When an institution helps identify speech for removal, channels it to online platforms through a privileged reporting system, and then watches that speech disappear, most people would recognise censorship, or at least something uncomfortably close to it. The European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), however, has arrived at a more ingenious conclusion: this is not censorship at all. It is merely the addition of information.
On July 24, EDMO published an article in its Weekly Pulse newsletter with the wonderfully indignant title, “EDMO defending election integrity via the RRS: True transparency and censorship nonsense”. Its purpose was to dismiss criticism of the Rapid Response System (RRS), established under the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, now the Code of Conduct on Disinformation, and operating under the auspices of the Digital Services Act (DSA).
EDMO described the RRS as a “cooperation and communication mechanism that enables the rapid sharing of information between online platforms and non-platform stakeholders during elections”. Accusations of censorship, it insisted, are entirely unfounded because “any decision about removing, labeling [sic], or downgrading content is entirely up to the platforms”. The responsibility is theirs, and no one else’s.
The article does not so much answer its critics as diagnose them.
EDMO is not some plucky neighbourhood fact-checking collective. Established in 2020, it is an EU-funded body led by the European University Institute in Florence. It connects fact-checkers, academics, media professionals and media-literacy organisations; collaborates with platforms and regulators; and describes itself as an integral participant in developing and implementing the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation. It also sits on the Code’s permanent Taskforce.
In other words, EDMO belongs to the institutional machinery whose conduct it is now certifying as unquestionably innocent. It is judge, character witness and communications department for its own system.
Its defence rests on two propositions, each so tortured that satire struggles to improve upon it.
The first, already alluded to, is that the RRS “clearly” cannot be an instrument of censorship because platforms make the final decision to remove, label or downgrade content. Responsibility, EDMO declares, is “theirs, and no one else’s”.
Apparently, censorship exists only at the precise moment a finger touches the delete key. Everything preceding that moment — the surveillance, classification, accusation, privileged referral and regulatory environment created by the DSA, with its threat of enormous fines for non-compliance — is merely innocent information-sharing.
Call it the outsourced delete-button alibi.
In the ephemeral world inhabited by EDMO, its hubs merely identify suspect speech. They submit it through an expedited election-time channel because they believe it threatens electoral integrity. The platforms then investigate and act. The entire arrangement sits within the EU’s Code on Disinformation, on whose permanent Taskforce EDMO serves. But because an employee at Meta or YouTube performs the final administrative act, everyone upstream washes their hands and announces that the speech removed itself.
This is outsourced censorship.
By this logic, a council that orders a theatre closed has not curtailed a performance because a locksmith turned the key. An editor who marks an article “kill” has not suppressed it because someone in production removed the page. In EDMO’s toy definition, the censor is never the institution that identifies the target, initiates the process, or supplies the authority. It is only the office junior who operates the machinery.
Some posts genuinely breach platform rules, impersonate candidates or conceal unlawful political advertising. One can even argue that certain interventions may be justified. But such interventions should not be shrouded in silence or carried out through backdoor removal. They should be open to public scrutiny and debate, especially during an election.
EDMO cannot make that argument without calling into question its own right and legitimacy to make such judgements in the first place. Who elected its officials to serve as arbiters of truth and legitimacy?
Instead, we are given a disingenuous choreography of evaded responsibility: We — the self-appointed, unelected and unaccountable body — pointed; they fired; therefore nothing happened here.
EDMO’s second proposition is more ridiculous still. The RRS, it insists, is “about adding information, not removing it”.
Yes, read that again.
This is no longer ordinary institutional spin. It is arithmetic rewritten by the European information-integrity industry. When content vanishes, the information sphere has apparently become fuller. When an account is banned, the public has gained another voice. Subtraction is now addition, provided the subtraction is carried out by those anointed by the unelected European Commission to manage a “healthy information sphere”.
Unfortunately for EDMO, its own records condemn this risible defence. In its assessment of the RRS during the 2024 European elections, it reported 18 notifications, addressed to Meta, YouTube and TikTok. Of these, 12 led to content or accounts being removed or banned. Two resulted in labels, one in labelling plus other measures and three led to no action. EDMO itself acknowledged that the high proportion of removals was “problematic”.
But what else should we expect from a regulatory system in which non-compliance carries draconian consequences and erring on the side of caution, that is, censoring, becomes the default?
The system has since become more ambitious. During Malta’s snap general election of May 30, 2026, the EDMO hub MedDMO — the Mediterranean Digital Media Observatory — flagged 296 URLs to Meta and Google over 21 days and reported that platforms removed most of them. This is an unusual way to “add information”: first compile a list, then send it through a priority enforcement channel, then watch most of it disappear.
EDMO tries to escape this contradiction by conflating two entirely different activities. Publishing evidence, rebutting a falsehood and inviting readers to judge would indeed add information. Escalating content to a platform for possible restriction does not. The former is journalism; the latter is censorship and its enforcement.
A genuine fact-check contests speech in public. The RRS places speech into a privileged — and therefore largely hidden — moderation pipeline. Calling both activities “providing information” is like describing a book review and a book-burning bonfire as alternative forms of literary criticism.
The most disturbing possibility is not that EDMO’s officials think the public is stupid enough to swallow this. It is that they have swallowed it themselves.
Their prose has the serene confidence of an institution that no longer recognises the difference between argument and classification, or between truth and falsehood. In the refined towers where EDMO operates, critics do not raise objections; they spread disinformation. Referrals do not precipitate removals; they test platform performance. Deleted posts do not diminish the information sphere; they add context. Institutional power recedes behind a technocratic process, while responsibility evaporates among unaccountable “stakeholders”, including Big Tech.
This is not ordinary hypocrisy. Hypocrites know the difference between what they say and what they do. EDMO appears to inhabit a more advanced condition: A bureaucratic parody of thought in which every coercive consequence is recast as a benevolent procedure.
Nobody censors. Everybody merely cooperates. Nobody removes information. They improve its quality by making it unavailable.
The RRS may be many things, but a mechanism that repeatedly produces removals cannot honestly be described as “the opposite of censorship”.
EDMO’s defence reveals something more alarming than mere bad faith. It shows what happens when an institution becomes so enclosed within its own moral vocabulary that even the disappearance of speech appears, from inside the system, to represent an increase in freedom.
Orwell provided the formula in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
EDMO has merely updated it for the digital age: censorship is information, and deletion is addition.
