Bullo 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧

So, as expected, the European Commission has finally activated the Digital Services Act’s (DSA) “rapid response system” in the context of the upcoming Hungarian elections, which gives EU-funded “fact-checkers” and “NGOs” a veto over online speech in Hungary. This is a serious escalation in the EU’s interference in the Hungarian elections. The official explanation is that this is needed to combat “Russian interference”. But as I noted in a recent article for @compactmag, no evidence whatsoever has been produced to support this claim. The narrative almost exclusively relies on an “investigation” by journalists at the Warsaw-based nonprofit VSquare, which claims that Putin has instructed a group of political strategists and Russian military intelligence to interfere in the parliamentary elections in Hungary in April in order to ensure that Orbán wins. And what is the evidentiary basis for this extraordinary claim? It boils down to this (literally): “Multiple European national security sources have told me.” In other words, no evidence whatsoever is provided. We are simply asked to trust the “investigative journalists” in question. One might be inclined to extend that trust if the outlet in question were genuinely independent. Regrettably, it is not. A glance at VSquare’s donor list reveals it to be less an independent journalistic outfit than a textbook example of artificial civil society, funded by entities like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), USAID, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and various EU-funded consortia. In other words, VSquare is part and parcel of the “color revolution” infrastructure that, for decades, has sought to bring Central and Eastern Europe in line with the agenda of Brussels and Washington. It’s clear what is happening: they’re applying the Russiagate script that was previously used to subvert the elections in Romania just over a year ago. The aim is twofold. Ideally, tilt the elections in favour of the pro-EU, pro-war opposition candidate Péter Magyar by using the DSA to influence the pre-election online narrative. It’s well-known that the the EU’s “rapid response system” enables approved third parties — the aforementioned EU-funded “fact-checkers” and “NGOs” — to submit priority content moderation requests that disproportionately affect “populist” or EU/NATO-critical actors. If this doesn’t work — and it’s unlikely to work in the Hungarian context — then the allegations of Russian interference serve the purpose of laying the groundwork to delegitimise the result if Orbán wins, by seeding seeding a story of “stolen” or “unfair” elections. This is incredibly dangerous, and is yet another confirmation that the very institutions invoking the threat of foreign interference to justify their intervention are themselves the most consequential foreign actors in Hungary’s election. Read the full article here: compactmag.com/article/russia…

I voted last night against the prospect of a new law allowing self-administered abortion up to birth. Sadly we failed to win the votes against this abhorrent practice, which will now become law shortly. It is deeply shameful that our country has gone down this awful road. Thank you to @DavidAltonHL and so many other colleagues who led this fight. This particular battle may be over (for now) but the campaign continues.