Mapping Censorship: France’s Empire of Silence Across Europe and Beyond

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

On 15 December 2025, the European Union sanctioned Jacques Baud, a Swiss national and independent military analyst, accusing him of spreading “false narratives” on Ukraine and NATO. Officially framed as a safeguard for European democratic resilience, the move exposes a far more troubling reality: a censorship industrial complex in which independent analysis, alternative viewpoints, and rigorous debate are increasingly treated as a national security threat.

Across Europe, unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, supported by a sprawling network of state-aligned NGOs, now wield the power to monitor, flag, and remove content; define disinformation; and impose sanctions, often without meaningful judicial oversight. Laws like the Digital Services Act (DSA) compel platforms to remove or restrict content under threat of fines and give influence to “trusted flaggers,” many handpicked civil society organisations funded by the EU.

“Independent voices can be silenced before courts even intervene.”

The Jacques Baud case is not an isolated incident. It exemplifies the systematic targeting of dissenting voices and underscores the urgent need to understand the mechanisms shaping Europe’s public discourse today.

France as the Architect of EU Censorship

France has emerged as the central architect of Europe’s censorship machinery. Domestically, laws such as the Pleven Law of 1972 created a legal framework empowering organisations to act as quasi-judicial arbiters of speech. Over decades, this system evolved into a bureaucratically and NGO-mediated enforcement ecosystem, blending government agencies, legal bodies, media regulators, and civil society organisations to exert preemptive narrative control over public debate and digital platforms.

The September 2025 investigative eport titled “How France Invented The Censorship Industrial” Complex |The Twitter Files – France, a case study by Pascal Clérotte and Thomas Fazi, reveals that President Emmanuel Macron personally coordinated with French NGOs, many state-funded or linked to intelligence service,  to influence Twitter moderation, granting special access to internal platform data. Public figures, including Miss France, were reportedly enlisted in campaigns advocating censorship, highlighting the extraordinary scale and personalisation of this initiative.

DOCUMENT: How France Invented The Censorship Industrial, case study by Pascal Clérotte and Thomas Fazi (Source: Civilization Work)
France Censorship Industrial Complex

Building directly on the findings of this report, investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger provided a firsthand account of how the French censorship industrial complex operates in practice. Speaking at the European Parliament in Strasbourg during a special roundtable discussion on freedom of expression hosted on December 17, 2025, and titled “Censorship Beyond the Seas,”  Shellenberger contextualises the internal Twitter documents that reveal high-level political coordination, including French President Macron, NGO involvement, and judicial pressure aimed at shaping platform moderation.

VIDEO: Extract from Twitter Files (Translated in English with AI) The American journalist who can bring down Macron tells us everything! (Source: Tocsin Media)

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Macron’s July 14, 2025, speech, emphasising “cognitive security”, signals the apex of a long evolution of narrative control. The French state exerts subtle social, administrative, and judicial pressure on citizens and platforms, relying on state-affiliated media, oligarch-owned private outlets dependent on government contracts, and NGOs empowered as privatised prosecutors to enforce speech norms. Liberticide laws passed since 2018 regulate online speech under the guise of protecting children or minorities, creating a panoptical system of social control in which dissent is penalised even when not explicitly criminal.

France’s domestic model now feeds directly into EU enforcement channels. Programs like CERV and European Democracy Shield embed state-aligned NGOs into EU networks, ensuring the domestic approach of “trusted moderators” dictates policy across Europe. The Baud case demonstrates how this reach can extend beyond EU citizens, targeting independent analysts internationally.

“France not only invented the seeds of modern censorship; it has exported them across Europe.”

The EU Censorship Industrial Complex: Institutions, Funding, and Enforcement

At the EU level, the censorship infrastructure is a multi-layered, institutionalised system combining regulatory bodies, funding streams, and legal frameworks. Key components include:

• East StratCom Task Force (headed by Martyna Bildziukiewicz) and EUvsDisinfo: Monitors and flags narratives considered destabilising, influencing platforms and public perception.
• European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO): Connects fact-checkers, academics, and NGOs, many aligned with France, guiding moderation EU-wide.
• Digital Services Act (DSA) and hybrid-threat sanctions: Empower regulators to compel platforms to remove content, cooperate with “trusted flaggers,” and face fines without independent judicial review.

