As part of her re-election campaign promise, Ursula von der Leyen pledged to strengthen democracy in the EU. In late 2025, she published a joint communication with the High Representative to deliver her promise—the European Commission unveiled its so-called ‘European Democracy Shield’. According to the Commission, the initiative aims to protect democracy from harmful foreign information manipulation and interference, especially during election campaigns. The regulation intends to safeguard the information space and to boost societal resilience and citizens’ engagement.

Part of the regulation is a so-called Centre for Democratic Resilience, a centralized hub that aims to monitor and protect Member States from foreign influence. On a voluntary basis, Member States and candidate countries can participate in the Centre that links together EU institutions, national bodies and civil society. The Centre’s responsibility is to ‘anticipate, detect and respond to threats’ in the online world, especially foreign disinformation campaigns. It started its work in late February 2026.

In preparation for implementing the regulation, the EU allocated (on top of the already existing funds) five million euros to fact-checking organizations that will be supporting the work of the Centre. From the EU’s next long-term budget (starting in 2028), Brussels plans to allocate nine billion euros from the AgoraEU programme alone to civil society, while additional funding will also be available to NGOs from other EU programmes.

The European Democracy Shield is far from the first regulation that the European Commission has introduced to ‘protect democracy’. The Digital Services Act, the Artificial Intelligence Act, the Defence of Democracy Package, and the European Media Freedom Act all intended to do the same. And while the previous legislation already provided a framework for what the European Commission views as ‘defending democracy’, the European Democracy Shield’s significance lies in creating a tool specifically for election periods.

Not everyone agrees, however, with the truthfulness of the Commission’s claim that these diverse tools are there to ‘protect democracy’. According to Kinga Gál, it is ‘absurd’ to position the European Commission as the ‘guardian of democracy’ ‘while EU institutions are shaken by corruption scandals’ and ‘lack transparency’. She sees the Democracy Shield initiative as ‘another move to control free speech’. ‘I disagree with transferring further powers to Brussels under the banner of protecting democracy and limiting the space for legitimate political debate within Member States,’ said European Conservative and Reformist MEP Mariusz Kamiński.

The United States is also growing more wary of the European Commission’s attempts to intervene and control democracy and free speech online. Recently, the Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives published a report exposing the Commission’s ‘decade-long campaign to censor American speech’. The report, which mainly targets the Digital Services Act (DSA), also raises alarms about the Democracy Shield: ‘…recent EU initiatives also threaten to worsen the European free speech crisis. Under President von der Leyen’s “Democracy Shield”, the European Commission will create at least two new censorship hubs for regulators and left-wing NGOs to pressure platforms to censor conservative content—the European Centre for Democratic Resilience and the European Network of Fact-Checkers…The European censorship threat shows no signs of abating.’

According to the report under the (in force) EU regulation, media platforms are required to identify and ‘mitigate’ systemic risks. That is, not only illegal speech—such as Holocaust denial, which is illegal in most European countries already—is moderated online, but speech that the European Commission and its network of civil society actors deem to pose a ‘systemic risk’. Some examples of content censored due to EU pressure include statements such as ‘there are only two genders’, ‘children cannot be trans’, as well as similar claims about COVID-19 and immigration. The published internal documents and communications reveal, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Europe has spent the past decade constructing a system of global control over online narratives.

The documents published by the US House Committee demonstrate that already before the Democracy Shield, the European Commission coordinated with large digital platforms, such as Facebook and TikTok, during election campaigns. The Democracy Shield now further expands the EU’s ability to monitor—and possibly remove—online content during election campaigns. As Hungary is heading to the polls in less than a month, ‘there is therefore no reason to believe that similar measures were not planned ahead of Hungary’s upcoming parliamentary elections’—according to Political Director of the Hungarian Prime Minister Balázs Orbán.

While the nature of the content moderation the Commission enforces during the Hungarian election remains unclear based on open-source information, one thing is clear: the Hungarian organizations financed by Brussels to fact-check or produce online content are known for their liberal bias. In Hungary 444.hu, Political Capital, and Telex are all reported to have received EU funding, whilst they are known for openly siding with the Hungarian liberal opposition and producing news that casts a positive light on the EU and the European Commission.

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