In Europe, censorship rarely arrives as a ban. It arrives as a lawsuit, a budget cut, platform dependence, and the slow shrinking of independent journalism. In Europe, censorship no longer always looks like censorship. It does not necessarily come as a newsroom raid, a confiscated newspaper, or a journalist dragged away in public. More often, it comes dressed as something ordinary: a legal threat too expensive to answer, a newsroom too fragile to sustain difficult reporting, an advertiser no one wants to irritate, an ownership structure that narrows the range of acceptable speech, or a platform change that quietly pushes serious reporting out of sight. The methods look softer than…