The Decline and Fall of Free Speech in Europe
Europe once stood as the proud heir to the Enlightenment. Today, it is becoming the graveyard of its core principles. The continent that produced Locke and Montesquieu now births bureaucratic decrees that treat memes, satire, and political slogans as threats to civil order. The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), originally sold as a regulatory shield against disinformation and harmful content, has metastasized into a censorship regime of stunning scope. Recent findings by the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Congressman Jim Jordan, confirm what many suspected: the DSA is not merely a European law, it is an export mechanism for ideological control.
The DSA pressures American companies to adopt global content moderation standards aligned with European political preferences, coercing them under threat of billion-dollar fines. In so doing, it subjects US citizens to censorship from foreign bureaucracies whose values diverge fundamentally from our own constitutional traditions. The Trump administration has made clear that this transnational censorship is unacceptable, and it is acting accordingly.
Let us examine the latest evidence.
According to the Committee’s July 2025 interim report, the European Commission and various EU member states are actively classifying basic political statements as “illegal hate speech.” Among the examples was the phrase “We need to take back our country,” a commonplace political sentiment uttered by everyone from Donald Trump to Elizabeth Warren. At a secretive European Commission workshop on May 7, 2025, this phrase was labeled as “coded language” requiring censorship. The target was not violence or obscenity. The target was dissent.
More troubling still, the DSA is designed to make these European standards universal. The law mandates that Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), including X, YouTube, Meta, and TikTok, adapt their global content moderation systems to conform to EU preferences. There is no firewall. In effect, what Brussels bans, Silicon Valley buries, not just in Europe, but worldwide.
The DSA incentivizes compliance through steep penalties: up to 6 percent of global revenue and, in extraordinary circumstances, total platform shutdown within the EU. It employs a network of state-approved “trusted flaggers” and arbitration bodies to review and demand takedowns. These flaggers are often government-funded NGOs or ideologically aligned civil society organizations. Their targets include satire, humor, and criticisms of immigration or climate policy. As the Judiciary Committee documents, posts flagged for removal included a meme about Syrian migration and a critique of electric vehicles. Both were clearly political speech. Neither was illegal.
France provides a particularly aggressive example. In early 2025, French authorities launched a full criminal investigation into X, classifying the company as an “organized crime group” for allegedly promoting divisive political content. The charges, based on cybercrime statutes typically reserved for narcotics traffickers and digital fraud syndicates, stemmed from algorithmic amplification of political speech that challenged France’s immigration and social policies. In essence, the French government used anti-mafia laws to criminalize not just speech, but the systems by which that speech is distributed.
Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act has become a model of bureaucratic overreach. The law empowers Ofcom, Britain’s communications regulator, to police not just illegal but so-called “legal but harmful” content. Platforms must submit to age verification systems, government audits, and potentially criminal penalties for executives. As a result, platforms like X have been forced to default users into restricted content modes unless they provide ID. In practical terms, this means speech that is not banned is instead hidden—scrubbed from search results, algorithmically buried, or preemptively throttled. It is not freedom. It is invisibility.
This raises an urgent constitutional question. If a foreign government pressures a US company to suppress speech that is protected by the First Amendment, should that be tolerated? The Trump administration has answered with a resounding no.
Under Executive Order 14149, federal agencies are prohibited from cooperating with any foreign censorship demands. More significantly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has begun diplomatic retaliation. Visa bans have been imposed on foreign officials engaged in censorship activities, including French police and German regulators. And litigation has followed: American platforms have sued foreign judges and agencies, asserting the primacy of American speech rights under US law.
The stakes are higher than most realize. The DSA, far from being confined to European borders, now functions as a digital colonial charter. American citizens find themselves governed by foreign standards enforced through corporate compliance. The House Judiciary Committee found that platforms are redesigning their algorithms, rewriting their terms of service, and restructuring user experience globally to placate EU regulators. To call this a mere “regulatory ripple” is to miss the tsunami.
Even worse, the so-called voluntary Codes of Conduct on Hate Speech and Disinformation promoted by the EU are anything but. As the report reveals, these codes serve as de facto mandates: platforms that refuse to adopt them are singled out for punitive enforcement. X learned this the hard way. After withdrawing from the Code of Conduct on Disinformation, it was immediately targeted by regulators, fined over $1 billion, and investigated for its use of community-based fact-checking (Community Notes) rather than state-approved monitors.
The chilling effect is unmistakable. Platforms are now being told to censor political memes, AI-generated jokes, and satire because they might be considered “harmful” or “coded.” Civil society organizations, themselves funded by EU governments, assert that “everything that can be considered hateful or harmful should be removed”, regardless of legality. This is not democratic governance. This is ideological enforcement by proxy.
European officials insist the DSA does not regulate content. The evidence shows otherwise. Article 34 mandates platforms to identify and mitigate undefined “systemic risks” including disinformation and hate speech. Article 52 authorizes massive penalties. Article 22 privileges “trusted flaggers” with censorship authority. When a law demands censorship, punishes disobedience, and outsources enforcement to political allies, it is a censorship law. To claim otherwise is gaslighting.
The US response must be unflinching. First, we must assert territorial integrity over our laws and platforms. No US company should comply with foreign takedown requests involving American speech without court oversight. Second, the Trump administration should continue to impose costs, diplomatic, financial, and reputational, on any foreign actor that suppresses American speech. Third, Congress must enshrine protections for American speech abroad, starting with the No Censors on Our Shores Act. And finally, US platforms must rediscover their backbone.
Let Europe build its censorship machine. But let it fail alone.
The Enlightenment did not die. It was hijacked. And America, if we still believe in liberty, must lead its rescue.
If you enjoy my work, please consider subscribing: https://x.com/amuse.
READ NEXT: ICE Drops Bombshell — TV Star Deletes Criticism
Bye Bye tourism then for EU if policies enacted