How Europe Plans To Strangle American Free Speech

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.

I testified yesterday before the Committee that the enormous fines recently levied on X by the European Commission prove beyond all doubt that the EU means to strangle free speech by a systematic assault on US companies. This is corroborated by the Committee’s incendiary new report, which shows that American companies are already having to adopt EU content moderation policies.

The EU has a multi-pronged strategy to open a slew of investigations, to add more and more regulations, to impose crippling fines, and, ultimately, to either break up or ban companies such as X, which are pro-free-speech.

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.

But it goes deeper; this censorship campaign is not just aimed at destroying free speech in Europe, it’s about imposing European Union speech laws globally.

Make no mistake, Europe’s draconian speech laws are being imposed across the world via global content moderation rules.

The EU’s obsession with eliminating free speech means that they are deploying a global campaign to ensure that all speech online bans “illegal content” and “prevents systemic risk” to the “discourse”.

And the costs are borne by real people, like my client Päivi Räsänen, a longtime Finnish parliamentarian, who has spent more than six years criminally prosecuted for peacefully expressing her Christian beliefs in a 2019 Bible verse tweet. Räsänen also testified alongside me before the Committee on her ordeal, as she awaits a verdict from Finland’s Supreme Court for “hate speech” charges under the national law for “war crimes and crimes against humanity”. Of course, “hate speech” has no meaning except speech that European elites hate.

This is what European censorship looks like in practice: the process itself becomes the punishment, designed to chill speech, exhaust dissenters, and warn others to stay silent. And if this is what happens to a sitting parliamentarian in a Western democracy, Americans should have no illusion that either American companies or their citizens will be spared if these censorship regimes are allowed to normalize globally.

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Lorcán Price is an Irish barrister and legal counsel for ADF International.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.