The European Union is preparing to issue a central bank digital currency that could easily be weaponized as a censorship tool, and its launch could come as soon as October 2025.
The effort for a digital Euro was launched in 2023, and by the end of this year, the EU will make a final decision, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced. Notably, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are likely to prove dangerous to free speech, and digital currency has been used to punish citizens for free speech. While the European Central Bank (ECB) pontificated about the “highest standards of quality, security, privacy and usability,” the EU is already engaging in a massive anti-free speech crackdown.
CBDCs are not just digital money. They are a form of digital credit that is programmable and allows the central bank and the government “to decide what you may or may not spend it on,” as lawyer and journalist Eva Vlaardingerbroek explained. This has obvious and ominous implications for free speech, as the government could freeze the CBDC for individuals making comments of which they disapprove.
ECB President Christine Lagarde confirmed this month that the EU CBDC launch is more imminent than previously believed. “The European Union is looking to launch the digital euro, our central bank, digital currency, by October this year,” she announced during a press conference. “We are working to ensure that the digital euro coexists with cash, addressing privacy concerns by making it pseudonymous and cash-like in nature.” She did not, however, explain the potential risks to free speech, nor did the ECB.
“The Eurosystem’s digital euro project aims to make central bank money available to the public in digital form,” the European Central Bank stated. In 2024, the Rulebook Development Group (RDG) for the digital euro reviewed a draft rulebook, reached out to central banks, and “made progress on the sourcing procedures for selecting potential providers for a digital euro service platform (DESP).”
And while the European Central Bank attempts to frame CBDCs as beneficial progress, the reality is far more ominous.
Other countries have already weaponized digital currency to silence dissidents’ free speech, including through debanking and through social credit score systems like those in place in communist China.
The communist Chinese government, for instance, which uses digital currency linked to a social credit score, cracked down on civilians who spoke out at protests and on online platforms against the harsh COVID-19 lockdowns in 2021 and early 2022. The authoritarian government shut down many protesters’ accounts as retaliation for their speech, thus preventing them from going anywhere or doing anything. As China expert Gordon Chang described in an X post, China is a “society with 540 million surveillance cameras, a social credit system, millions of neighborhood watchers, and the Great Firewall,” meaning it is not merely authoritarian, it is “semi-totalitarian on the road to full totalitarianism.”
Another example of censorship occurred in a “democratic” Western nation. In 2022, the Canadian government engaged in financial censorship as it ordered all regulated financial firms to stop any transactions from 34 cryptocurrency wallets that were tied to the anti-lockdown trucker protests in Canada. Likewise, Big Tech crowdfunding platform GoFundMe froze the truckers’ accounts.
And since EU countries, including Germany and France, are currently cracking down on free speech, with Germany even raiding and arresting citizens for online posts, it seems likely that an EU CBDC could become another tool to suppress free speech.
Free speech is under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Congress adopt policies that would ensure the United States does not embrace a draconian Central Bank Digital Currency that could lead to a communist Chinese government-style social credit system and be used to silence Americans’ free speech.
