“Threats, threats everywhere” – this is one way to summarize the gist of EU Equality, Preparedness, and Crisis Management Commissioner Hadja Lahbib’s recent statements.
Lahbib spoke for the Ukrainian government’s Ukrinform agency to give off “big disinformation warrior energy:” she attempted to compare the proliferation of “disinformation” with the way an actual virus spreads during a pandemic.
The EU bureaucrat first remarked that unvaccinated people spread the virus, and then asserted that it’s the same with disinformation, blaming people “not prepared to distinguish facts from disinformation” for spreading it on to “contaminate” others.
It seems – though it’s hard to tell if the analogy runs all the way through – that Lahbib considers the EU’s so-called Democracy Shield a sort of “disinformation vaccine.” This recent initiative is supposed to coordinate EU member countries’ agencies looking for “information and manipulation,” specifically around elections.
Lahbib repeats all the key and long-since established EU talking points: Russian disinformation, alleged nefarious ties between conservative (opposition) politicians in various member countries (this time, Belgium) and Russia, democracies in danger and in need of initiatives such as Democracy Shield – along with quite extravagant claims, such as that “some” media are, basically, preparing insurrection.
“(…) These threats are everywhere. Threats may come from media that seek to sow confusion, incite people to a revolution against the system,” Lahbib is quoted as saying.
Still in the same tone, she mentioned the need to “reinforce” the EU’s Civil Protection Mechanism, set up in 2001 to improve prevention, preparedness, and response to – disasters. This official apparently believes that definition should now cover “disinformation” as well.
For some reason, the report then abruptly switches to bashing X and Elon Musk, seemingly in a bid to provide context for Lahbib’s statement.
And so we learn that two “famous” newspapers – Belgium’s “most famous” one, De Morgen, and the UK’s apparently not as famous, but still famous Guardian – recently decided to no longer share links to their articles on X, due to “toxicity, disinformation, conspiracy theories, racism, disturbing content…”
Spain’s La Vanguardia gets an honorable mention (but isn’t referred to as “famous”) for doing the same thing, as well as suspending its accounts on X.
