Europe Trying to Censor Americans by Censoring American Companies

Apparently, what happens in Brussels doesn’t stay in Brussels.

The House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on “Europe’s Threat to American Speech” made one thing unmistakable: this is no longer a distant policy debate — it’s a fight.

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee last week released the EU’s previously secret full decision to issue the first fine under the DSA to X (formerly Twitter) in December. It confirms what critics have warned: This law threatens everyone’s basic liberties.

Witnesses warned that the European Union’s Digital Services Act has moved from theory to enforcement, and its reach does not stop at Europe’s borders. Lorcan Price told lawmakers that what was once dismissed as hypothetical is now being used to pressure global platforms through fines, investigations, and regulatory intimidation. The message to companies like X is blunt: conform to Europe’s speech codes or pay the price.

Jeremy Tedesco drove the point home, arguing that Americans who shrug at European speech prosecutions are making a dangerous mistake. Arrests in the U.K. over online posts, prosecutions over religious expression in Finland — these are not isolated incidents, he argued, but signs of a continent-wide censorship infrastructure. And when American platforms operate globally, those rules inevitably bleed across borders.

The warning from the hearing was clear: Europe is building the machinery to export its speech restrictions worldwide. If Washington doesn’t confront it, American speech may soon be governed not by the First Amendment — but by Brussels bureaucrats.

The House Judiciary Committee recently held a hearing on “Europe’s Threat to American Speech” (YouTube).

Two of those who appeared are driving home the threat. Lorcan Price: What does European censorship look like, and why should Americans care? I answered that question before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee this week. The last time I testified before the Committee in September, I highlighted the censorship potential of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which at the time still seemed theoretical. My message then was that this EU law controlling online speech was poised to censor lawful expression beyond Europe, including in the United States. Many were not convinced. But now we have moved from theory to practice. There can be no doubt now that the DSA is the tip of a massive censorship industrial complex with global implications…. Free speech is such a threat to European elites that they intend to either cripple X with fines and investigations or force them to bend the knee at the altar of censorship. I hope X stands strong because we need free speech in Europe more than ever (Daily Wire).

Jeremy Tedesco: If you’re like most Americans, your idea of global censorship is that it’s bad, but it doesn’t feel like a real threat to you. The fact that 30 British subjects are arrested every day for speech crimes sounds dire but distant. The ongoing crusade to arrest and prosecute U.K. grandmothers and clergy members for tweets and peaceful protests is infuriating, but it is also far from our shores. The same goes for Päivi Räsänen. A medical doctor, grandmother of 12, and member of the Finnish parliament, Räsänen is now awaiting a verdict at her nation’s high court that stems from a 2019 Twitter post that cited a Bible verse…. We are long past the point where censorship is someone else’s problem. Europe has built itself the infrastructure to impose global speech controls, and the Europeans don’t plan to exempt Americans (The Hill)

Wall Street Journal:

But the 184-page decision that American lawmakers made public shows the commission acting like a petty despot, with little if any regard for due process.

The decision relies on some stunning interpretations of law. It claims that X’s blue checkmarks violate the DSA’s Article 25, which says “online platforms shall not design, organise or operate their online interfaces” in a way that “impairs” users’ abilities to “make free and informed decisions.” The commission’s definition of “decisions” turns out to include mere thoughts: whether users believe an account is authentic on a platform “advertising itself as a source for information and news.” As X protests in its response, the commission’s broad interpretation of Article 25 puts “at risk virtually every online interface implemented by every platform.”

Perhaps the commission has access to reliable psychics it doesn’t disclose, but the evidence it does cite as its main basis for finding X’s blue checkmarks noncompliant is laughable: a paper by a professor and three graduate students with tiny sample sizes, a dozen or so news articles critical of X, interviews with a former Twitter employee, and a blog post by a Russian cybersecurity company that the Biden administration banned from the U.S. market over national-security concerns.

The decision overall gives a sense that the investigators’ conclusion was preordained. It asserts that because all of X’s “alleged infringements were self-explanatory,” the commission “primarily relied on gathering its own evidence.” To ascertain whether X screened researchers’ applications for its data too strictly, the commission reviewed 12 applications, four of them “in depth”—tiny numbers given that X received 151 research requests in a single two-month period.

All this gives the decision a “Get Hoffa” tone. Elon Musk has been a thorn in the side of the commission with his forthright commitment to free speech. Though the commission’s decision doesn’t order X to perform any censorship, it does arm the commission with deadly force against X over speech restrictions in the future. It is still assessing whether X fails to combat “information manipulation” and to take down “illegal content.”

Thanks to the December decision, the commission can now bring—alongside any allegations of “hate speech” or “misinformation”—the threat of financial ruin. Though the fines in this case came to a mere €120 million, the commission based that figure not on X’s revenue but on that of Mr. Musk and “all legal entities directly or indirectly controlled by” him. That means a single future fine could be north of $6 billion—or more than 200% of X’s reported annual revenue.

The commission further raised the pressure for X to give in on censorship by ordering it to give researchers easier access to its data, particularly for those investigating general “misinformation”—though the legal basis for this is questionable. This will make it much easier for pro-censorship figures—such as those the U.S. State Department banned from the country in December—to find fodder to support demands for the removal of content.

Unless Washington or sensible European voices push back against the commission, platforms and those of us who enjoy free online expression are largely at its whim. Let’s hope someone on either side of the Atlantic cares about preserving actual liberal democracy.

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