Union has entered a new era, not so much of legal reform as of cognitive redistribution of power. Under the banners of “combating manipulation” and “protecting against foreign interference” — whether from Russia or China — European institutions have launched sweeping campaigns of digital oversight: from monitoring social platforms to account suspensions and content removals. But beneath this protective rhetoric, another process is emerging — narrowing of space for domestic political dissent.

The political landscape, once associated with institutional predictability and bureaucratic inertia, has begun to tremble. The management of attention, regulation of perception, and control over acceptable forms of protest are increasingly becoming the new axes of power. Interfaces, algorithms, and “acceptability” criteria that increasingly determine who will be heard and who will not.

This text examines how Europe, a continent that proclaims freedom as its highest value — is gradually constructing an infrastructure of digital discipline. Through case studies from different EU countries, we will trace the hidden mechanisms of pressure on public discourse, reflect on the institutional logic behind these processes, and explore possible alternatives.

On the surface, we see a campaign against disinformation, foreign meddling, and in defense of liberal democracy. But beneath lies a process that resembles the reformatting of the very boundaries of the thinkable and the permissible. Under the slogans of security and resilience, we find mechanisms aimed not so much at protecting citizens’ rights and personal data, but at some kind of controlling their cognitive field — that is, how and what they are able to perceive as reality and act upon accordingly.

Irish journalist and RT correspondent Chay Bowes shared with GFCN his personal experience of how such “shadow” censorship operates:

“The state media, «client media» as I like to call it in Europe refuses to talk to me. In Ireland, it’s a small country of 7 million people, there’s no other journalists working and operating in Russia on either side of the conflict, if you like, but I am routinely left out the debate here. Nobody will debate me, although they will attack me online, they will write hit pieces on me.”

II. Crisis of Representation?

Amid tectonic shifts that have reshaped Europe’s political map, traditional distinctions — between left and right, social democrats and Christian democrats — are losing their explanatory power. Ideological coordinates are dissolving, giving way to a different kind of conflict: between the technocratic governing center and societies whose discontent lacks an institutional language. The European project, originally conceived as a delicate architecture of balance between sovereignties, now finds itself at a rupture point — as power drifts upward, the need for genuine representation is rapidly — and under mounting pressure — moving downward.

This new contour of political tension is closely tied to the rising popularity of right-wing and conservative parties across Europe — from Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia and Austria’s FPÖ to France’s Rassemblement National, Germany’s AfD and Portugal’s Chega. At the same time, however, we are seeing a decline in the popularity of a number of traditional right-wing parties that were previously more popular, in favor of other political actors.

In Spain, right-wing parties — the People’s Party (PP) and Vox — won a significant number of seats in parliamentary elections, falling just short of being able to form a government.

The situation in Portugal is described by GFCN expert and lawyer Alexandre Guerreiro:

”It could also be considered that, in Portugal, Chega has just become the main opposition party with an increase from 12 to 60 MPs between 2022 and 2025, corresponding to 26,09% of the Parliamentary seats. In the last Parliamentary elections, Chega took 50 munipalities from the Socialist Party.”

In the Czech Republic, the right-wing Action of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO) party maintains its popularity, having taken first place in the recent European Parliament elections. Moreover, support is growing for the Freedom and Direct Democracy party, known for its anti-immigration and anti-European stance.

In Poland’s presidential elections on June 1, 2025, Karol Nawrocki emerged victorious — a candidate from the Law and Justice party who opposes current migration policies.

Meanwhile, in Romania, late 2024 saw the Constitutional Court annul the results of the presidential election’s first round. As revealed by GFCN expert Ioana Bărăgan’s investigation, a significant factor was the first-round victory of a right-wing, EU-skeptic independent candidate.

