Ever since the withdrawal of USAID, people have started looking at how the EU spends their money—and each week seems to bring new shocking revelations of the absurd waste, corruption, and socio-political engineering that Brussels has been financing.
Now, a new report from the conservative think tank MCC Brussels, released today, sheds light on yet another troubling trend—taxpayer-funded “research” on so-called “hate speech” and “disinformation,” described by the author as a key part of the EU’s efforts to control the narrative of public discourse and crack down on dissenting voices.
The report is titled Manufacturing Misinformation: the EU-Funded Propaganda War Against Free Speech, and was written by Dr. Norman Lewis, a British expert on digital communication regulation with over two decades of experience.
While researching the topic, Dr. Lewis identified 349 projects funded by the European Commission, mainly through the Horizon research program, focused on countering ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation.’ The cost? €649 million. That’s 31% more than what Brussels spends on transnational cancer research.
“This massive allocation of taxpayers’ money has been consciously used to fund an Orwellian disinformation complex to dictate and control the language of public debate,” the think tank said in a press release, shared with europeanconservative.com.
Using numerous concrete examples, the report demonstrates that this is not a benign act of responsible government but a systematic assault on free speech in Europe, replacing open debate with “a top-down, authoritarian, curated consensus” to benefit Brussels’ agenda.
Dr. Lewis also identified a list of deliberately ambiguous and euphemistic terms that often accompany such projects, which he refers to as “NEUspeak” (after Orwell’s “newspeak”), designed to build an artificial ideological framework. The goal? To control the political narrative and delegitimize opponents, primarily on the populist Right.
The goal is to create a “moral panic” that justifies sweeping censorship tools, such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Democracy Shield (EDS).
As is often the case, these projects reveal that the EU is dependent on inventing the problems it then comes in to solve. What’s framed as “neutral research” is often just “the ritual confirmation of preordained political assumptions,” with NGOs and academia financially incentivized to confirm the Commission’s pre-existing talking points.
According to Dr. Lewis, keeping hundreds of organizations in this corrupt, self-serving loop also diminishes civil society and academic research. “There is no quest for truth or new knowledge, only compliance with an elitist bureaucratic narrative designed to protect the status quo,” the author said.
But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the report is that many of the identified projects involve the development of advanced AI systems. These are tasked not only with the real-time monitoring and censorship of unwelcome content, but also with influencing user behavior by “training” young people online to become autonomous “agents” or “speech police” for the EU narrative.
This report is not merely an exposé of financial misuse but “a democratic intervention,” MCC Brussels’ press release added.
“When language is narrowed, softened, obfuscated, or stripped of meaning, so is the possibility of resistance and the development of alternatives,” the think tank said. “The Commission, by defining what may be said and how it must be framed, does not protect democracy but undermines it.”
EU Spends €650 Million of Taxpayer Money on Policing ‘Hate Speech’ ━ The European Conservative