Recent reporting reveals France’s ambition to extend its censorship model globally, particularly targeting U.S. social media platforms. During ongoing trade talks with the Trump administration (as of September 2025), French authorities, led by Thierry Breton, former EU Commissioner, threatened action against Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) for hosting a conversation with Donald Trump. Macron attempted direct communication with then-CEO Jack Dorsey to enforce pre-censorship, access internal platform data, and modify content moderation worldwide.

“An apparently coordinated effort by the Macron government and state-affiliated NGOs sought to force the world’s most influential social media platform to censor legal speech.”

These actions are paralleled by broader EU-NATO initiatives. Beyond the DSA, the EU has introduced biometric ID cards potentially linked to the European Central Bank’s digital euro, as well as a repository for health and other personal data (EHDS). Adoption is currently low beyond basic ID functions, but plans exist to make critical services accessible only through this system. France’s push to ban social media for under-15s is part of a broader effort to compel digital identification for platform participation.

The EU-NATO partnership reinforces these measures through joint declarations on cybersecurity and combating disinformation. Institutions such as the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn (CCDCOE) and the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in Helsinki (Hybrid CoE) coordinate closely with EU authorities, creating an integrated transatlantic framework for online narrative control.

“The EU-French censorship machine is institutionalised, coordinated, and increasingly extraterritorial.”

Vast EU funding supports NGOs, research institutes, and media projects investigating hate speech or disinformation, creating a self-reinforcing censorship ecosystem. Funding and institutional backing for aligned actors ensure that the same narratives dominate across multiple layers of governance, turning platforms into instruments of regulatory policy rather than neutral public spaces.

Consequences and Implications: Democracy, Debate, and Due Process

The consequences of this system are profound. Mechanisms like the DSA, platform flagging networks, and aligned NGOs can stifle independent thought, political critique, and alternative analysis, shrinking civic space. Free expression is increasingly a privilege granted to those who adhere to sanctioned narratives.

The Jacques Baud case demonstrates the human impact: as a non-EU citizen, his independent analysis was targeted by administrative sanctions, highlighting how speech policing can reach extraterritorially without judicial oversight. Combined with France’s domestic mechanisms, cognitive security policies, privatised prosecution through NGOs, state-affiliated media dominance, liberticide laws, regulatory enforcement, and social media ID mandates, it represents a sophisticated, transnational censorship apparatus.

SEE MORE: NATO’s Red Pen on Ukraine: Jacques Baud and the Silencing of Dissent

The expansion of digital ID cards, digital euro-linked identification, social media age restrictions, and the EU-NATO cybersecurity framework signals a move toward a panoptical system of social control. The Covid pandemic’s mismanagement, which curtailed individual liberties yet failed to achieve its objectives, serves as a cautionary example, demonstrating that top-down control measures can falter despite suppressing freedoms. Similarly, continued attempts to stymie online free speech may ultimately fail as technology evolves faster than regulation.

“Freedom of expression is dwindling to a mere shadow of its former self, increasingly turned into a privilege granted to those who do not deviate from official narratives.”

Ultimately, the EU and France’s censorship industrial complex demonstrates that democratic debate is being systematically constrained, turning legal, independent, and critical voices into targets of surveillance, administrative sanctions, and global content moderation pressures.

The convergence of state power, bureaucratic discretion, NGO enforcement, and platform compliance has created a transnational architecture of narrative control whose consequences for freedom, democracy, and public discourse are profound and enduring.

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21st Century Wire is an alternative news agency designed to enlighten, inform and educate readers about world events which are not always covered in the mainstream media.

Source: https://21stcenturywire.com/2025/12/29/mapping-censorship-frances-empire-of-silence-across-europe-and-beyond/