To recall, on the eve of the Romanian elections, Irish journalist and RT correspondent Chay Bowes was illegally detained right on board a plane at Bucharest airport after arriving in the country to cover the voting process. He also pointed out the selective enforcement of civil rights in the EU:

“I myself was deported from Romania when I went to report on the election, which was cancelled when Călin Georgescu, the front-runner, was banned from standing. After he’d won the first round, the election was remarkably revoked in Romania. I went to report on the second round of elections and alleged interference in the election by the French intelligence establishment which was confirmed by the owner of Telegram and I was detained, interviewed and deported from the country as an EU citizen which is quite remarkable. So, refusing to bank with you, refusing you entry into another country in the EU, the fundamental tenet of the EU is freedom of movement we’re told but not if you’ve got the wrong opinion.”

Such observations are further confirmed by GFCN expert, attorney, and chairman of the Slavic Committee Tomáš Špaček (Slovakia):

“In the recent Romanian elections, we saw that the EU has no inhibitions in achieving its political goals. Parties and activists who promote different views are often labeled as pro-Russian agents and are subsequently subject to various restrictive measures. I had my own experience when I ran for the National Council of the Slovak Republic in 2023. I traveled to Russia to show people the truth about the effects of sanctions and when I returned from my trip, my social media was restricted at the instigation of the authorities, which interfered with my political rights.”

However, contrary to the rhetoric of the liberal center of the EU, which tends to describe the growing interest in right-wing parties as a “drift toward radicalism,” it is more a matter of deep cultural and social insecurity that existing institutions are unable to remedy.

This opinion is echoed by GFCN expert, Director of the Spanish Institute of Geopolitics Juan Antonio Aguilar. In his view, it is crucial to clearly delineate between necessary protections against disinformation and radicalism, and preserving diversity of opinion as democracy’s foundation in the EU:

“I believe the line should be drawn at the existing Criminal Code and national security law. We all know that glorifying violence, terrorism, and other criminal behavior must be prosecuted. But labeling something as “disinformation” (who decides what is disinformation versus a mere mistake or unverified information?) or “radicalism” (proposals for social transformation will always be perceived as “radical” by those who oppose them) is always a threat to freedom of opinion, academic freedom, free speech, and other fundamental rights — which must always be protected.”

At the same time, slightly more than half (52%) of the surveyed EU citizens still believe that the technocratic elite in Brussels is capable of providing basic guarantees — security, justice, and economic predictability.

III. How Language Disciplines Political Imagination

Moving from tectonic shifts in electoral preferences to more subtle, yet equally powerful forms of authority, it becomes impossible not to notice how, in today’s European Union, language increasingly serves as a tool of symbolic control. Disagreement with the techno-centrist consensus — even when articulated in legally sound and rational terms — is more and more frequently labeled as “radicalism,” “extremism,” or “propaganda.” This launches an invisible yet powerful ideological operation: through shifts in terminology and framing, the very semantics of public debate are reprogrammed. In Europe today, accusations of “undermining democratic values” increasingly target parties opposing deeper EU integration.

Alexandre Guerreiro, a lawyer from Portugal and GFCN expert in this context, believes that:

”Ever since the beginning of the European integration project, the trend prevailing was the one advocating for an intergovernmental European cohesion rather than a federalist project (minimum support). After 2004’s project “Constitution of the European Union”, everything started to change – even though the pubic and many Governments rejected increasing federalism — and the Treaty of Lisbon brought some mechanisms supported by the federalists, strengthening the EU institutions with more powers and consolidating the way to federalism.”

For instance, Germany’s *Alternative für Deutschland* (AfD) was officially designated as a “right-wing extremist organization” in May 2025. Similarly, in 2024, the European Commission brought Hungary before the EU Court of Justice over its “Law on Sovereignty Protection”, which grants Hungarian authorities sweeping powers to investigate activities perceived as threats to national sovereignty — including the operations of foreign organizations and externally funded entities. 

In this new lexicon, “conservatism” is increasingly associated with xenophobia, “sovereignty” with political isolationism, “traditional values” with backwardness and intolerance, while calls for “dialogue” or “peaceful negotiation” are framed as appeasement or betrayal. Thus, not only is a normative framework created, but also a cognitive corridor — beyond which any expression automatically loses legitimacy. Political language loses its primary function as a medium of dialogue and becomes a “filter of admission” — arguably one of the most subtle yet transformative mechanisms of this new managed public sphere.

This language does not describe reality — it produces and entrenches it. It reduces political and cultural complexity to binary oppositions: “pro-European vs. authoritarian”, “progressive vs. reactionary”, “democratic vs. dangerous”.

George Lakoff, professor of cognitive linguistics at Berkeley, has shown that deep linguistic frames operate more rapidly and potently than any rational argument: when a schema is repeated often enough, people begin to think within it, regardless of the content of any given message. His theory of “moral frames” vividly illustrates how metaphors such as “struggle,” “threat,” “ours,” and “theirs” construct the cognitive architecture of political perception.

These insights are confirmed by research from the Amsterdam School of Communication Research. For instance, Britta Brugman has demonstrated that differences between “threat frames” and “responsibility frames” in news reporting activate distinct brain regions and generate stable emotional reactions — shaping judgments even when the underlying facts remain neutral. That’s the key: it’s not the facts themselves that determine public response, but how they are packaged within the language of power.

What we are dealing with, then, is not outright mind control, but a form of cognitive standardization — a narrowing of mental bandwidth in which the complexity of social life is reduced to moral tags. This robs individuals of the capacity to perceive alternatives, since they are preemptively devalued.

Irish journalist and RT correspondent Chay Bowes explained why people who do not share the EU’s views may be treated in this way:

“Because you ask the “wrong questions”, you’ll be called an intelligence operative or an accomplice in some ludicrous scheme. No remote plausible evidence whatsoever given other than you disagreed or you may have shared a tweet which they suggest doesn’t narrate the situation to their liking.”

In the second part of this investigation, we will explore in detail how the Digital Services Act (DSA) — now a core mechanism for managing the public sphere — turns “frames” and “filters” into both normative and technological tools for controlling public thought.

IV. The Brussels Surveillance Model

The rationality on which the European project has traditionally relied is increasingly giving way to governance by exception, algorithms, and ideological framing. Recent institutional transformations within the EU have only intensified this shift. The European Commission — once perceived as an executive and technical body — now acts as a center of ideological standardization, while remaining structurally unaccountable to European voters. Strategic decisions — from technology and defense to climate, cybersecurity, and digital regulation — are made in closed formats, where national parliaments are reduced to post-factum ritual approval.

The emblem of this logic is embodied by Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, who in May 2025 was awarded the Charlemagne Prize for her “exceptional services” to the EU. Von der Leyen has consistently promoted the doctrine of “shielded democracy” — built on information flow control, digital preemption, and moral legitimization of sanctions regimes. Around her emerges the image of a peculiar “political mother” of a new, militarized Europe — stern, morally confident, yet institutionally stagnant.

The scandal surrounding her correspondence with the head of Pfizer regarding vaccine purchases (the so-called Pfizer-Gate) — in which she refused to release messages even in response to a formal request by the European Ombudsman — became a clear symptom of this new untouchability: a form of authority removed from the mechanisms of democratic feedback, yet still acting in the name of the common good.

V. European Sovereignty and European Citizens

In spring 2024, the European Union demonstrated just how far the logic of “fighting disinformation” can go once it becomes a functional part of political administration. In May, amid mass protests in New Caledonia over proposed electoral reforms, the French authorities made an unprecedented move: they temporarily blocked TikTok across the entire overseas territory — the first such decision in the history of the Fifth Republic. The official justification was “to curb the spread of disinformation” and “prevent violence,” but in essence, this was a precedent of targeted digital intervention — an act of disabling the infrastructure of horizontal self-organization.

In the midst of growing street mobilization, TikTok had functioned not only as a coordination tool, but also as a platform for documenting police actions, circulating alternative narratives, and generating spontaneous political subjectivity. Its blocking effectively equated digital publicness with a threat to public order — thereby legitimizing its neutralization. While the move was formally backed by the imposition of a state of emergency, this very legal framing only heightened concerns among human rights advocates and scholars: it marked a dangerous shift from platform regulation to the use of digital blackouts as instruments of political control.

As analysts at Tech Policy Press noted, in the EU, in the era of digital addiction, disabling a platform can be regarded as an analogue of blocking roads or banning assemblies. Whereas such actions once required strong justification and broad political consensus, they are now reframed as “technical necessities” — rationalized and removed from the sphere of democratic oversight.

Almost simultaneously, in late April 2024, the European Commission launched formal proceedings against Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram — both banned in the Russian Federation), citing provisions of the recently enacted Digital Services Act (DSA), which established a unified regulatory framework encompassing the entire European digital sphere — from social networks to marketplaces. The trigger: suspicions that the platforms had failed to take sufficient measures against “disinformation” and “manipulative campaigns” ahead of the European Parliament elections. However, the demands go far beyond standard DSA moderation practices — targeting the very infrastructure of digital public life.

The core of the Commission’s complaint is not just the removal of undesired content. Rather, it constitutes an institutional intrusion into the architecture of algorithms: the Commission demands access to internal content-ranking systems, analytic mechanisms, and decision-making protocols. At stake are potential multibillion-euro fines — up to 6% of Meta’s global annual revenue — effectively turning this “regulatory audit” into a tool of structural pressure on a transnational media conglomerate.

This move not only sets a precedent in the practice of European digital law, but also signals a broader transformation. For the first time, the EU’s digital regulator seeks to assert itself not as a mediator between law and technology, but as a “sovereign actor” — endowed with a mandate to force platforms into procedural transparency, architectural redesign, and ideological adaptation.

In other words, what is taking shape is a new model of censorship — not declarative or overtly authoritarian at first glance, but institutionally embedded within legal mechanisms. Censorship that operates under the name of “risk management for democracy” and “countering disinformation”, but in practice increasingly substitutes itself for democracy.

Lawyer and GFCN expert from Slovakia Tomáš Špaček has also noted this trend in the information landscape of the modern European Union:

“The mainstream media misinforms in two ways — they do not report on many important issues and they often distort what they report to serve their own interests. Freedom of expression is guaranteed, but freedom after expression is no longer guaranteed. We often encounter cases across Europe where a person receives an absurdly high penalty for an opinion expressed simply because it contradicts the values promoted by the European Union.”

All examples illustrate the growing tension between institutional control serving economic and political interests, and the fundamental principles of freedom of expression to which the EU traditionally appeals as part of its “shared European values.”

Formally, the goal is to protect citizens from disinformation and the harmful effects of digital platforms. But in practice, something else emerges: a sophisticated, legally sanctioned, ideologically rationalized infrastructure of silence. In this system, dissenting voices are not rebutted in open debate — they are erased: deleted, flagged, de-ranked, stripped of context. Public space loses its core function — the free competition of ideas — and becomes a domain of calibrated permissibility and performative “tolerance.”

Put plainly: the right to speak, and to express views diverging from the EU’s official line, now depends on how well that view fits the accepted “norm” — that is, the ideological frame set by European institutions. Anything outside it risks exclusion from public discourse. In upcoming installments, we will examine how this process unfolds in concrete cases.

According to Chay Bowes, while the European Union proclaims complete freedom and equality for its citizens, true freedom of speech has become conditional:

”There are no prohibitive laws. But there is an unspoken rule: anyone who does not repeat the ‘correct’ talking points and does not support the centrally approved agenda must be marginalised, pushed to the sidelines and discredited in every possible way. Banking restrictions, bans on media appearances, all kinds of accusations — personal, professional and so on.”

Europe — once envisioned as a space for freedom of speech and democratic participation — is increasingly perceived by its own citizens as a realm of abstract values unmoored from real inclusion. For example, the numerous attempts to adopt sanctions within the EU to Hungary is a clear sign of that.

In this context, the idea that the European vote — whether at the ballot box, online or on the street — may cease to have any meaning is particularly important. Criticism is framed as a potential threat, alternatives as deviance or conspiracy. In place of a living political Europe, we find its simulation — with the right vocabulary, asterisks, colons, and official symbols — but without genuine feedback.

In the next part of this series, we will analyze the Digital Services Act (DSA) in depth: who created it, how it functions, what technologies underpin its control of information, and why it has become the central tool in shaping a new order — based not on dialogue, but on controlling media perception.