The highest proportion of legally permissible but deleted comments was recorded in Germany. It was almost 100%. Out of every thousand deleted comments, 997 were lawful. In order to remove three genuinely unsafe posts, the company also removed 997 that were legally permissible. In Sweden and France, the figures were slightly lower, but not by much, at 94.6% and 92.1% respectively.

Self-Censorship

The study’s authors suggest that social networks were not always acting under direct orders. Instead, they appear to have removed legal content as a precaution because they feared heavy penalties and fines.

That fear was not paranoia. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has said that senior Biden administration officials repeatedly pressured Facebook for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire. He later called that pressure wrong and said some of the decisions made at the time would not be made today.

In Slovakia, we faced a phenomenon in which websites and media outlets accused of spreading disinformation could be temporarily blocked by state authorities. In media reality, such a measure can amount to liquidation or severe damage, especially when it comes without transparent justification.

The conclusion is obvious. The excessive removal of legal content is proving to be a far more serious problem than the occasional appearance of genuine hate speech in public. The censors were looking for a needle in a haystack by burning the haystack down.

The report therefore arrives at a very simple and obvious democratic conclusion. It calls for a clearer definition of “hate speech” and greater transparency in content moderation.

That makes sense. If your views are to be censored, you should at least know where the boundaries are. That is especially true when people are excluded from public debate for claims that later turn out to be true. The war in Ukraine provided a telling example: censors often protected the purity of “correct” propaganda rather than the public from dangerous opinions.

According to the study’s authors, bans on content should also be justified. The opaque legal zone in which we found ourselves between 2020 and 2024, when media outlets could be blocked or threatened with closure without proper justification or explanation, should belong to the past.

The removal of content should also be subject to independent audits and appeals mechanisms. It is astonishing how completely we have given up on such obvious safeguards. We need only think of the many cases in which people had posts or social media accounts deleted without even being told what they had supposedly done.

Ineffective Regulation

The Future of Free Speech report also examined whether regulation is effective at all in curbing alleged hate speech, as we have so often been told by politicians who declared themselves fighters for the preservation of democracy.

Analysts recall that when the European Union adopted its framework to control illegal online content in 2022, the Digital Services Act (DSA), the aim was to create a “safe, predictable and trustworthy online environment”. So far, these noble ambitions look much more like an attempt to enforce uniform opinion and police language.

Brussels has made it very clear how a person should live if he does not want to fear the consequences of stepping outside the prescribed framework of correct expression. He has been told which legitimate, legal and decent opinions must not be expressed if he wants to avoid punishment or public retaliation.

The practical meaning of this approach was illustrated by former European Commissioner Thierry Breton when, only hours before Elon Musk’s interview with Donald Trump on X, he publicly warned Musk over the live conversation itself and threatened the use of the Commission’s full enforcement powers under the DSA, including interim measures, if it found breaches.

The Slovak Experience

We have had similar experiences in Slovakia, where we saw the creation of blacklists of alleged conspirators, public enemies and social threats. Lists of this kind, which have parallels only in totalitarian regimes, became part of the manipulation of public information.

The fact that different interpretations of “disinformation” or “hoax” are used to influence the public in favor of a political ideology was also highlighted at a conference and panel discussion at the Faculty of Law of Comenius University in Bratislava.

It is precisely the vague definition of disinformation that serves, in hybrid information warfare, as a means of pushing political currents that would otherwise fail to gain traction in a free society. Authoritarian, unfree regimes and foolish ideologies have no other choice. They must manipulate society, because their ideology cannot prevail freely and openly. In their view, society must be broken by propaganda.

Paradoxically, an information influence operation could also include the creation of lists of “conspirators”, which are plainly politically useful and are drawn up by private entities presenting themselves as acting “in the public interest”. That is their own description of themselves, offered without challenge.

Coordinated media outlets, which in turn describe themselves as “serious”, then give these entities a stamp of authority. The circle of manipulation is closed, even though it has no contact with reality. The supposed enemies are named, and the “decent people”, or at least those who want to belong to them, are told exactly whom they are expected to despise in public.

This is a surrender of the very foundations of European law, under which inappropriate content requiring removal should be decided by courts alone, through legal means.

Private companies that have positioned themselves as “owners of the truth” have their own rules. It is therefore hardly surprising that they act in accordance with certain political narratives. For them, removing “inappropriate content” is in effect the removal of a political rival, so that a genuine exchange of views in society becomes impossible.

Political attempts to put Europeans into the straitjacket of a single opinion and subject them to a new idea of freedom will have far-reaching consequences.

We recently had people in government who believed that even the view that Ukraine was losing the war had to be eliminated. That claim, once treated as impermissible, has since become a mainstream assessment among many analysts.

Shockingly for a democratic regime, David Puchovsky, who was then responsible for the police Facebook page and later relaunched the anti-disinformation project Hoaxy a podvody, branded such assessments as disinformation and used the authority of the police to warn those who expressed them.

Law Above the Law

There is no law that prohibits you from holding “wrong” opinions, as long as you do not harm anyone or incite hatred. There is, however, a clearly established right to hold and express one’s own opinion. Violating that right is therefore a clear violation of the spirit of the law.

Nevertheless, we have seen the very people who trampled on freedom brand themselves as defenders of law, liberty and democracy.

Authoritarian regimes often behave in the same way when they sense that their time is running out and that power must be maintained by any means. The question is how European citizens will understand the word “freedom” after such devastating encroachments on their right to express their own opinions. Will it remain compatible with the Western value framework, or will some Orwellian reinvention of it take hold?

The “defenders of democracy” have made a habit of depriving citizens of fundamental rights and freedoms precisely because they supposedly need to be protected from the wrong influences, from their own views and, above all, in the name of protecting democracy and freedom. George Orwell had a name for that. He called it dictatorship.

Although the folly of this destructive approach is becoming more visible, the battle is far from over.

Puchovsky, the above-mentioned self-declared “warrior against hoaxes”, recently announced that he was entering politics under the banner of Progressive Slovakia. His fight against wrong opinions, a cause he regards as sacred, is now to continue through direct political means.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, which recently avoided taking a clear stance on the tragedy in Gaza, says that if it comes to power it will act far more harshly than before and imprison those it considers to be spreading “pro-Russian propaganda”.

The catch is that the party uses the term “pro-Russian propagandist” indiscriminately for anyone who takes a different view of the likely outcome of the war in Ukraine and rejects the crude propaganda of a united Western victory over Russia, which supposedly must be strategically defeated, even at the cost of Ukraine’s devastation.