The remarkable thing about EU censorship is that the EU doesn’t seem to really censor that much. Instead, the government decides what the narrative that they w

The remarkable thing about EU censorship is that the EU doesn’t seem to really censor that much. Instead, the government decides what the narrative that they want to communicate is and the press willingly and uncritically reports it. Not all the press and not always, but there is a strong pull to the mainstream. This sounds rather ridiculous, but I’ve seen it time and again in Germany with the 2015 refugee situation, the Coronavirus pandemic and now also with the Russian invasion in Ukraine. Other countries don’t seem to do much better and critical thinking, presenting deep analyses or alternative explanations are very rare. What happens instead is that each crisis has a group of bad guys which are typically critical of the mainstream opinion, but are at the same time flawed (e.g. far-right, racist, anti-science, etc). Over time anti-mainstream opinions become associated with extremism and become easy to dismiss - unless reality diverges so hard from the mainstream that it forces a re-evaluation. This makes it very easy to find out what the mainstream political opinion in say the UK or France or Germany is, but quite hard to get informed. The restriction and indirect censorship of public discourse is pure poison for a democracy, but typically it’s those that claim to protect democracy that practice it.