A shield against democracy: How the Democracy Shield protects the EU from the electorate

READ THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY HERE

The European Commission claims its Democracy Shield will protect the EU from hostile foreign actors. They are lying.

This is not a defence of democracy, but its curation and containment. This report from Dr Norman Lewis is the first systematic exposé of the European Commission's new flagship project. It reveals that the Democracy Shield is a fortress shielding the unelected European Commission and wider elites from domestic dissent and political accountability.

The core of the Democracy Shield is a new ‘censorship operating system’ – a vertically integrated regime designed to filter what Europeans can see, say and hear.

But this is not all. The Shield brings together EU-funded NGOs, ‘fact-checkers’, and ‘trusted flaggers’ to act as outsourced arms of Brussels's narrative control. It employs ‘prebunking’: the use of predictive AI and educational interventions to inoculate citizens against narratives before they even surface. And it is a whole playbook for intervening in elections across the continent to ensure the ‘right’ outcome.

About the author

Dr Norman Lewis is a visiting research fellow for MCC Brussels. 

Norman is a writer, speaker and consultant on innovation and technology. He is recognised worldwide as an expert on future trends and user behaviours regarding technology innovation and adoption. He has over 20 years of experience driving commercial innovations and disruptive social technologies in global corporations and start-ups. His research on the EU’s digital sovereignty strategy, particularly the negative impact of its regulatory dynamic, focuses on the increasing censorious attacks on online content and speech, which threaten the future of democracy and innovation.