The EU’s media crackdown: Why redfish is forced to close

February 22, 2023

Since 2017, redfish has dedicated itself to reporting from the perspective of people around the world who are oppressed by the capitalist system in the Global North and South and all its features: racism, war, imperialism, patriarchy, ecocide and extreme inequality. Looking back, we are immensely proud of all we have accomplished over the past five years but the reality of developments around redfish this year has forced us to make a hard decision: redfish is closing.

The relentless campaign of smears by mainstream media, academia and think tanks; social media censorship and now state-sanctioned harassment have made it impossible for us to continue. Here is what happened to us, how we have been used as one test case in the EU’s weaponization of “disinformation” to shut down critical voices, and why what we’ve been through is only the beginning of a crackdown that will impact everyone, including those who have encouraged and cheered the suppression of our work.

The recent Twitter Files have rightly brought a lot of attention to how entrenched the US military and intelligence apparatus is at the executive level of social media giants like Twitter, who control the information we have access to. Completely under the radar, however, the political heart of the EU in close collaboration with allied military institutions and those same social media companies, has developed its own strategy complete with a chilling array of tools to crack down on voices critical of the status quo of Western capitalist imperialism. In EU policy circles the threat is described as “undermining the European project”, and questioning the “democratic legitimacy of the representatives of Member States”. That is, in the eyes of the EU’s decision-makers, voices that publicly question the current political and socio-economic order in the West are no longer entitled to international and EU legal protection which covers the right to freedom of expression. On the contrary, we are to be treated as a threat.

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continua qui: https://redfish.media/blog/the-eus-media-crackdown-why-redfish-is-forced-to-close/