Report: European Censorship Accelerates

The European Commission holds a seminar on implementation of its Digital Services Act, offering a disturbing window into a tightening speech landscape

While the United States continues to deal with its own domestic speech controversies, including around a Trump administration order sanctioning anyone who’s “materially assisted” the International Criminal Court (ICC), the European Commission is trying to use its own draconian speech laws to impact countries beyond its borders, including the U.S., according to an alarming new House Judiciary Committee report.

The Committee chaired by Ohio’s Jim Jordan began investigating Europe’s primary speech-control law, the Digital Services Act, after a bizarre incident last August. Europe’s Commissioner for Internal Markets, Thierry Breton, sent a letter to X CEO Elon Musk threatening an “extremely vigilant” response for “any negative effect of illegal content on X in the EU,” ahead of a planned live interview of Donald Trump by Musk. Though the interview was to be held in Washington — speech between two Americans in America, distributed by an American company — Breton was upset it would be “accessible to users in the EU,” and “spillovers” of “illegal content” might ensue. Though Breton resigned shortly after in a clash with President Ursula von der Leyen, questions about how serious Europe might or might not be about asserting jurisdiction over American speech remained.

Nearly a year later, Jordan’s Committee has come back with unpleasant answers. On May 7th, European authorities held a “DSA MultiStakeholder Workshop” in Brussels, intended to help major platforms like Meta, X, and Google understand their obligations under the DSA. As Jordan notes, the seminar was closed to the public, unlike previous seminars about laws like the Digital Markets Act. Participants of the new event were specifically warned not to describe the seminar’s “exercise scenarios,” but Jordan’s committee got hold of key documents.

Europe already has a broad definition of “illegal content,” but the “MultiStakeholder Workshop” participants were additionally asked to come up with intervention plans for content that isn’t “illegal,” even according to Europe’s loony standards. Moreover, European authorities made it clear that platforms were expected to prepare changes to their “global” policies, meaning “European censorship may affect what Americans can say and see online,” as Jordan’s report put it.

“On paper, the DSA is bad,” the report concluded. “In practice, it is even worse.”

The Trump administration’s most controversial speech policies have involved using AI to screen social media accounts of would-be “pro-Hamas” visitors and the withholding of subsidies from universities like Columbia for allegedly failing to stop antisemitism. The most consistent themes in Trump’s First Amendment controversies are the removal of subsidies for ideologically charged policies or speech (from NPR to VOA to DEI to universities) and using immigration and anti-terror laws like the PATRIOT Act to try to expel immigrants over “beliefs, statements, or associations.” Courts have delivered varying rulings on these matters, and even some of Trump’s erstwhile supporters have expressed unease with some his policies.

Europe’s pattern is the inverse of Trump’s. It keeps trying to expand its subsidy of ideologically charged speech, and it’s using even broader and more powerful tools than Trump’s executive orders to try to eliminate criticism of its immigration policies. The recent workshop also clearly shows the EU expanding both the scope and the methodology of its censorship practices, going after humor, satire, anodyne political opinions, memes that “may” spread “discriminatory ideologies,” and other content its army of “trusted flaggers” might not have noted even a few years ago. Some of the most upsetting examples: