A new report from France’s top policy planning body may be opening the door - and one of its authors is a name you already know.

If you’ve followed the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) saga - UnHerd’s exposé, the visa bans, the FTC’s antitrust settlement — you know the outline of the story already. What you may not know is that the organisation appears to be quietly re-establishing itself on the other side of the Channel, and the French government just gave it a seat at the table.

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Le Monde has devoted a full summer-long investigative series in seven episodes to what it calls a “war of succession” inside LVMH. Yet another storm in the stagnant Parisian fishbowl that interests almost no one, but which perfectly illustrates the sheer panic that has gripped France’s oligarchs and politico-media class at the prospect of compromising information leaking online, WikiLeaks-style, and robbing them of their carefully curated scoops.

Leading the charge are Raphaëlle Bacqué and Vanessa Schneider—two of the three main “order prepers” in Le Monde’s newsroom, alongside Ariane Chemin. Let us recall Mme Bacqué complaining at the “Les idées mènent le monde” literary festival about the unfair competition journalists now face from competent anonymous voices on social media. Together, Bacqué and Schneider authored the book Successions: L’argent, le sang et les larmes (Albin Michel, 2022), in which they scrutinize twelve major French capitalist dynasties.

77 years old Bernard Arnault’s role in Emmanuel Macron’s rise is public knowledge, as is the fact that LVMH dresses Brigitte Macron for free whilst being probably the most loathed woman in France. That association is starting to weigh heavily on the LVMH’s image, not to mention the still-unresolved and very murky Hermès case.

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Good god, Emmanuel Macron’s end of reign is long, calamitous, and even more hopeless than the nine years that preceded it. Laurent Nuñez — tax inspector, then Paris police prefect, then junior interior minister, then head of the domestic intelligence agency, then Interior Minister, eye-gouger-in-chief of the Yellow Vests but otherwise incapable of keeping public order at a single Stade de France football match, just like his predecessor Gérald Darmanin — has just signed decree n°2026-646 setting up a commission to inform the public with a view to prevent the effects of foreign interference during elections.

Under article L. 562-1 of the Monetary and Financial Code (asset freeze and forfeiture) and point 9 of article R. 1132-3 of the National Defense Code, this commission will keep watch over attempted foreign election interference. Not a single mention of the electoral code.

Which means this commission can only ever have an informational role — as its name says, nothing repressive — since it wasn’t created by statute. A statute that, in any case, would never have made it through a parliament where the government holds only a minority.

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The French National Assembly has passed the law banning under-15s from social media — a law that will require all users to verify their identity, thereby opening the door to illegal mass surveillance. Instead of reacting like Pavlov’s dogs, let’s think for a moment: this isn’t the end of free speech, but a text drafted with the left foot by clowns — and given the size of the shoes...

Note that National Rally MPs voted for it or abstained. This just goes to show there’s not much to expect from that party — no more than from the rest of the French political class — unless the people put a gun to their heads, figuratively, one hopes.

This kind of law has already proven its uselessness elsewhere. Take Australia. A study by the University of Newcastle, published in the British Medical Journal, showed that more than 85% of minors gleefully circumvented the ban. Among the various methods used, 9 to 29% used someone else’s account, 15 to 19% created a fake account with a false age, and 6 to 11% went through private browsing and VPNs.

In the United Kingdom, a government survey (BMG Research for the DSIT), conducted among 2,299 children aged 11-17, showed that nearly two children out of five (39%) managed to bypass online age verification, and more than half deliberately choose sites, apps, or games specifically to dodge such checks.

Let’s not be told this is about protecting children, who are the sole responsibility of their parents. This is about filing the entire population and banning online anonymity — even though French courts reaffirmed in September 2025 that speaking anonymously online is perfectly lawful (Paris judicial tribunal, September 19, 2025, No. RG 25/51051, Wikimedia Foundation case).

Worse, the law that was passed is very likely unconstitutional. Freedom of expression and communication doesn’t wait for a certain number of years to kick in — it runs from birth. Minors enjoy them under the supervision of their parents. This law restricts a category of individuals’ freedom of speech on shaky grounds — a report from the National Health Safety Agency claiming social media is dangerous for children’s mental health. What they put kids through during Covid, of course, doesn’t count. And it does so with zero proportionality, since it bans all minors under 15 from all social media, full stop.

An analysis published by Le Club des Juristes points to a paradox: the adopted text amounts to nothing more than a statement of principle (access is banned for minors under 15) with no concrete enforcement mechanism attached to it — much like the “digital majority” provision in the Marcangeli law, which remained a dead letter for lack of any implementation tool. These legal scholars believe that, precisely because there’s no practical mechanism, even a referral to the Constitutional Council would struggle to find it unconstitutional, for lack of any concrete issue to rule on — but that such a referral would delay the law’s entry into force, currently planned for the start of the school year (September 1, 2026, for new accounts) regardless.

So the law that was just passed serves no purpose whatsoever, other than to scare people and harass the entire population. It will stay in limbo. Emmanuel Macron and his government are banking on the adoption of EU-wide measures to actually implement this ban — which isn’t about to happen anytime soon. As La Quadrature du Net, a online free speech activist organization, points out, Article 28 of the Digital Services Act specifies that it does not require platforms to process additional personal data to determine whether a user is a minor — whereas an age-verification requirement does exactly the opposite, forcing the processing of extra data on everyone in order to exclude minors.

Article 28 of the DSA — Online protection of minors

1. Providers of online platforms accessible to minors shall put in place appropriate and proportionate measures to ensure a high level of privacy, safety, and security for minors on their service.

2. Providers of online platforms shall not present advertisements on their interface based on profiling, as defined in Article 4(4) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679, using personal data of the recipient of the service, when they are aware with reasonable certainty that the recipient is a minor.

3. Compliance with the obligations set out in this Article shall not oblige providers of online platforms to process additional personal data in order to determine whether the recipient of the service is a minor.

4. The Commission, after consulting the Board, may issue guidelines to help providers of online platforms apply paragraph 1.

In short: Emmanuel Macron and his government have no idea what they’re doing, and the members of Parliament don’t understand what they’re voting for. Yet another PR stunt from the tenant of the Élysée that just fell flat on its face — like a cowpat dropped straight from the cow’s rear end.

Where things take an amusing turn is in reading the letter from Marc Guillaume, the new head of the Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court also acting as councel to the government, addressed to the Secretary-General of the government.

In this letter, the Conseil d’État states that it did not have sufficient information to formulate its advisory opinion, because the government failed to provide it. So we’re in for a good laugh when the implementing decrees of this law come up for judicial review — where the Conseil d’État will be able to strike them down on grounds of non-conformity with EU law, namely the DSA.

Let’s repeat this in other words: the ban on social media for under-15s will inevitably be illegal in its application, since it contravenes the DSA — that infamous European regulation whose primary goal is to control online speech — and the same fate awaits any attempt to impose it top-down at the European level. Proud to be amateurs!

This once again confirms what we’ve been saying for over six months: the senior judiciary and part of the senior civil service are no longer playing along with the schemes of Macronism and the centre. They can no longer stomach the legislative riders, the mess, the erosion of the legal order, and the generalized insecurity created by incompetents obsessed with controlling speech — who now have no way left to tip the scales in their favor for the 2027 presidential election.

If you’d like us to keep doing our work and producing original reporting — which we do for you, dear readers — then subscribe. Because a commitment to journalism, which doesn’t aim to shape public opinion but to inform the public, doesn’t put food in the fridge. No one can live indefinitely on love and cold water alone, however strong the passion carrying them.

Three French senators — Agnès Evren of Les Républicains (center-right), the Socialist Sylvie Robert (who also chairs the cultural observatory at the Fondation Jean Jaurès), and Laurent Lafon of the UDI/Macronist camp, charmain of the Senate’s cultural affairs committee — simply lifted, wholesale, for their information mission report on the "grey zones" of information, the recommendations of the Aspen Institute's "Commission on Information Disorder" (dating from 2021) and those of a report dressed up as scientific, produced by a consortium of NGOs led by Science Feedback — part of the European branch, as it were, of the American censorship-industrial complex set up under Barack Obama in 2015 (Science Feeadback was founded in 2015) and dismantled by the Trump administration in 2025.

The list of people called to testify is jaw-dropping: among them, the "anti-conspiracy" crusaders Gérald Bronner (who led a mission commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron on "fake news" in 2021) and Thomas Huchon (close to Conspiracy Watch), the heads of Streetpress, Basta and Blast — news outlets that are, of course, not remotely progressive biased nor activist — and thoroughly independent, objective NGOs, such as Reporters Without Borders.

For further information on the French Censorship Industrial Complex, please refer to the Twitter Files France. It’s all there.

To balance things out — otherwise the trick would have been too obvious — Frontières and L'Incorrect were also called in for testimony, two outlets branded as "opinion" media, as if having an opinion were somehow the exclusive property of conservatives.

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What a symbol, indeed. On this 14th of July — France's national holiday, commemorating two founding moments of the Republic, 14 July 1789 and 14 July 1790 — the day that has, for over two centuries, marked a watershed: the storming of the Bastille, the birth of the Convention, the people rising against the Ancien Régime, the very emblem of the fight for liberty… on this day of all days, the Macronist regime retreats into its ivory tower.

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Alright. We see where this is going. L’ECLAIREUR’s logo is an owl — the owl of Minerva, symbol of wisdom and clear-sightedness, capable of seeing in the dark. So obviously our little publication must be the offshoot of some secret society, à la Bohemian Club. And isn’t the Bohemian Club’s own emblem an owl, by the way? Ergo, L’ECLAIREUR - The Enlightener in English - has to be the Illuminati.

Nice try. More prosaically, the owl was simply the unofficial insignia of the Human Intel Units of the Chasseurs Alpins, France’s elite light mountain infantry, now folded into the Mountain Commandos. Just a tribute to the one French army that was never defeated — the Army of the Alps. The Alps is where we’re from. FAFO. :D

We are not writing these lines from some off-grid cabin deep in the Écrins massif, tinfoil hat clamped to our heads to ward off CIA rays and chemtrails. Think us as batshit crazy as you like: we’ll wager that by the end of this series, it’s you who’ll be seeing the world upside down.

This summer serial is not a manual, not a cheat sheet for passing the entrance exam into Freemasonry, the Rosicrucians, the Order of Malta, the Templar lodges, Bilderberg, or any other secret society. We are, needless to say, not talking about cults but about secret societies made up of sane people who take part of their own free will, in no way held in thrall by some guru exercising total dominion over their free judgment.

Our aim here is to shine a journalistic light — this is not a historian’s work — on a social and political reality: the influence of secret societies on French society. And when it comes to secret societies meddling in politics, we French are world champions. Take “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.” A Masonic slogan first, before it became the motto of the French Republic.

Did we not see criminologist Alain Bauer, former Grand Master of the Grand Orient of France 1, pounding the table on every TV set to order Emmanuel Macron — who had just come down hard on the judiciary — to “shut the fuck up about the Lyhanna affair” ? 2

Consider that the legal professions, the judiciary included, have traditionally supplied a substantial contingent to Freemasonry since the 18th century. The about-face of the senior judiciary — which for twenty years has constantly meddled in politics, to the point of helping get Emmanuel Macron elected in 2017 and defending him tooth and nail ever since — has just called recess to an end. Through an appeals ruling, through the very words of the Paris prosecutor general on TV, and through a press release from the Cour de cassation3, it has signaled that Marine Le Pen will not be deprived of her liberty during her presidential campaign (no electronic tag), and has decreed, by implication, that she will be eligible — whatever the Constitutional Council4 may say...

Yes, alright, fine. You've got us there: we're sinking into magical thinking and conspiracy-mongering. No, truly, not a shred of irony on our part. Stop it! We're telling you our act of contrition is sincere.

Let’s begin, if you don’t mind (as if you had a choice), by defining occultism and esotericism, neither of which we practice.

Occultism is too often synonymous with satanism — a conflation we owe, for obvious reasons, to the Catholic Church. Any revealed religion sits uneasily with a rival body of practice that claims the existence of hidden forces or knowledge, invisible to ordinary mortals, and purports to grant access to or mastery over them through esoteric methods.

Esotericism is the set of doctrines and currents of thought that posit a deep, hidden, or symbolic knowledge of the world, reserved for a narrow circle of initiates and transmitted through particular means — initiation, symbols, correspondences.

So what’s the difference between occultism and esotericism? Simple: esotericism is theory, knowledge; occultism is practice. You might say esotericism is the map of the hidden world — its symbolic and philosophical cartography — while occultism is the use of that map to try to act upon the world: to heal, predict, influence, transform, etc.

And by what magic is esotericism put into occult practice? Simple: by magic. Magic that history’s most famous occultist, Aleister Crowley, defined as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will” — spelling it “Magick” to distinguish it from mere prestidigitation (that is theatrical magic). Consider the etymology of “prestidigitation”: nimble fingers, quick and deft.

Magic? As old as humanity itself. From the oracles and pythias of antiquity, and shamans, all the way to Christian priests. For the priest is God’s interpreter and, alone, through the ritual of the Eucharist, can transform a piece of bread into the body of Christ and a glass of wine into his blood, to present to the communicant faithful. This is transubstantiation, formally defined at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and reaffirmed at the Council of Trent (1545–1563). The priest is not just anyone. He has been “initiated” at seminary, then ordained, and belongs to a restricted circle: the clergy. The Science and Art of causing Change in conformity with Will — God’s, in this case?

But Islam, you’ll say, has no priesthood. That’s both true and false, since only the ulama — religious scholars recognized for their expertise in theology, jurisprudence (fiqh), and Quranic exegesis (tafsir) — hold the authority to interpret the Quran. Don’t confuse the absence of a centralized organization with the absence of religious authority. Islam also has its mystics, its occultists — the Sufis — with their initiatory practices: brotherhoods, spiritual masters or sheikhs, rituals such as dhikr or the whirling dervishes’ dance.

As for the Jews, they have the Kabbalah, a body of doctrines and practices aimed at uncovering the hidden meanings of the Torah and understanding the nature of God, creation, and the human soul, through symbolic, numerical, and meditative methods reserved for initiates.

And here we must slay a myth: that of conspiracy-mongering itself. Conspiracy, alongside war, is the engine of history. A conspiracy is an action devised by a small group of people, out of sight of the multitude, in order to bring about change in conformity with their will, in service of a shared objective. Isn’t what Crowley called “Magick,” among other things, simply a definition of politics?

An example? It was in the lodges of Thessaloniki that the Young Turks planned their 1908 coup against the Ottoman Sublime Porte, giving birth to modern Turkey — lodges including Macedonia Risorta (tied to the Grand Orient of Italy), Veritas (tied to the Grand Orient of France), Labor et Lux, and Perseverencia, working alongside the Committee of Union and Progress, the political party. Many Young Turk leaders — Talat Pasha, Djemal Bey, and others — were Freemasons, without the Young Turk revolution itself being a Masonic plot. Rather, these were networks of sociability and organization useful to the conspirators.

Conspiracy-mongering, in today’s common parlance — that of the media, of fact-checkers — is nothing more than a refusal to accept lived reality in its simultaneous multiplicity, substituting for it a single truth. It’s Delphine Ernotte, France’s Public Broadcasting System’s CEO, declaring that the role of France Télévisions is not to show France as it is, but as she wishes it to be. These people fancy themselves priests. Of what God, the question hangs.

This, mind you, is magical thinking — a mode of thought whereby an individual establishes a cause-and-effect link between their ideas, words, actions, or symbolic objects, and events in the external world — a link resting on no real, logical, or scientifically verifiable causal relationship. Let’s not deny ourselves the pleasure: “lockdowns and Covid vaccines are effective” is a perfect illustration.

Secret societies most likely first appeared in France in the Middle Ages through compagnonnage — the organization of craft trades that passed down know-how through initiation rites. Tradecraft secrets through apprenticeship, if you will. Compagnonnage had its “devoirs” (internal rules), its signs of recognition, and its initiatory Tour de France. The Compagnons du Devoir, who still make their Tour de France to become master craftsmen, exist to this day.

Take the Legion of Honour, France's highest decoration. It isn't really a medal at all — it's induction into the Legion of Honour, a ranked fraternity for which the medal merely serves as the outward sign of membership. At least, that's true if you're French. If you're not, you can't actually join the Legion itself; you simply receive the medal, whose significance does not extend beyond honorary protocol.

In the seventeenth century, three works published in Germany and attributed to the Lutheran theologian Johann Valentin Andreae — the “Fama Fraternitatis” (1614), “Confessio Fraternitatis” (1615), and “The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz” (1616) — spread like wildfire through France, just before the revolt led by the Prince de Condé, who, though Catholic himself, used the Huguenots to broaden his base against the regent Catherine de Medici. These were indeed the three founding texts of Rosicrucianism, named for Christian Rosenkreutz (literally “Rose-Cross” in German).

In 1623, mysterious posters plastered across Paris announced the presence of “deputies of the Principal College of the Brothers of the Rosy Cross,” triggering a full-blown moral panic in the capital: rumor credited the Rosicrucians with occult powers — invisibility, the gift of tongues — and spawned a literature of denunciation, notably from the Catholic Church, which saw in it a heretical and diabolical threat. No organized society, however, was ever identified behind these posters.

Hold on a moment. Printing subject to royal privilege and censorship; authority itself under challenge; powers of invisibility and diabolical multilingualism? Why, this is version 1.0 of social media, of the DSA, of ChatControl, of artificial intelligence, of globalization, of neoliberalism, of “Europe” as an institution of authority — all set against a backdrop of moral panic among the powers that be...

Or were the Rosicrucians, at their origin, simply one big disinformation operation meant to weaken what was then the most powerful — and most bankrupt — state in continental Europe, at a time when power was exercised collegially under the Marquis de La Vieuville, superintendent of finances to Louis XIII, while at court a certain Cardinal Richelieu was plotting — and who got his way in 1624 by having himself named Prime Minister, holding sole power to decide the nation’s policies (still the prerogative of the prime minister today)?

Freemasonry itself was imported into France from England in the 1720s–1730s, and remains a strange phenomenon. What were these aristocrats, bourgeois, and intellectuals — all enlightened, naturally — doing playing at masons, they who couldn’t mix mortar or build a wall? Not to mention that after their banishment under penalty of death in 1787, many Bavarian Illuminati (who did really exist) are said to have found refuge in France within the Masonic lodges.

All this to say: if such societies exist — discreet ones like Freemasonry, or secret ones like the Bilderberg group — it’s because they serve a function, and their members derive from them a benefit, collective and individual alike, be it spiritual, social, political, or economic. That doesn’t mean they are inherently malevolent, since all of them claim to pursue progress.

In the modern era, one can safely venture that every secret society aspires to the advent of a new society led by an enlightened elite, whether through political maneuvering or revolutionary action — like Carbonarism, which lay behind Italian unification and which in France, from 1821 onward, brought together students, officers, and liberal bourgeois opposed to the return of the Ancien Régime under the Restoration (Louis XVIII, then Charles X), and in favor of a more liberal, even republican, regime — and who never stopped conspiring on the brink of what we would call today domestic terrorism.

One last myth to send to the stake, since you’re bound to ask: the Templars. Not a secret society, nor a brotherhood, but an order of warrior-monks under the pope’s direct authority, whose original role was to protect pilgrims en route to the Holy Land — and who invented the letter of credit. Any pilgrim could deposit his gold in a temple, also called a perceptory, in exchange for a letter allowing him to withdraw it at other temples along the way, reducing the risk of being robbed or ransomed.

The Templars invented banking and fiat currency, to the point of lending not only to kings and nobles and anyone able to put up collateral (hence the French expression “le carreau du temple”) but, in France, of directly managing the kingdom’s treasury. The Templars also invented... the central bank!

Their arrest in 1307 — beyond being motivated by the fact that the crown had found a easy way not to repay the enormous debt it owed them — was the direct consequence of Philip the Fair’s decision, in the 1290s, to tax the Church without papal authorization, in order to finance the war against England. In 1296, pope Boniface VIII responded with the bull Clericis Laicos, forbidding clergy from paying taxes to secular powers without the Holy See’s consent, on penalty of excommunication.

Philip the Fair retaliated by banning the export of precious metals from the kingdom, depriving Rome of considerable revenue from France. Under this economic pressure, Boniface VIII backed down and issued a more conciliatory bull in 1297, conceding the king’s right to levy taxes in case of necessity — as an exception.

The conflict resumed with Philip the Fair’s arrest of Bernard Saisset, Bishop of Pamiers, accused of treason and insulting the king. The arrest of a bishop without reference to Rome was seen by Boniface VIII as a grave assault on the Church’s rights. The pope responded with another bull in 1302, Unam Sanctam, a landmark text asserting the supremacy of spiritual power (the pope) over temporal power (kings), and the necessity for every human being, for the salvation of their soul, to submit first to the Holly See.

Philip the Fair then convened the Estates-General (yes, already!) to secure the nation’s backing, and wasted no time: in 1303 he ordered the abduction of Boniface VIII by his legal counsel Guillaume de Nogaret and the head of the powerful Roman Colonna family. Promptly freed, Boniface VIII died a month later. His successor, Benedict XI, died in 1304, apparently poisoned.

In 1305, a French archbishop, Bertrand de Got, was elected pope under the name Clement V — under heavy pressure from Philip the Fair. Clement V never settled in Rome but in Avignon, hence the Palace of the Popes in this southern French town, built by his successors. It was he who pronounced the dissolution of the Templar order in March 1312, transferring its assets to the Hospitallers (the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, future Order of Malta) — except in France, where Philip the Fair managed to keep the bulk of them as “administrative fees.” No doubt in anticipation of the cost of sweeping up the ashes of Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Temple, and his companions, burned at the stake in 1314.

1314, the year of the curse said to have caused the deaths of Clement V, Philip the Fair, and his agent Nogaret? Read, or reread, Maurice Druon’s saga “The Accursed Kings,” which opens with the execution of Jacques de Molay. Not conspiracy theory — historical fiction.

Which goes to show — whatever French Freemasons may claim — that France’s unique form secularism (laïcité) doesn’t originate in the nineteenth century with the consolidation of the Republic as a political regime (we did warn you: it’s you who’ll end up seeing the world upside down).

And this marks a constant throughout the history of secret societies in France, which, from the Enlightenment onward, served as a means of defying moral and political authority and the strictures of the Catholic Church. Often these were smoldering wars — information wars — where blows were traded through tendentious publications - disinformation - even hoaxes and fabrications: fake news, in short.

In the next episode, we’ll turn to the richest recent period for occultism and secret societies: the second half of the nineteenth century through the eve of the First World War — the age of the Industrial Revolution, a major anthropological shift.

This article is freely accessible. Future episodes will be reserved for our paying subscribers. A commitment to journalism — which aims not to shape public opinion but to inform the public — isn’t enough to keep the fridge stocked. No one can live indefinitely on love and cold water alone, however strong the fervor and passion. Subscribe. Now. Do it.

And in the meantime, if you haven’t already, you can listen to our interview with Richard B. Spence, a historian specializing in Russia, espionage, and secret societies. Also free.

The European Parliament, following a manoeuvre that ran counter to its own rules and was orchestrated by its President, Malta’s Roberta Metsola, has voted to extend the CSAR regulation (Child Sexual Abuse Regulation) -popularised by its critics under the name “ChatControl 1.0” - despite having twice rejected, back in March, the continuation of this provisional regulation.

Don’t believe what you’re being told on social media: rolling on the floor screaming “censorship” has become a knee-jerk reaction, sometimes doubling as a business model, and most people doing so have not seriously studied the issue.

Read Patrick Breyer instead, the former German MEP from the Pirate Party and a specialist on the subject.

It’s worth recalling that mass surveillance and the indiscriminate collection of data are strictly prohibited in Europe under the settled case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Its rulings carry the force of law.

The CSAR regulation proposed by the European Commission is a temporary derogation from the ePrivacy Directive (the European text that, in principle, protects the confidentiality of electronic communications). It authorises major platforms (Meta, Google, Microsoft and others) to “voluntarily” scan private communications in search of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

• Introduced in 2021, it allows messaging and social media platforms to continue automatically scanning - but on a voluntary basis, with no legal obligation - users’ messages, photos and videos in order to detect child sexual abuse material.

• Without this derogation, such scanning would simply be illegal under European rules on the confidentiality of communications.

• More than 90% of content reports reportedly come from a single American company, Meta.

“ChatControl 1.0” is therefore not generalised, state-run mass surveillance, but a form of surveillance delegated to the platforms. Note that the overwhelming majority of European email providers do not apply this exemption. It is therefore time to drop your Gmail or Outlook address in favour of encrypted email services such as Proton, Tuta or Posteo.

By Patrick Breyer

The European Parliament allowed the suspicionless mass scanning of private communications ("Chat Control 1.0") to pass, a measure it had rejected twice in March. Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation - 314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions- the motion to reject it failed to secure the required absolute majority of 361 votes. As a result, mass scanning is now permitted again until 2028.

A symbolic exemption was adopted for encrypted communications—though in practice, service providers do not scan these anyway. Furthermore, while a majority of voting MEPs wanted to restrict the scanning of private communications strictly to suspects identified by the judiciary (322 to 255 votes), this amendment likewise fell short of the required absolute majority.

The fact that “Chat Control” is moving forward against the will of the majority of voting MEPs is a farce and damages democracy. Our children are the real losers in this undemocratic process. The passage of a genuine, permanent child protection regulation is now in serious jeopardy. The Council will never agree to a desperately needed paradigm shift as long as they can simply stick to the old approach of suspicionless scanning at the whim of the tech industry.

Today's vote on the interim regulation was a setback, but the political battle over the permanent 'Chat Control 2.0' is just getting started. The resistance we saw in Parliament today was so strong that finding a majority for permanent, suspicionless mass scanning in future negotiations is a complete pipe dream.

Trying to protect children with suspicionless mass surveillance is like frantically mopping the floor while the faucet is still running. Blanket Chat Control is just as unacceptable as indiscriminately opening everyone's physical mail. For five years, this failed system has served as a smokescreen to delay real action, all while overwhelming the police with false alarms. We need more child protection, not less—but we need effective protection, not the illusion of security.

What happens next?

The interim regulation passed today will remain in effect until 2028, or until an agreement on a permanent regulation is reached. Negotiations for the permanent law will resume in September. The core dispute between the EU Parliament, member state governments, and the EU Commission remains the scanning of private chats: should it be indiscriminate, or targeted at criminal suspects?

What changes with the return of Chat Control 1.0—and what stays the same

What is coming back: US tech companies are once again allowed to scan private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion. This affects direct messages on platforms like Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, as well as emails via Google's Gmail and Apple's iCloud.

What remains unchanged: Public social media posts and files hosted in cloud storage could already be scanned without this law. Furthermore, private messages can always be reported by users, or monitored by authorities using targeted, court-ordered wiretapping.

What is still NOT being scanned: End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures.

Why Chat Control is the wrong approach

Since 2022, the volume of suspected abuse reports from the US has already dropped by 50 percent due to the growing use of message encryption. According to EU Commission figures, mass scanning of private chats accounted for only 36 percent of all abuse reports in 2024 (the majority came from public posts and cloud storage).

The German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) reports that 48 percent of all incoming alerts are not criminally relevant in the first place. Crime statistics reveal that 40 percent of the resulting investigations actually target minors themselves.

Under the Chat Control system, an estimated 99 percent of reports generated by Meta consist of previously known material, which generally does little to stop ongoing, active abuse. The EU Commission admits there is no evidence that suspicionless scanning of private communications has led to an increase in criminal convictions or in rescued children.

Talk of averting a "protection gap" is therefore highly misleading. The most effective law enforcement tools—court-ordered wiretaps, user reports, and the scanning of public platforms and cloud storage—were never at risk and remain fully intact. The only practice that was temporarily banned since April was the indiscriminate, warrantless searching of private, unencrypted messages of innocent people on a handful of US platforms.

Background: The deadlock over a permanent solution

In parallel, negotiations are ongoing for a permanent regulation to protect children from sexualized online violence (the "CSAM Regulation" or "Chat Control 2.0"). In these talks, the EU Parliament is pushing for a paradigm shift in how we approach online child safety, demanding:

Mandatory, targeted detection orders against actual criminal suspects, rather than blanket mass scanning left to the tech industry's discretion. An EU Child Protection Centre tasked with the systematic removal of known abuse material from the public internet. Strict security standards for messaging apps ("Security by Design") to prevent cyber grooming.

This permanent legislation has stalled because EU member states insist on maintaining the outdated approach of voluntary, suspicionless scanning of private communications. Critics warn that repeatedly extending the interim rules removes the political pressure needed to reach a viable, permanent agreement. Ultimately, clinging to the status quo threatens to derail real progress on child protection.

As long as EU governments can use procedural loopholes to continually extend their comfortable status quo of voluntary, indiscriminate mass scanning, they have zero incentive to engage with the Parliament's targeted, legally sound, and far more effective child protection strategy.

The Voices of Survivors: “We need privacy to bring abusers to justice

Survivors of sexual violence explicitly emphasize that untargeted Chat Control did not help victims.

Alexander Hanff, survivor of child sexual abuse and privacy advocate :

“As a survivor I relied on confidential communications to tell my story and find justice for 28 schoolboys—myself included—resulting in the conviction of multiple offenders. We survivors need privacy, because without it we lose our voice. Chat Control was not created to protect children. It was about Big Tech companies like Meta or Google wanting access to our data for profiteering, and states attempting to expand mass surveillance. The EU Commission has wasted five years and millions of euros on algorithms that cannot protect children and were never meant to. This money should have been diverted to real policing, causal research, and support for survivors, millions of whom have never received any support at all.”

Marcel Schneider (name changed), a survivor who has been suing Meta in court over its voluntary Chat Control :

“Anyone mourning the end of Chat Control has not understood what actually helps survivors of sexual violence. Mass surveillance by corporations like Meta does not prevent abuse. Genuine protection means: deleting material at the source, proactive police work on the Darknet, and apps that are safe by design for children from the very start.”

Dorothée Hahne, founding member and vice-chair of the survivors' initiative MOGiS e.V. (A Voice for Survivors), emphasizes the danger mass surveillance poses to victims themselves:

"As survivors, we see our 'safe spaces', our protected areas and communication channels, endangered or destroyed by this. For survivors, this need is existential, if not vital”.

It's amusing to watch the calendar align so neatly — suspiciously accelerated just days before the summer recess. Has a kind of panic gripped the ruling class? Whatever the cause, this Tuesday, July 7th, deserves to be marked with a white stone.

Paris: the 2027 presidential race is decided on appeal

The Paris Court of Appeal will rule tomorrow in the case pertaining to the parliamentary staffers of the Rassemblement National/Front National. Marine Le Pen was sentenced in March 2025 to four years in prison (two of them under electronic tag, two suspended) and five years of ineligibility, with immediate enforcement. That immediate enforcement is what currently bars her from running.

This is no small matter, since the 2027 presidential election hinges on today’s ruling of July 7th. On this subject, listen — or listen again — to the podcast by Régis de Castelnau and Pascal Clérotte. It says it all.

For non-French speakers, here's a short summary of this podcast with regards to Marine Le Pen’s case. Régis de Castelnau is a lawyer by trade, well-versed in polically motivated procedures: he used to be the lawyer of the French Communist Party.

The Appeal Court is facing a zero-sum game. With the trial ruling reading like a political pamphlet, there's no clean way out. The court could sentence Marine Le Pen to 18 months in prison, as the General Prosecutor requested, with the 18 months' ineligibility counted as time served. In that case, Le Pen could run — with an electronic tag. She's already said she won't.

Now imagine she runs anyway and wins. Presidential immunity would shield her for the term, and the tag would be waiting once it’s over — five or ten years down the line.

If she’s barred from running, though, nothing stops Jordan Bardella from being elected president and naming her Prime Minister. And that’s really the establishment’s worst nightmare: the French Constitution states plainly that it’s the Prime Minister and government who decide and execute the nation’s policies. What do they say about revenge?

The European Parliament shoud not spare the AfD either

A small bloc holds the levers across every EU institution — Parliament, Commission, and Council alike: the EPP (European People’s Party), the Socialists and Democrats, and Renew Europe (Renaissance, on the French side). Together they command the majority of seats, they’ve locked down every Commission and control bodies, and they’re in favor. To what effect, though? Mostly symbolic. The mechanism itself is limited, because it’s political rather than legal. Strike the ENS off, and the worst that happens is its European funding gets cut. Its MEPs keep their seats, keep voting, keep working. And the AfD and the rest keep operating in their home countries exactly as before.

Chat Control: out the door, back through the window

Amid all this maneuvering — some of it clearly rushed to beat the summer recess — worth flagging is the quiet return of ChatControl 1.0, the transitional version of the EU’s CSAR regulation (Child Sexual Abuse Regulation). Parliament is set to vote on a request for emergency procedure, pushed by its president, Malta’s Roberta Metsola, to relaunch mass, indiscriminate surveillance of private communications. Surveillance MEPs have already voted down twice.

Originally, MEPs had insisted that scans of private messaging apply only to people actually suspected of a crime. When trilogue talks between Parliament, Commission, and Council broke down, Parliament rejected the extension outright, 311 votes to 228.

Shown the door once, the text is now sneaking back through the window.

“The conservative EPP is justifying its emergency-procedure request by pointing to a legal vacuum left by Chat Control 1.0’s expiry in April,” says Patrick Breyer, civil-rights campaigner and former MEP (Pirate Party). “But the German government hasn’t confirmed any drop in reports since the regulation lapsed. Companies are still running voluntary scans, just as they said they would. And by the EU’s own figures, over 60% of suspicious-activity reports come from scanning public posts and cloud storage — areas this regulation doesn’t even touch legally.”

What makes the move so blatant is that it exploits a shift in the rules themselves. At first reading, Parliament only needs a simple majority of votes cast to set its position — whoever happens to be in the room; that’s how 311 to 228 was enough to kill the extension in March. Second reading is a different game entirely: to reject or amend the Council’s position, Parliament now needs an absolute majority — 361 of 720 seats — present or not. Schedule the vote for July 9th, the eve of the summer break, when the chamber is already thinning out, and the arithmetic tilts neatly the other way.

“So the expired Chat Control 1.0 would be reinstated even without Parliament’s consent,” Breyer sums up — over the heads of MEPs who already voted against it, and past years of warnings from cybersecurity researchers.

Since 2023, more than 800 experts across 37 countries have signed a string of open letters condemning the ChatControl project. Technically unworkable, fundamentally at odds with end-to-end encryption, riddled with “unacceptably high” error rates and “serious proportionality problems” — that’s the verdict of two of those experts in a fresh warning sent to MEPs just this weekend.

“We’re deeply worried next week’s vote will confirm our fears,” write Bart Preneel (KU Leuven) and Carmela Troncoso (Max Planck Institute). “It’s rare for the scientific community to reach this level of consensus and speak as one — that alone should signal how serious this is, and what’s at stake if this proposal goes through. And still, none of its fundamental technical flaws have been fixed, despite everything we’ve already said.”

Online content surveillance, electoral process monitoring — Europe’s control architecture is accelerating its rollout ahead of 2027 and elections that could prove pivotal for countries like France and Germany, as well as for the future trajectory of the EU itself. But between what some are hoping for and what is actually achievable, the road ahead remains strewn with obstacles.

Consider the fate of the CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) regulation, better known as ChatControl. After yet another extension of the temporary version of that text was rejected by the European Parliament, its President Roberta Metsola took it upon herself on 18 June to resuscitate it — which, incidentally, amounts to a blatant circumvention of the democratic process.

Consider also, as Czech journalist Cecílie Jílková explains in the article reproduced below with her kind permission, how the European Parliament established a special committee on the European Democracy Shield, chaired by French MEP Nathalie Loiseau (Renew Europe). The committee is calling for an expansion of Europol’s mandate to cover “hybrid threats” and “information manipulation”, as well as permanent monitoring of electoral processes across all member states. Until now, no EU body has exercised continuous oversight over elections held by member states. It is contrary to the Treaties.

All elections in the EU are nevertheless observed. That’s the prerogative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Time will tell whether the initiative succeeds — but its path is considerably more tortuous than a simple resolution pushed through by a temporary committee. First, because Europol currently lacks both the technical capacity and the legal basis for a mission involving monitoring online content and determining what qualifies as “information manipulation”. And because expanding its mandate touches a raw nerve with member states, as has already been seen on other issues such as the fight against migrant smuggling and trafficking.

Second, because this special committee is nothing more than a parliamentary body tasked with issuing recommendations — it holds neither regulatory nor legal powers. It falls to the European Commission — which holds legislative initiative — to table a legislative text along these lines. To our knowledge, no such text has been tabled, nor is one currently scheduled. Any text that is eventually produced would then need to be adopted by both the European Parliament and the Council.

One thing is clear: for all the time, money, resources, and political capital invested in controlling online content, the results have been remarkably weak. It is therefore worth asking what is really driving this process - and whose interests it ultimately serves.

Is Mrs. Loiseau pushing her own agenda - one that is franco-French rather than European, aimed squarely at France’s next presidential election? It seems the centrists are attempting another coup, this time using European institutions, since the French judiciary and elite civil service don’t appear ready to intervene as they did in 2017 when they took down front-runner François Fillon.

By Cecilie Jilkova - originally published in Czech at Reportéři on-line

The European Parliament’s Special Committee on the European Democracy Shield on June 23, 2026, approved and published its final report, which calls for the creation of a European Centre for Democratic Resilience. The Centre is to assume unified control over previously separate tools for monitoring online content, and a permanent monitoring group for electoral processes across all member states is to be established under its umbrella.

The committee also wants to expand Europol’s mandate to cover “hybrid threats” and “information manipulation.” The report was backed by a coalition of EPP, Socialists, Renew, Greens, and the Left. ECR, Patriots, and ESN voted against. The plenary vote of the full Parliament is scheduled for September.

What is the European Democracy Shield

In April, the European Commission launched its “Protect What Matters” campaign promoting the European Democracy Shield. The project combines three regulatory instruments: the Digital Services Act (DSA), the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), and the Rapid Response System.

The DSA establishes so-called “crisis protocols” that allow the European Commission to bypass standard regulatory procedures and order platforms to take immediate measures, including suppressing the virality of content. EMFA enables algorithmic preference for media outlets that meet “recognized ethical standards.”

The Rapid Response System is a communication tool connecting fact-checkers and platforms for controlling the information flow during election campaigns.

Europol as a “data black hole swallowing fundamental rights”

The Democracy Shield committee’s report supports expanding Europol’s mandate — currently focused primarily on drugs, terrorism, and cybercrime — to include “hybrid threats” and “information manipulation.”

This is the third Europol reform in six years. The Commission proposes doubling Europol’s budget to 3 billion euros, introducing automatic and systematic uploads of data from national police databases, and creating a shared police data space on Europol’s cloud infrastructure.

Following this reform — the legislative proposal for which the Commission is preparing this year — Europol could also collect and analyze data about social media posts.

The Protect Not Surveil coalition of human rights organizations condemned the reform. According to Chloé Berthélémy of European Digital Rights (EDRi), the new mandate grants the agency “all its wildest wishes and continues its transformation into a data black hole — swallowing our fundamental rights and undermining justice, safety, and accountability.”

Europol has a history of collecting data illegally. In January 2022, the European Data Protection Supervisor ordered it to delete data on individuals with no established link to criminal activity. Instead of complying, the Commission retroactively legalized this conduct through a June 2022 regulation revision.

The Centre for Democratic Resilience restructures the existing system

The committee’s report also proposes merging the currently separate tools for combating “Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference” (FIMI) under the unified management of the Centre for Democratic Resilience. Rapporteur Tomas Tobé (EPP, Sweden) said at a press conference on June 23 that the Centre should assume responsibility for operating the Rapid Response System, the Rapid Alert System (RAS), and the Task Force against disinformation.

The Rapid Alert System is an intelligence-sharing mechanism managed by the EU’s diplomatic service (EEAS). Established in 2019 under the Action Plan against Disinformation, it operates continuously, with activity intensifying around elections.

Its function is to gather intelligence on FIMI campaigns and share it among EU institutions and member states.

The Task Force against Disinformation (Permanent Task Force of the Code of Practice on Disinformation) is a standing body previously managed by the European Commission’s communications department (DG COMM). Created in 2022 as amechanism for overseeing signatories of the Code of Practice on Disinformation —i.e., platforms (Meta, Google, TikTok, X, Microsoft) and other signatories (fact-checkers, EDMO hubs, NGOs).

Article 71 of the committee’s report also requires all member states to participate in governing the Centre and introduces “ongoing evaluation” of their work on electoral processes. The previous model included no evaluation of member states.

Article 71 simultaneously establishes a permanent monitoring group to oversee elections. The wording does not distinguish between types of elections — it covers parliamentary, regional, and municipal ones. Prior to this, no EU body continuously monitored member state elections.

The European Cooperation Network on Elections (ECNE) previously functioned as a platform for voluntary exchange of experience among member states — no state was required to participate and none was evaluated. The committee’s report proposes incorporating ECNE into the Centre for Democratic Resilience and introducing two new elements: a permanent monitoring group that will continuously oversee electoral processes in all member states, and ongoing evaluation of how individual states implement the Commission’s recommendations on “inclusive and resilient electoral processes.” Participation is to be mandatory.

Impact on free speech and NATO

Through the combination of existing and newly proposed controls and regulations, the Union — according to both the report’s text and MEPs’ statements at the press conference — is defending itself against external enemies. However, domestic Euroskeptic, conservative, and right-wing voices may also be affected, including those from the United States.

The report states that “certain forms of manipulative information activities may also arise from actors operating within the EU.” Committee Chair Loiseau criticized MEPs who voted against the report at the press conference for “rejecting the points about attacks coming from within the EU.”

The report also addresses the U.S. stance. Rapporteur Tobé described American and Chinese companies as part of a “dangerous cocktail” in which “powerful digital platforms, mainly based in the U.S. and China, fail to take sufficient responsibility.”

The sanctions through which the EU intends to enforce its regulations target these platforms.

Vice President JD Vance suggested during the 2024 campaign that the United States might leave NATO if the EU does not abandon its regulation of American platforms and censorship of American citizens.

“If NATO wants us to continue supporting them and NATO wants us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance, why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?” Vance said in an interview with podcaster Shawn Ryan.

In February 2025, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Republican Jim Jordan, issued subpoenas to eight American technology companies to determine the specific impact of EU DSA legislation on American users. Documents obtained from the platforms confirmed that they had censored Americans’ free speech under pressure from this regulation.

For example, during a non-public workshop in May 2025, the European Commission classified the phrase “we need to take back our country” as “illegal hate speech” to be censored by all platforms. This phrase has been used across the political spectrum by American politicians, including former Vice President Kamala Harris, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and President Donald Trump. The workshop was documented by the Judiciary Committee.

A 2024 study analyzing content removed by platforms in Germany, France, and Sweden found that 87 to 99 percent of deleted content constituted legally permissible speech. According to the study, platforms prefer to over-moderate rather than risk fines of up to six percent of global revenue under the DSA.

There is something deeply, fundamentally rotten in France — and it has little to do with “the far right.” The rot seeps from the left and the “progressives”, a cohort congenitally incapable of fighting its battles in the arena of ideas. The question here isn’t whether one agrees with Frontières, a very conservative media outlet— it’s whether Erik Tegner has the elementary right to speak, and to found a media outlet, given that in France “printing and the press are free.” That’s Article 1 of the 1881 Press Freedom Act. Perhaps someone should send these people a copy.

StreetPress — that plucky “independent and committed investigative outlet, funded by its readers,” as it likes to purr — is outraged that Erik Tegner received €4,200 per month to act as the French relay for the conservative think tank The Danube Institute before founding Frontières. Scandalous! Except, of course, this is precisely what every think tank on earth does. They write analyses, reports, and policy briefs. They try to get them read by journalists and politicians, so that their propositions gain traction. That’s the job. How shocking !

Before being elected to Parliament in 2022, Benjamin Haddad — now Secretary of State for European Affairs — did nothing but work for American think tanks: the Hudson Institute, then the Atlantic Council. A foreign agent, by any chance?

As for StreetPress itself, it has been generously watered by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. The documented grants are worth reciting: $65,000 in 2016 for video development; $24,500 in 2019 for a documentary on police violence; $70,000 in 2021, conveniently before the 2022 presidential election; and $100,000 in 2022 over two years, earmarked for fighting police violence and monitoring the far right. That’s nearly a quarter of a million dollars flowing in from a foreign influence network. But do go on about Mr. Tegner.

StreetPress also receives “pluralism subsidies” from the French Ministry of Culture — several tens of thousands of euros per year, €66,617 in 2023 alone. Government money, that is. Our money.

And who do we find lurking in StreetPress‘s ownership structure? The Héliée endowment fund for independent press support, holding 8.99% of shares. Héliée — isn’t that Hervé Vinciguerra, the multi-millionaire? Yes, the very man who tried to hand Denis Robert €400,000 to launch Blast!, a left wing outlet, in exchange for the scoop rights on Blast’s investigations, all in service of preparing a potential Arnaud Montebourg candidacy in 2022 — as L’Eclaireur reported at the time, based on Maxime Renahy’s revelations.

And who does StreetPress wheel out in its piece to thunder that Erik Tegner was, during his contract with the Danube Institute, a foreign influence agent? Macronist MP Éric Bothorel. Yes, the same Éric Bothorel who filed the complaint that launched a criminal investigation into X and Elon Musk on grounds that can only be described as fanciful.

Let it be said once more, for those in the back: disagreeing with Mr. Tegner is entirely your prerogative. Refuting him is too — if you have the intellectual wherewithal to do so. The problem is that they don't, and they know it. So they reach for the only knives left in the drawer: the personal attack, the smear, the ritual demonization. This, apparently, is what now passes for debate among people incapable of stringing together two coherent propositions — people who have forgotten, or never knew, that in a democracy you wage war on ideas, not on the men who hold them.

It is time — well past time — to abolish all press subsidies and let the public decide.

In New York, the Democratic primaries on June 23rd turned into a bloodbath. Brad Lander, the city’s former comptroller — that is, the independently elected official overseeing municipal finances — crushed incumbent congressman Dan Goldman by a thirty-point margin. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old pro-Palestinian activist, unseated Adriano Espaillat, chair of the Hispanic Caucus and a candidate backed by Hakeem Jeffries — the House Democratic minority leader, mockingly nicknamed “AIPAC Shakur.” In the 7th congressional district, spanning Queens and Brooklyn, Claire Valdez swept aside Antonio Reynoso, the handpicked successor to retiring incumbent Nydia Velázquez.

A clean sweep for the Democratic Socialists of America and their standard-bearer, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The results are poised to double the movement’s representation in Congress — much to the dismay of the Democratic establishment. One centrist lawmaker, speaking on condition of anonymity, summed up the evening in two phrases: an “earthquake” and a “massive defeat” for party leadership.

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Cecílie Jílková is a Czech writer and journalist, daughter of dissidents Ludvík Vaculík and Lenka Procházková, who lived and worked under communist rule. She edits and contributes to Reportéři on-line, an independent publication on Substack.

We reproduce below, with her kind permission, her interview with Eli Vieira — recipient of the Free Speech Courage Award, an award presented to him in London on June 18 by the Free Speech Union, a free speech advocacy organization founded in the United Kingdom.

In August 2025, Vieira and his colleague David Ágape (whom we interviewed in July 2025) revealed that Brazilian citizens had been imprisoned for their social media posts in the aftermath of the January 8, 2023 riots, when Bolsonaro supporters stormed government buildings in Brasília. After exposing that Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes had repurposed the national biometric database to cross-reference detainees’ identities with political opinions they had expressed online years earlier, both journalists fled Brazil.

Are journalists and citizens truly free to speak their minds? In Brazil, the answer is no. "Brazil is a juristocracy," David Agape told us last July. In Europe, we are not there yet. But the temptation to tighten controls and curtail freedoms is unmistakable, as the groundwork is quietly laid for what could become a fully-fledged architecture of censorship. For that reason, warns Eli Vieira, Brazil's trajectory should serve as a wake-up call.

A June study by the Reuters Digital News Report showed a further decline in trust in media across many countries. In Brazil, trust has fallen to a twelve-year low. This decline is happening in parallel with the retreat of Brazilian democracy and the rule of law.

In August 2025, two investigative journalists, Eli Vieira and David Agape, documented how Brazilian citizens were imprisoned for their social media posts. Last week, they received the Free Speech Courage Awards in London. Both journalists now live in exile.

Public

EXCLUSIVE: New Files Show Brazil’s Supreme Court Illegally Used Social Media Posts To Frame Pro-Bolsonaro Protesters As Insurrectionists

Friends — This important investigation, written by David Agape and Eli…

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a year ago · 316 likes · 30 comments · David Agape and Eli Vieira

You are accepting an award in London, but you cannot go home with it. What happened and why did you leave Brazil on November 12 last year?

It all started when in August 2025, together with my friend and journalism colleague David Agape, I showed that Brazilian citizens had been kept in prison for their social media posts. The events took place between January and March 2023.

What exactly happened?

Some Brazilian citizens took part in the January 8 riots, when hundreds of mostly right-wing supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro, unhappy with his narrow election defeat, stormed the Square of the Three Powers in Brasília and smashed windows and valuables in three buildings: the Presidential Palace, the Supreme Court (STF), and both chambers of Congress.

Others had set up camps on public grounds near military installations, such as the Army Headquarters, months earlier. These camps were considered peaceful demonstrations even by military officials, and most people from the camps did not take part in the January 8 riots.

The vandalism was obviously wrong, but the reaction of the STF and the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) was worse. Citizens were arrested en masse and subjected to trials that followed a uniform script, without attention to what each individual had actually done.

The main judge overseeing all cases was TSE President Alexandre de Moraes. He acted very fast. Right after the riots, on January 10, he issued a decree in the government gazette branding the protesters as “terrorists.” In the following years, he was the main judge sentencing these people to prison.

For example, hairdresser Débora Rodrigues dos Santos was sentenced to 14 years in prison for, among other things, “violent overthrow of the democratic rule of law” and a “coup.” Materially, however, all she did was write in lipstick on the statue of Justice outside the STF building: “You lost, you fool.”

After two years, her sentence was commuted to house arrest so she could be with her small children. If only Cleriston Pereira da Cunha had received the same leniency — another protester who suddenly died in prison. His lawyers had been warning the judges about his health problems in vain.

Judge Moraes also misused Brazil’s largest biometric database to verify the identities of detainees while screening their political opinions on social media. The evidence was provided to us by IT specialist Eduardo Tagliaferro, who became our primary source. After the publication of our story, he fled to Italy and at a Senate hearing apologized for helping Moraes carry out his persecution.

The data we obtained comes from Tagliaferro’s phone. The court officials’ workflow was as follows: first, they obtained — also through unofficial channels — a list of nearly 2,000 names from the police who had arrested the detainees. Then they searched for the names on social media and in the biometric database to confirm identities. If a given detainee had tweeted anything against President Lula and his party, even years earlier, they were issued a “positive protocol” — essentially a cadre profile marking them as an enemy of the new government, and for this reason such a detainee remained in “preventive custody.”

This was, for instance, the case of street vendor Ademir Domingos Pinto da Silva, whose protocol contained only tweets from 2018. Silva was not even a clear-cut Bolsonaro supporter, as he also tweeted critically against Bolsonaro’s politically active sons. But that was not included in the protocol.

Tagliaferro also published a list of people he accused of helping add citizens to blacklists intended for censorship. One of the people involved in this censorship was former government official Letícia Sallorenzo, known for her ostentatious adoration of Moraes.

This official filed a criminal complaint against us last October, addressed directly to Moraes’s office. This is essentially illegal, because ordinary citizens are tried by lower courts. Instead of dismissing it outright as the law would have him do, Moraes accepted the complaint and asked the prosecutor general for an opinion. The prosecutor’s deadline was November 12, 2025.

That is the date when you and your colleague David Agape fled Brazil, correct?

Yes. Agape and I already knew about the cases of journalists persecuted by Moraes. Jackson Rangel spent over a year in prison. Oswaldo Eustáquio was granted asylum in Spain. We were next in line.

The lawsuit against you was archived this January at the prosecutor’s request.

Yes. After three months of wreaking havoc in our lives by delaying his official opinion, the prosecutor general said the case had no merit and must be archived. Moraes did not fight him on this, which was in our favor.

Why was the case archived?

I can only speculate, but I see two main reasons. First, Tagliaferro was the third defendant in the case, but the prosecutor general had already issued an opinion in a separate case accusing this whistleblower of crimes against the Brazilian state for leaking the information we published. A second prosecution against him would have been excessive.

The second reason is that they may have already been informed of our departure and did not want to give us another argument when telling the US and UK governments that Brazil persecutes journalists. Moraes cares about his image in the media.

So is it safe for you in Brazil now?

I don’t think so. Also for two reasons. The oldest STF justice, Gilmar Mendes, who has mostly defended Moraes’s actions and is highly politically active, recently reopened another already-archived case because it was politically convenient. This shows that our case can also be reopened at any time.

Second: I spoke with a Federal Police officer when consulting with family, friends, and employers about whether I should leave Brazil. This officer said there was no way for me to find out if I would be allowed to leave the country. I would only find out at the moment I presented my passport at the border gate before boarding the plane to London. Persecution happens covertly — you learn about it at the last moment.

The STF and Moraes have kept open for seven years the so-called “Fake News Inquiry.” People can be investigated without knowing it. It is a permanently and preventively open investigation for events that have yet to happen. An investigation targeting the future. An absolutist instrument that gives Moraes and his allies more power than the Constitution ever granted them.

Sallorenzo’s criminal complaint asked Moraes to add our names to this inquiry. And we have no way of verifying that he didn’t.

What about the people you wrote about? According to your data, not a single person with a negative “cadre profile” has been released to this day, is that correct?

Since we only had access to 67 protocols covering just 23% of the total 1,398 names screened by Tagliaferro and his team, we don’t know what kind of profile was issued for some people. However, we do know that some people fled the country.

Moraes then turned against those who stayed in order to retaliate against those who fled. He sent back to prison even sick elderly women who had been serving their sentences under house arrest, such as Vildete Guardia and Iraci Nagoshi. He only reversed this decision after public outrage over their health. He doesn’t want to damage his PR if someone else were to die in prison.

The latest Reuters Digital News Report says that Brazilians’ trust in media has dropped even further and is now at a twelve-year low. How do you see the future of Brazilian media?

I once read an article on Bari Weiss’s The Free Press about the conflict in Gaza on exactly this topic. The article said that Gazans and Israelis no longer rely on media brands. Only on individual journalists. On those with a reputation for telling the truth. Brazil is not a war zone, but that is an apt observation.

I work for Claudio Dantas, a journalist who built a strong reputation on both reporting on human rights abuses during the military dictatorship (1964–1985) and on corruption scandals under previous Lula governments. People trust individual figures like him.

Reportéři on-line

Anatomie nedůvěry: Brazilská mediální krize

Nejnovější studie Reuters Digital News Report 2025 odhaluje dramatické změny v globálním mediálním…

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a year ago · Cecílie Jílková

In some cases, newspapers create so-called “blogs” for such figures, ostensibly to give these highly valued journalists editorial independence. At the same time, however, the label “blogger” makes it easier to persecute these journalists. If we’re not real journalists, just bloggers, the subtext is that it’s okay to go after us.

You are essentially describing a system in which power structures, through pressure on newspapers, decide who gets the status of journalist and who doesn’t. Where is this all heading? President Lula publicly asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping to send advisors on internet regulation. What is the goal?

The goal is the October elections. The entire model of censorship as an alleged “shield of democracy” will be tested again in Brazil during the next elections. The Washington Post called Brazil a global laboratory for this kind of test. The American left endorses the persecution of those detained on January 8 and claims the protests were motivated by “disinformation.”

The unit that carried out the cadre profiling of detainees on Moraes’s orders was also established in the name of fighting “disinformation.” Incidentally, in Portuguese, “disinformation” and “misinformation” are the same word. The consequence is that intent doesn’t matter. The state has appointed itself not only as the arbiter of truth but also as the editor of your political beliefs.

Yet according to the Reuters study, Brazil is the only country out of 48 markets where concerns about disinformation have declined.

I’m used to this kind of studies about Brazil. To put it cynically: for some international observers, everything is fine in Brazil when left-wing politicians are in charge. When a right-wing leader is in power, then all rights are under threat. In 2018, the left claimed Bolsonaro would cause a genocide of the LGBT community. I am married to a man. Our union is recognized by a Brazilian court. And we are alive.

Perhaps the Reuters Institute relies too heavily on Brazilian mainstream media (paid with money from Lula’s Communications Secretariat) and on Brazilian academics who are overwhelmingly biased against anything that looks right-wing.

That said, I’m not saying the study’s conclusions are wrong. Perhaps the “fight against disinformation” fad is simply fading in Brazil because it has already been successfully used to imprison Jair Bolsonaro and many of his supporters for an alleged coup attempt.

At the conference in London where we are meeting, European regulations and their impact on freedom of speech were discussed. Do you see parallels with developments in Brazil?

Not just parallels — I see a direct influence of the DSA on Brazilian moves toward censorship. The DSA speaks of “trusted flaggers,” and the TSE has already used them — mostly left-leaning fact-checking agencies — during the 2022 elections to remove content from social media. The DSA also speaks of “systemic risks” — Lula used very similar language in two censorship decrees he issued in May.

What would you say to a Czech reader who asks why they should care about a story from a country on the other side of the world?

I hope Czechs reading this will realize that the rule of law is a fragile thing that can be broken by powerful forces — especially those perceived as bearers of legal expertise. These can be very dangerous when they come for free speech and the rights of ordinary citizens.

I also hope that Czechia has done a better job than Brazil in establishing rules that prevent people in high positions from making decisions based on their own whims and prejudices, especially political ones.

Brazilian democracy is renewable, but only if the separation of powers is restored and judicial activism is tamed.

One more thing: only Brazilians care about Brazil enough to do something about it, and only Czechs care about Czechia enough to keep it open and free. Don't expect saviors from abroad. Take your freedoms into your own hands before the state — or in your case, the state above states — takes them from you.

Eli Vieira is a Brazilian journalist, biologist, and geneticist, president of Free Speech Union Brasil, and co-author of the investigative reports Vaza Toga 2 and Twitter Files Brazil. He has been living in exile since November 2025.

Eldur Smari Kristinsson is an Islandic politician. He ran for the Democracy Party in the Northwest constituency of Iceland in the last parliamentary elections.

Iceland applied for EU membership in July 2009 after the financial crisis. Negotiations opened in 2010 and advanced rapidly thanks to its European Economic Area membership.

In 2013, a new eurosceptic government froze the talks. In March 2015, Foreign Minister Gunnar Bragi Sveinsson sent a letter to the EU stating Iceland no longer wanted to be considered a candidate country.

For Iceland, the letter was a withdrawal. However, the EU claims the application was never formally withdrawn and remains legally valid and dormant.

In January 2025, an EU spokesperson confirmed: “Iceland’s membership application is still valid; it was never formally withdrawn, so legally, it remains active.”

