What is the Bigger Threat to Free Speech, Europe, or Donald Trump's America?

Thoughts after a challenging discussion with Freddie Sayers of Britain's Unherd

On Tuesday morning, a day after Father Ted writer and comedian Graham Linehan was arrested at Heathrow airport for three tweets deemed transphobic, I spoke with Freddie Sayers of the U.K.-based Unherd, in an interview released yesterday. For the unfamiliar, Unherd has been a stalwart, often lonely defender of free expression in a post-Brexit era that saw significant shifts in British attitudes. Freddie’s site responded to the Linehan story in characteristic fashion: “The Shameful Arrest of Graham Linehan.”

In the last year, Unherd has become more pessimistic about unfettered free speech. There’s been backlash to criticism from America about British regulation, particularly as expressed by Elon Musk and his supporters on X/Twitter. Through voices like Richard Hanania and the always-interesting Malcolm Kyeyune, Unherd has devoted a lot of space to decrying Musk’s actions with DOGE, and what it sees as a too-unchecked flow of falsehoods on X.

I have my own documented issues with Musk and often roll eyes at his leap-before-you-look tweets, though many of the supposedly “terrible” things he’s said just strike me as funny (e.g. a picture of Bill Gates under the tweet, “in case u need to lose a boner fast”). As noted in the friendly interview above, when asked to choose between a British government that arrests citizens for tweets and has an Online Safety Act that empowers the state with broad control over Internet content, I have to side with Musk.

He certainly has reasons to be upset with Britain and the EU, which are both threatening crippling penalties for refusing to obey content dictates. As Paul Thacker and I also reported last year, the Labour-aligned Center for Countering Digital Hate listed “Kill Musk’s Twitter” as a top organizational goal in leaked documents:

Center for Countering Digital Hate memorandum regarding goals for May of 2024. The document also listed a meeting with Senator Amy Klobuchar’s “team”

When Freddie referred to Musk’s Twitter as a “cesspit,” I had a flashback. It’s forgotten, but the digital censorship era began with two electoral results. First after Brexit in June 2016, then after Donald Trump’s election in November that same year, it became instant conventional wisdom that “disinformation” on social media was responsible. When Trump was elected, Twitter — not Elon Musk’s Twitter but Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, proto-BlueSky Twitter — was deemed a “cesspool for disinformation” by the New York Times. Public panic reached such a pitch that within a year Twitter, Facebook, and Google were dragged to the Hill and forced under the threat of increased regulation to come up with plans to combat “discord” and disinformation, birthing public-private censorship.

Twitter and Facebook, previously praised as a lubricant for aiding Barack Obama’s victories (“The First Social Media President!” the Seattle Times gushed), were now regularly denounced as “cesspools” of “fake news,” bigotry, and anti-Semitism. The pattern would repeat across multiple issues (Covid, J6, Ukraine, Gaza), inspiring more draconian responses, from Trump’s social media ban to suppression of content promoting “vaccine hesitancy.” In America heavy-handed digital measures helped re-elect Trump. In Europe, the specter of Brexit, Trump, Viktor Orban, and other movements led to full-service censorship laws like the Digital Services Act.

It’s a chicken-egg question. Did a dangerous xenophobic nationalism necessitate state intervention, or did an authoritarian political establishment inspire the nationalist revolt? The U.S. under Trump and J.D. Vance since last year’s election formally accused Europe and Britain of undermining democracy, while our ex-Atlantic partners accuse us of stirring up nationalist violence, with Musk becoming a villain of almost Hitlerian sweep in Britain. Who’s right? Freddie posed some of these worries in an earlier talk with Claire Lehman of Australia’s Quillette, but my American answer is that Europe started it: