About Brussels Record
Somebody decides what you are allowed to say, read, and be tracked doing. This site exists to find out who, and how.
Brussels Record keeps coming back to one question from different angles: how do laws, moderation rules, platform incentives, data collection and automated systems decide what gets seen, trusted, shared, or quietly dropped? Being angry about it is easy and does not get you very far. Describing it does. A system you can name and document is a system you can argue with.
In 2026 the question has a sharper edge, because the European Union is writing the answers into law: what may be scanned in your private messages, how you prove your age before a page opens, what a platform must take down and what it must leave up. Those decisions are made in rooms most people never see. This site keeps the record of them.
New here? Start with the short tour.
What you will find here
Three things, kept in this order of importance.
Live records. Pages that are maintained rather than written once. The EU Chat Control Tracker says what applies to your messages right now and what is being negotiated. Where the 27 governments stand holds every government’s documented position, with the receipt behind each entry. Both are dated, sourced and carry a changelog, so you can see what changed and when. The glossary explains in plain language the terms that keep coming up, from shadowban to threat model. The next records in preparation cover age verification and the EU digital identity wallet.
Who Decides? The one series this site writes: numbered parts that follow a decision from proposal to law and name the people and bodies who made it. A part comes out when something has happened, not because a calendar says so. Analyses and the occasional signed opinion piece belong to the series as well.
Guides. Practical protection, written step by step and meant to be used the same evening you read them.
And one short email. The Briefing goes out when the records change, with the five things worth knowing since the last one. Nothing else.
How the work is done
Receipts first. A claim about a government, a vote or a law links to the document it comes from: the Council record, the vote result, the ministry statement, the article of the regulation. Where there is no document, the record says “unclear” rather than guessing.
Nothing changes quietly. The records carry a last-checked date and a changelog. Mistakes are corrected with a visible note, not overwritten. If something here is wrong, unclear or missing, say so and it gets fixed.
One editor, one name. Brussels Record is researched, written and edited by Pavel Kadlec, PhDr., a Czech editor. By training he is a social worker with a doctorate in the field, which is why the work starts with the people a system touches, not with the system. Editorial choices, sourcing and corrections are his responsibility, and there is no committee to hide behind.
Independent does not mean unedited. Not everything sent here gets published. Texts go through selection and checking, because speech that takes no responsibility for facts is just more noise. What matters is who decides, and how: not a platform, not an advertiser, not an algorithm, but one editor who signs his name and answers for every word. How texts are chosen, how claims are checked and what never gets published is written out in the Editorial Policy.
AI tools, currently Anthropic’s Claude, are used for research, translation, drafting and checking, and drafts can be substantially machine-written from the documents cited. They do not decide what appears on the site. Every published word is reviewed, edited and approved by the editor, who is answerable for it; no unreviewed machine output is published.
What this site does not do
No advertising, no affiliate links, no sponsored articles, no paywall. There are no sponsors, grants or investors: hosting and software are paid for by the editor, which is also the honest reason the site is small. The full statement is here: How this site is funded.
No tracking. Visits are counted by a self-hosted counter (Koko Analytics) that sets no cookie, keeps daily totals per page and nothing about you, and sends nothing to anyone. No advertising pixels, no session recording, no profiles. The few things that still load from other companies, a web font, a spam check on forms and comment avatars, are listed in the Privacy Policy.
No algorithmic feed. What you see on the front page was put there by an editor, in an order a human chose, and you can take the whole site with you as an RSS feed and never come back to the homepage. That is deliberate.
No open publishing. Readers do not post here directly, and there are no reader accounts. If you have experienced censorship, blocked access, content removal or platform pressure, or you hold a document that belongs in one of the records, send it. It is checked, and where it holds up it becomes part of a record or a story, with your name or without it, as you prefer. Analyses by outside experts appear occasionally, under the author’s real name, after editing, and labelled as such.
Reuse and republishing
Everything written here is published under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0). Republish it, including commercially, quote it, put it in a briefing or a lecture, as long as you credit Brussels Record and link back. A record is best cited with the date you checked it, for example: Brussels Record, “EU Chat Control Tracker”, last checked 6 September 2026, with the address. The Republishing page has the details, and journalists will find contacts and background on For journalists.
Until September 2026 the site also republished selected articles from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Global Voices and EDRi under their open licences. That has ended: from September 2026 everything new here is written here. The republished pieces stay online, clearly marked, credited to their authors and linked to the original.
Contact
Write to info@brusselsrecord.com or use the contact form. Journalists: For journalists. Something you have seen, or a document you hold: send it.