After the 2024 general elections, the new government revived the issue. A referendum is now scheduled for 29 August 2026 on whether to resume negotiations.

The EU has stated it is ready to restart talks if Iceland votes yes.

No domestic agenda

According to our law on referenda, this poll is advisory — yet the government claims it provides a mandate to continue aligning with the EU alongside the negotiation process. It will establish whether we want to take the next step toward becoming part of a political union that has never been as close to falling apart.

What makes this referendum quite out of the ordinary is that there is neither a popular majority nor a parliamentary one for joining the European Union.

This is not a domestic agenda. Icelandic politicians are puppets on a string - and the strings are being pulled from abroad.

Yet the debate that has taken place so far reads like a manual on how to avoid the real questions. It has mostly revolved around our currency, interest rates, and economic “stability.” Supporters of membership promise lower interest rates and the euro as a magic solution. Opponents point to the volatility of the króna and fear the loss of an independent monetary policy. Both sides speak as if EU membership were primarily a technical economic matter that would solve domestic problems.

This is misleading. Interest rates in Iceland are first and foremost the result of domestic governance — fiscal policy, inflationary pressures, and decisions by the Central Bank of Iceland. EU membership does not change the fundamental fact that governments can continue to spend more than they take in, or that the Central Bank can continue to respond to the consequences with high interest rates.

If the government has given up on tackling these issues responsibly at home, Brussels will not solve them. It will merely shift the responsibility elsewhere — while simultaneously reducing Icelanders’ ability to correct the course through elections.

The Democracy Party advocated specific solutions for Icelandic households by removing the housing component from the consumer price index, abolishing indexation of lending and mortgages, and imposing a cap on the Central Bank’s interest rates. These measures have never been properly tested.

Even less attention has been given to the ceding of sovereignty over natural resources. Fisheries are a cornerstone of Iceland’s economy and national identity. The EU’s Common Fisheries Policy has proved difficult for many coastal states — quotas, allocation, and oversight shift to Brussels and Luxembourg. Energy, agriculture, and the use of natural resources are also at stake. These are not side issues. They are questions about who owns Iceland — the nation or joint institutions operating under rules over which Icelanders have little say.

Pressure on civil rights

What is most absent from the debate is the truly profound question: What happens to our fundamental civil rights?

Democracy, freedom of expression, and the right to privacy are not self-evident. They have evolved continuously in the West — but not always in the right direction. In recent years, the EU has developed tools presented as safeguards for democracy that can, in practice, serve to restrict it.

Examples include the so-called European Democracy Shield and the Centre for Democratic Resilience. These ideas are framed as a response to foreign influence, disinformation, and “threats to democracy.” They are supposed to pool information, build capacity to detect and counter “undesirable” narratives, and strengthen the “resilience” of democracy.

This sounds noble. In reality, the danger is that such institutions will be used to define what counts as a legitimate opinion and what does not — often based on whether it aligns with Brussels’ policies and narratives. When unelected institutions are given the power to “defend” democracy against elected representatives and voters who hold different views, democracy itself is at risk.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. It is part of a larger and more systematic network often described as the NGO industrial complex and the censorship industrial complex. The EU has built an extensive system for funding non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that function as influence agents, lobbyists, and “representatives of civil society.”

These organisations receive grants from the Union’s common funds to work on issues such as migration, climate policy, digital governance, and “social justice.” They participate in consultations, shape proposals, and present themselves as an “independent” voice — even though their funding and incentives are closely tied to Brussels. This creates an industry in which organisations multiply, receive more money, and continually generate new “challenges” that require more intervention and funding.

At the same time, a censorship industrial complex has emerged in which governments, publicly funded fact-checking organisations, academia, media outlets, and tech companies collaborate to define, label, and restrict “disinformation” and “hate speech.”

Rules such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Code of Practice on Disinformation have strengthened this cooperation, giving “trusted flaggers” and partner organisations privileged influence over what appears online.

The European Democracy Shield and the Centre for Democratic Resilience are directly linked to this network. The document establishing them refers to a “stakeholder platform” in which civil society organisations, fact-checkers, and media providers are to participate.

In this way, the EU’s official tool becomes part of the same industry that already operates under the banner of fighting “threats.” The result is a system in which power shifts away from voters and national parliaments toward funded organisations and informal networks that have a strong incentive to maintain and expand their own existence.

When “threats to democracy” are defined by those who receive funding from the very system they are supposed to defend, the danger is obvious: legitimate criticism of any EU policy, immigration, or centralisation can be labelled as “disinformation” or “foreign interference”, and thereby silenced — without voters having any direct say in the matter.

Silence on both sides is deafening

Why does either side in Iceland discuss this openly? Supporters of membership prefer to talk about economic benefits and “European cooperation.” They know that any debate about this industrial system, centralisation, and restrictions of freedom of expression frightens people. Opponents to EU Membership have focused on traditional sovereignty issues — fisheries and independence — but have avoided digging deeper into how the EU has evolved into a system capable of limiting even the rights it claims to protect.

Both sides of the board appear to agree on keeping the debate on the surface: money and quotas, but not the question of who actually has the right to decide what may be said, what may be known, and how democracy should function.

Icelanders have long prided themselves of a strong democratic tradition, freedom of expression, and respect for privacy. These rights are not guaranteed in a large, centralised union where decisions are increasingly moved further away from voters and where EU funded organisations and censorship systems can wield more influence than elected representatives.

If we are to take a position on EU membership, we should discuss these matters honestly — not only what we gain in our pockets, but also what we give up of what makes us a free nation.

The 29 August referendum is not about the euro. It is about whether we want to continue debating our future on our own terms — or whether we want to hide key issues behind economic promises and a system that restricts our freedom. Democracy begins with asking all difficult questions. Now is the opportunity to do so.

Is there not something faintly absurd about European Parliament President Roberta Metsola of Malta launching a disciplinary investigation into Luxembourgish MEP Fernand Kartheiser on the grounds of the EU’s code of conduct?

The former ambassador stands accused of maintaining contacts with Russian authorities — through meetings and exchanges — a stance that ultimately cost him his seat in his parliamentary group. More recently, he attended the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum and signed a cooperation declaration with the Russian parliament.

But can a lawmaker genuinely be accused of undermining the political message of an institution he does not claim to represent, by disregarding a rule that does not exist? There is no written prohibition on engaging with Russian interlocutors simply because the EU has placed them under sanctions.

Since his election, Kartheiser has held consistently to the same position: he acts in a personal capacity, within the freedom afforded to any elected representative. He has never claimed to speak for the European Parliament. In his view, he answers to his voters — not to the institution itself.

Back-channel diplomacy? That is a fair question to ask. What makes the affair particularly farcical, however, is the light shed on it by recent developments within the EU itself. While the European Parliament has shut the door on any engagement with Moscow, others have been quietly opening it.

On June 19, European Council President António Costa announced the establishment of what he called a “diplomatic channel” with the Kremlin, intended to gauge whether conditions for peace negotiations might exist. He reportedly did so without consulting all 27 member states — Estonia was notably opposed — and without informing the European Commission in advance. The European Parliament was not consulted either.

The Kartheiser affair, then, is about far more than a clash between an MEP and his institution. The debate over whether to negotiate with Moscow is merely the visible symptom of a much deeper malaise. Divisions are emerging not only between EU member states — particularly along the sharpening East-West fault line on Russia policy — but within the European institutions themselves.

What is truly at stake is a struggle for diplomatic legitimacy among the EU’s three centres of political authority: the European Council, the European Commission, and the European Parliament. The underlying question is both simple and explosive — who actually speaks for Europe in its dealings with Russia, especially when Moscow has made clear it does not want the EU at any future negotiation on Ukraine?

This ambiguity has never been resolved by the EU treaties. The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union distributes responsibilities across the European Council, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs — currently Kaja Kallas, a figure of growing controversy in some circles — and the European Commission, yet it designates no single diplomatic authority. The tensions now surfacing are exposing precisely that institutional fault line.

All of this we discuss with Fernand Kartheiser.

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You know the tune: peoples are not their leaders. The British, for all their periodic bouts of tabloid Francophobia, are rather fond of us — a feeling we return in kind.

Britain’s current leaders are inept, first and foremost toward their own country, yet bear us no particular ill will. Germany’s leaders, on the other hand — the hübsche — despise us, even as ordinary Germans, true to the old adage Wie Gott in Frankreich (to live as God lives in France, meaning in pure contentment), hold a genuine warmth for the French.

What strange masochism drives the French ruling class to persist, nearly sixty years on, in the fantasy of a Franco-German “couple” that has never existed? The obsessive neurosis of binding oneself to those who revile us from across the Rhine is nothing new. There was even a word for it once — Collaboration — and it stretches back as far as the First World War. L’Entente Cordiale has proven far more enduring and productive.

Listening closely to Chancellor Merz — the latest face of that CDU/CSU-SPD coalition, Merkel's GroKo, which has been quietly poisoning Europe for the better part of twenty years — one might reasonably wonder whether the Russians deserve some help rebuilding the Wall, since Berlin seems to have forgotten the very treaty - the 2+4 - that made reunification possible.

As for the Constitution of the French Fifth Republic: in both its spirit and its letter, it draws its inspiration from British parliamentary democracy. Honni soit qui mal y pense.

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The Trump administration has issued an export ban on Anthropic’s two most advanced models — Fable 5 (the safety-bridled, guardrail-laden public version of Mythos 5) and Mythos 5 itself — barring all foreign nationals from access, including those on US soil. The catch: one of Anthropic’s chief scientists, Andrej Karpathy (OpenAI co-founder, Tesla alumnus, and the man responsible for pre-training — the single most critical phase in model development) is not an American citizen and can no longer, in theory, work on the very models he helps build.

Doesn’t this ring a bell? Remember Apple’s PowerPC M4 chip in 1999, or PGP encryption in 1991 — both banned from export on grounds of national security that were, to put it plainly, idiotic? Donald Trump’s decision — in which Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO and one of Anthropic’s principal shareholders, whose company counts Anthropic as its biggest AWS AI client, representing 80% of its backlog, is said to have played a significant role — will have catastrophic consequences that will accelerate the implosion of the bubble. China is rubbing its hands together, as we reported as early as January 2025.

