Brussels spent up to 2024 almost 650 million euros to control the “political narrative” and silence patriotic and sovereigntist voices

The Mathias Corvinus Collegium Brussels (MCC) has revealed in an event this Wednesday at the European Parliament that the European Commission has funded with at least 648.9 million euros to a large network of projects, digital platforms, academic institutions and non-governmental organizations with the aim of controlling the public narrative, restrict freedom of expression and “repress voices critical of the official discourse of Brussels”.

The report, entitled “Fabricating Disinfongrmation”, reveals with precise data how the EU “has institutionalized a censorship machine” financed with public funds, whose scope and purpose have been carefully disguised under euphemisms such as “media literacy”, “social resilience” or “youth mental health”.

It has been documented that between 2014 and 2024 at least €648.9 million has been earmarked for projects related to speech control. This funding has been channeled mainly through three major programs: Horizon 2020 / Horizon Europe: 354 projects worth €571 million; Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV): 48 projects with funding in excess of €36.7 million; and Creative Europe: 54 projects that have received a combined €40.8 million.

The author of the study, Norman Lewis, warned that “we are facing a real threat: all organizations and institutions, including universities, have become cogs in an ideological machine”. He explained that many of these projects are nothing more than “emotional and narrative surveillance platforms that use artificial intelligence to label speech as dangerous”.

“More funds have been allocated to ‘emotional repair’ projects in the face of hate speech than to cancer research,” he has denounced. “Every week a new minority group appears that feels offended and this is used as a pretext to restrict free speech.” For Lewis, this system represents “a direct threat to freedom of speech, turned into an object of ideological intervention.”

Among the specific cases cited is the FAST LISA project, coordinated by the University of Bologna and financed with 5 million euros, which develops “narrative resistance” tools for young people through algorithms that detect and neutralize content considered “harmful”.

From MCC Brussels, the analyst and spokesman Jacob Reynolds has assured that “the Parliament itself has financed press associations to affirm what is democratic and vibrant”. As he denounced, these initiatives do not seek pluralism, but to build a hegemonic discourse closed to disagreement. “We have to expose all this so that the EU understands that it cannot have only one valid narrative,” he insisted.

Reynolds has warned of the existence of a carefully structured propaganda machine with reports, media and technological platforms that receive public money to reinforce the institutional image of Brussels, marginalizing those who do not submit to progressive orthodoxy.

French MEP Virginie Joron has denounced Brussels’ use of like-minded NGOs loudspeakers for the official narrative. “They control the narrative and omit scientific research that does not fit their discourse,” she said. As he has explained, in the Committee on Budgetary Control (CONT) MEPs are not even allowed to print, photocopy or disclose the contracts they access. “It is a deliberate opacity,” he warned.

Joron recalled Ursula von der Leyen‘s speech at the Davos Forum, in which she justified information control through the Digital Services Regulation (DSA), initially designed to monitor counterfeit products, but reformulated after Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter as a narrative monitoring tool. “Young people don’t watch TV anymore, and we politicians turn to platforms like X because they don’t invite us into the media. Now they want to shut them down too,” he has pointed out.

He also accused the Commission of financing organizations such as Oxfam, whose directors, he said, “get rich, sell products, and on top of that receive public funds”. He added: “We are here to control the budget and fight against this. We are going to publish everything we know”.

The report has given a name to this strategy: manufactured disinformation. It is not about fighting hoaxes or fake news, but about institutionally producing a single version of reality, financed from power and validated by algorithms, like-minded NGOs and subsidized media. Any alternative view is automatically labeled as “extremist”, ‘dangerous’ or “denialist”.

“The use of language is important. It’s an attack on free speech, on disagreement”, Lewis has warned. “If we want to renew democracy, we have to go back to the old values. Every man should be free to think and say what he wants. If we cannot say what we think, we will soon forget how to think”.