By Hounaz Beheshti
Israeli forces boarded the Global Sumud Flotilla last week and detained Dutch journalist Gijs Sanders and his cameraman in international waters, together with other members aboard the vessel. They were mid-broadcast and had their press credentials in hand.
This is not an isolated incident, but the latest expression of a deliberate pattern to suppress journalism. This short note is about the different forms used by authoritarian regimes, with considerable help from tech companies, to silence critical voices that hold power to account and what it costs us when they succeed.
In 2025, at least 86 journalists were killed by Israeli fire, more than two-thirds of the global total. 41 Palestinian journalists remain in Israeli detention, and international media have been banned from entering Gaza entirely. When a journalist is arrested mid-broadcast, or a blogger disappears after a critical post, we all know that the intended audience is not just that individual, but every journalist, activist and citizen who is watching. Systematic repression has a global chilling effect where self-censorship and fear become the norm.
According to the Center for News, Technology and Innovation, nearly half of journalists surveyed in 2025 have stated that their governments seek too much control over their reporting. Authoritarian governments understand the mechanism of censorship very well and utilise it to silence critical voices.
Two Models of Suppression
We see the same logic playing out in Iran. The regime’s pressure on press freedom has tightened even further after the deadly crack-down of January 2026 and the following combined attack by US and Israel in February. From January 8th, Iranian journalists lost the ability to reach the outside world because of a near-total communications blackout imposed by Iranian authorities. Since then, the only sources left standing were state-affiliated outlets.
Those with a public voice online have been singled out. Over 400 Iranian journalists and artists abroad have had their assets inside Iran seized. Charges apply broadly to anyone reporting outside the regime’s preferred narrative. In effect, the Iranian regime has criminalised the act of witnessing.
In both cases, the intent is to remove the witness and control the narrative.
Israel and Iran each represent a distinct model of how critical and independent voices are silenced. Whether it is the targeted elimination and detention by a state actor, or the infrastructural control of the means of communication, different censorship methods will have the same outcome: the story doesn’t get told and power continues unchecked.
The Illusion of the “Free World”
The erosion of press freedom is often framed as a problem of restrictive or undemocratic settings. But the evidence from the United States and Europe shows otherwise.
In the United States, President Trump has pursued a sustained campaign of harassment against women journalists in the White House. He has used sexist terms to refer to female journalists, has claimed baseless sexist allegations against them, has questioned the seriousness of their career and their intelligence, and has continuously used a pattern of targeting and harassing women journalists to silence them. Noting that these public attacks by a person of authority will further fuel online abuse towards these reporters. The result is that women journalists are paying a personal cost in order to do their jobs.
Europe is not exempt from this either. Hungary is the starkest proof. Over sixteen years in power, Prime Minister Orbán reduced Hungary from 23rd to 68th place in the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index. He turned public broadcasters into government propaganda outlets and silenced independent private media through biased allocation of state advertising.
The European Commission did not open an infringement procedure against Hungary for systemic media freedom violations until December 2025. Nor did it blink at the intimidation campaign targeting the American journalists. In fact, in the free world, such incidents are often labelled as evidence of a robust free speech culture, where people can openly criticize one another, when in reality, they are often simply forms of abuse.
The Shift to Digital Systems
In the digital age, the battlefield has shifted but the logic stays the same. Global internet freedom has declined for fifteen consecutive years, as authoritarian governments have employed censorship and offline repression.
Digital media platforms were once seen as a corrective to state-controlled landscape, a space where critical voices could bypass censorship and reach audiences directly. That promise has not held. Platforms have become part of the system of suppression, not a refuge from it. Tech companies have failed to place human rights at the centre of their operations and thus have created a vacuum of responsibility that authoritarian leaders exploit. We have seen platforms complying with government takedown requests, suppressing content from conflict zones and applying content moderation policies in ways that disproportionately affect independent media in the Global Majority.
This is a reminder that internet is not a neutral infrastructure. Yet it is a major actor in the information landscape with a responsibility to uphold human rights.
What is at Stake and What Europe is Failing to Do
In the absence of independent media, citizens cannot access reliable information, disinformation and mistrust fills the void, pluralism collapses and power remains unchecked. This is documented reality in every country where the traditional and digital press has been systematically suppressed. Independent media is democratic infrastructure as essential as any institution we claim to defend.
And yet, at the very moment when that infrastructure is under attack globally, Europe is quietly failing to fund it. A broad coalition of civil society organisations, independent media outlets and journalism bodies across all EU member states has called on European institutions to adequately fund AgoraEU – the framework that brings together support for culture, independent media and democratic participation – in the next Multiannual Financial Framework 2028-2034.
The ask is simple: adequate and sustainable funding for media as strategic infrastructure that upholds democracies.
The data they cite is not abstract either. Journalism revenues across Europe have fallen by €7 billion annually between 2019 and 2023. 85% of civil society organisations working on fundamental rights fear that funding shortages threaten their work. Meanwhile, authoritarian actors are moving in the opposite direction: Russia alone allocating around €1.4 billion to state media and influence operations.
How can an under-funded media respond to the foreign influence and information manipulation? Europe is not just underfunding independent media. It is jeopardising the information space and by extension, its democracies.
A Moment of Reckoning
For European leaders in particular, this is a moment of reckoning. If Europe is serious about democratic resilience, countering disinformation, and the values they invoke when speaking about Gaza or Iran, then they need to back those values with budgets.
In addition, too often, human rights commitments are set aside when geopolitical or commercial interests are on the table. That cannot continue. The freedoms Europe enshrined in its founding treaties, human rights frameworks and foreign policy commitments were never meant to be conditional. Freedom of expression and media must be embedded as binding expectations across all trade agreements, diplomatic relationships and foreign policy decisions.
The question, then, is whether Europe is willing to treat media viability and information integrity as strategic democratic priorities rather than secondary values that can be negotiated away when politically inconvenient.
In the next piece, we will examine what Europe must do to reverse this trajectory: how democratic institutions can meaningfully protect independent media, regulate platform power, and treat information integrity not as a communications issue, but as a matter of democratic resilience.