Faced with the export ban targeting Fable 5 and Mythos 5, Anthropic's latest flagship models, a holy terror has seized France's political and media class, which promptly broke into its customary chorus: sovereignty — European sovereignty, naturally, a phrase that means approximately nothing —, the geopoliticisation of AI, technological warfare. Given the depth of knowledge and understanding these people actually bring to the subject, we might as well be taking tech policy advice from the Simpsons' Mayor Quimby

The tech-brained simpletons, meanwhile, are rolling on the floor, weeping and tearing their hair out — already traumatised by Apple's suspension of Siri in Europe, without which they cannot figure out how to order their sushi and their artisanal sourdough.

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Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky delivers a damning verdict.

What the hell happened? Hypernormalisation, as Adam Curtis lays bare in his seminal documentary?

The term was borrowed from Soviet scholar Alexei Yurchak, who used it to describe late Soviet society: everyone — citizens and officials alike — knew the system was broken, dysfunctional, and built on lies, yet everyone kept performing as though it worked. Not out of genuine belief, but because no alternative was imaginable - which did not mean that one did not exist. The collective pretence became the social glue.

It is striking how those who claim to offer an alternative to globalism, Europeanism, and progressivism operate with the same mindset, the same intellectual framework, the same reflexes, and exhibit the same behaviours as those they purport to fight. Pure mirror play: oppositions only oppose each other symmetrically. No one has an angle. The reflection plane - the script - never changes.

Hypernormalisation.

Take the victimhood reflex — that insufferable posture. While progressives cry discrimination on grounds of gender, colour, or sexual orientation to demonise their opponents, “conservatives” — let us call them that, for want of a better generic term — have simply swapped it out for the censorship they claim to suffer on account of their ideas.

We are not saying this is entirely without ground. Discrimination exists. So does censorship. But not in the structural, all-pervasive way we are meant to believe — a convenient fiction that allows each camp to monopolise suffering, dodge accountability, and blame for their failures external forces they claim are beyond their control.

Progressive climate alarmism failing to land with the public? Blame social media for platforming sceptics. Eighty percent of French people opposing uncontrolled immigration? Blame social media for reflecting that majority view. Conservatives losing elections? Social media censorship, obviously.

Nobody stops to ask whether their message actually resonates with public opinion — shaped by lived reality, not by media — and subsequently whether their actions match their words.

Take La France Insoumise, the French radical left-wing party that has loudly demanded Macron’s departure since 2017, yet helped elect him twice (2017 and 2022), then squandered the 2024 legislative opening to give him the boot by engineering the election of 159 Macronist MPs in the second round — all to fend off a thouroughly fictitious fascism. The National Rally did no better, twice abstaining on no-confidence motions that would have cornered Macron into either a new parliamentary recall or resignation. That is the reality of what these two parties actually do. The script never changes. And the soup’s hot, tasty and free.

But back to censorship. The grievance has become so lucrative it now functions as a fully-fledged business model for some French alternative media outlets — outlets with no qualms about burning the bulk of their audience’s donations on washed-up, irrelevant boomer commentators who’ve been around for fifty years, bellowing into microphones and contributing close to nothing to public debate.

Indeed, at the height of woke capture, employees at certain platforms — Twitter and Meta in particular — did exercise censorship, because they were allowed to. Yes, during Covid, any criticism of government policy was systematically suppressed, and those same governments seized the moment to try to silence political opponents.

The platforms, however, quickly grasped the commercial damage. A social network only works when all (lawful) opinions present in society are fairly represented. Anything less means haemorrhaging users, advertising revenue, and data.

Today in Europe, extra-judicial censorship is virtually non-existent. Contrary to what both progressives and conservatives insist, the Digital Services Act is a comprehensive failure as a speech-control instrument — because it is simply unenforceable. Not our claim, but the assessment of sources inside the regulatory apparatus itself: Digital Services Coordinators, the European Commission, and judicial institutions.

Take X. The €140 million fine handed down by the Commission is being challenged in court — the CJEU will decide, not the Commission. Don’t hold your breath: It’ll take years before the first ruling. The DSA is so toothless that the French government has resorted to weaponising criminal justice through asymmetric prosecutions - possibly unlawful ones, since the charges brought against X could equally apply to every other platform, none of which are being prosecuted. If the DSA were actionable, then why this escalation?

Not everything in the DSA is without merit, it should be said. For instance, it explicitly stipulates that providing a digital intermediation service guaranteeing encrypted communications and user anonymity cannot be deemed illegal or criminal, unless the service was designed specifically to support criminal activities.

As for state-approved trusted flaggers, a senior executive at a major platform was refreshingly blunt when we spoke with him: “Trusted flaggers get priority processing. We respond to them first — and in the majority of cases, we flip them the bird. Meanwhile, these NGOs can no longer sue us the way they used to. We couldn’t be happier.”

It is also worth recalling that last year in September, within sixteen days, the Paris judiciary tribunal handed down three landmark rulings with regards to DSA implementation, stating: that freedom of expression is the rule, not the exception; that it can only be restricted in cases of manifestly unlawful speech supported by concrete evidence; that subjective opinions cannot be censored; that freedom of expression and the right to information take precedence over the right to oblivion; and that anonymous speech is not in itself unlawful.

Anyone familiar with the chronic backlog of French courts knows this was no coincidence. It was a message from the judiciary: it will not tolerate having its monopoly over the control of the exercice of freedoms encroached upon.

We are not arguing that the censorship impulse should not be fought tooth and nail — freedom of expression is the bedrock of any democracy. What we are claiming is that every party that reaches power will, all things being equal, behave exactly like those already there, in order to stay there. One would have to be profoundly naive to believe that La France Insoumise or the National Rally, once in office, would not reach for state power to silence critics and opponents. They will be no better on freedom of expression than the centrist bloc.

Donald Trump was elected twice because his message was in tune with public opinion, against the establishment. During his first term, he proved incapable of delivery, unable to overcome the machinations of the deep state and the mainstream media. Elected a second time on the back of the Biden disaster, he promptly did the opposite of what he was elected for.

Hypernormalisation.

Today’s politicians are professional talking heads congenitally incapable of action — and it is on this basis that political personnel are selected, across all parties. Because they have nothing but words, because they are genuinely convinced that speaking is acting — which speaks volumes about their magical, infantile thinking — they will never stop trying to control speech by every means available, including censorship.

Let us close with elections — which in European countries, unlike the United States, are extremely difficult to rig, since voting requires ID and is conducted overwhelmingly on paper ballots, one race at a time.

It took intervention by the French senior judiciary in 2017 to sideline François Fillon so that Macron could clear the first round and ultimately win. In Romania, foreign pressure strong-armed the Constitutional Court into annulling the entire 2024 presidential process — just one week after it had validated first-round results in which Călin Georgescu had come first. In Hungary, Peter Magyar’s victory is explained primarily by Orbán’s fatigue after sixteen uninterrupted years in power, compounded by Brussels’ structural funds blackmail — without which virtually every country in Central and Eastern Europe would be in default.

Spending billions funding NGOs and media outlets to control political discourse has proven ineffective. So has platform regulation.

Which means that in France or Germany next year, attempting to cancel an election on grounds of foreign interference will not fly — neither legally nor in public opinion — given that we now have concrete proof that media and social networks lack sufficient influence to meaningfully compromise the integrity of a vote. And it does not look like the French judiciary will intervene, with a view to remain unscathed and preserve its prerogatives in case of an alternation.

Those in power have run out of solutions. The problem is that those hoping to replace them have none either.

Hypernormalisation.

Athanasios Rantos, Prosecutor General at the European Court of Justice (ECJ), has delivered his opinion in a key case concerning public access to Covid-19 vaccine procurement contracts. He has recommended that the Court uphold the EU General Court’s July 2024 rulings, which sided against the European Commission on transparency issues.

During the pandemic, the Commission negotiated multi-billion-euro contracts on behalf of EU member states with pharmaceutical companies including Pfizer and BioNTech. When MEPs and citizens requested access to the documents, the Commission released heavily redacted versions. It withheld, among other details, the names of the negotiators — information needed to check for potential conflicts of interest — and the pharmaceutical companies’ liability and indemnification clauses, citing privacy and commercial confidentiality.

As the ECJ typically follows the Advocate General’s opinions in most cases, the Commission appears headed for a formal rebuke. Brussels will likely be required to improve transparency and grant better public access to official documents. It may even have to publish less-redacted versions of the contracts to comply with the judgment.

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Apple is, technologically speaking, one colossal scam. It always has been.

Steve Jobs quite literally stole the concept of the mouse and graphical user interface after glimpsing a prototype during a visit to Xerox PARC, the R&D center of Rank Xerox. MacOS? It’s nothing more than a dressed-up version of UNIX (open source) built on a foundation called “Darwin.”

iOS — the operating system powering iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and the rest of the shiny menagerie — is equally Unix-based, except Apple has buried it under such a mountain of restrictions that it functions as a fully proprietary, locked-down system designed for one purpose above all else: total control. Control over app certification, control over app distribution, control over you.

How convenient. What a racket. Developers get to pay through the nose for access to the development toolkit, the APIs, and the privilege of selling their apps — apps that must, naturally, be signed with an Apple certificate. And Apple, ever the gracious host, helps itself to a tidy commission on every app sale. The device you handed over your hard-earned cash for? It’s yours in name only. You can’t actually do what you want with it.

Google pulled the exact same trick with Android — a Linux distribution dressed up with proprietary add-ons courtesy of the Palo Alto giant. The key difference, at least, is that Android remains open source, which curtails some abuses — as we’ll examine further on in this article.

The latest drama in this ongoing saga: Apple’s decision to withhold its AI Siri features from iOS in the EU. That’s not about the EU’s Digital Market Act. That’s about over 25 years of anti-trust and competition case law, on both sides of the Atlantic.

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