American leaders accuse Europe of not only denying the values of freedom and democracy that both sides of the Atlantic profess to uphold, but also of interfering extraterritorially in American public debate. This objection was most prominently voiced early last year in a speech in Munich by Trump's vice president, JD Vance.
At the end of the year, the US State Department imposed visa sanctions on European censors, and now, in early February, the House Judiciary Committee has released a detailed list of what Washington finds objectionable about Brussels.
The report is undoubtedly biased. It is written from the perspective of conservatives facing progressive censorship and from the perspective of Americans who see European bureaucracy as the biggest problem. Regardless, it presents facts that should concern not only American conservatives, but above all every European who cares about freedom of expression.
The committee's report objectively captures ten years of Brussels' efforts to control social media. They began in 2015, when the European Commission established the EU Internet Forum, bringing together Google, Facebook, Microsoft, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter to force them to "voluntarily" regulate communication on their platforms. The stated goal was to combat terrorism, but standard anti-terrorism laws would probably suffice for that.
In reality, it is about removing information that does not violate any law but is inconvenient for the European Commission. At the time, this mainly concerned migration and gender.
The European censorship complex
The pressure for censorship has been growing since 2020. The Commission first suppressed information questioning the official policy on the Covid pandemic, then turned its attention with the same vehemence to the war in Ukraine, and since 2023 to almost every election, whether national or European. This year was a significant milestone, as the Digital Services Act came into force in the EU. It made it possible to replace enforced voluntariness with obligations, with companies facing significant fines for non-compliance.
From the American perspective, August 2024 was a major turning point when Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton publicly threatened Elon Musk, owner of Network X (formerly Twitter), with sanctions under the aforementioned regulation if he conducted a live interview with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump on his network.
This was an intervention in the US election campaign based on the extraterritorial jurisdiction that the European Commission claimed over US companies. The Commission argued that if it was to protect Europeans consistently, it could not limit its regulation to content offered in Europe, but must also regulate content offered elsewhere that is still accessible in Europe via VPN.
Breton's intervention triggered an investigation by the House Judiciary Committee, which objected to the European Commission's assumption of jurisdiction to regulate American political speech. The investigation also revealed that in the same year, Commissioner Věra Jourová traveled to California to discuss with TikTok representatives the censorship of campaigns ahead of the European Parliament elections and the subsequent US presidential elections.
According to the report, if anyone bears political responsibility for the European censorship complex, it is Babiš's former favorite Jourová and Macron's nominee Breton. He earned himself a ban from entering the US for censorship.
Neither Breton nor Jourová are in Brussels today, but that does not change the situation. They were just the visible tip of the iceberg that continues to sink freedom of expression. Two months ago, the Commission imposed a fine of €120 million on Musk's X network, punishing him under various pretexts, primarily for his unwillingness to cooperate with censors. What the Commission believes he should cooperate on is documented in chilling detail in an American report. It captures part of the anatomy of the censorship octopus, documents what is to be censored, and gives examples of censorship pressures.
If the European Commission is the head of the octopus, its brain is the CONNECT Directorate-General. It is headed by Prabhat Agarwal, an official unknown to the public, who has spent many years shaping European censorship strategy and instructing platforms on how to comply with Brussels regulations. Today, he heads the Directorate for Online Platforms, where he oversees the enforcement of the Digital Services Regulation. Jourová and Breton are Brussels puppets controlled by Agarwal.
The ecosystem of censorship and Kafkaesque world
The tentacles of the octopus controlled by these officials are of two kinds: the platforms that the Commission is pushing and the censorship NGOs that the Commission feeds.
The American report focuses primarily on the pressure on platforms. This takes place in a galaxy of working groups and subgroups dedicated to combating disinformation.
Among the most important are several subgroups: for crisis situations convened for specific events, for the integrity of services ensuring information that meets Brussels' needs, for reviewing advertising aimed at cutting off inconvenient websites from advertising money, for artificial intelligence, and for fact-checking to ensure the influence of censoring NGOs and create officially approved facts. In addition to these, there is a separate working group for elections, which is coordinated with the crisis sub-group through a special steering committee.
It is perhaps not surprising that in this Kafkaesque world, elections are, in a way, a crisis situation. This steering committee is supposed to monitor election campaigns and intervene against inconvenient political forces.
Platforms attending group meetings receive instructions and submit measurable results demonstrating compliance with those instructions, such as how many accounts they have closed, how much advertising money they have diverted from dangerous disinformers, or explanations as to why they have not withdrawn a documentary film about Covid vaccination.
Their participation in this Kafkaesque galaxy was ostensibly voluntary, but the Commission made it clear that non-participation would not be tolerated and that repeated absences by those who did not cooperate would be reflected in unfavorable regulatory decisions.
The Commission does not have to enforce participation among NGOs, as they are its watchdogs. It cannot monitor social media content on its own, so it uses "fact checkers" from NGOs funded by its extensive grant system. The report is limited to an illustrative list of these organizations: HateAid, Activewatch, Jugendschutznet, Debunk.org, NewsGuard, and Dot.Europe.
However, the connection between censorship NGOs and the European Commission is carefully documented in a study by Norman Lewis published by the Orbán-affiliated think tank MCC in Brussels. It should be added that, like Breton, the heads of some of these organizations have been banned from entering the US since December.
What content does the Commission object to?
It has prepared a handbook that warns against populism, Islamophobia, and rhetoric directed against Brussels, governments, elites, migration, or LGBTIQ. Its totalitarian character is confirmed by its warning against political satire; in Brussels, Kundera's "no one will laugh" applies. Another totalitarian element is the vagueness of the rules and their constant change.
Last year, the Commission explained to platforms that the best practice is to "continuously review community rules" on the basis of which problematic speech is excluded. TikTok, which according to the report was one of Brussels' most docile pupils, then censored information that "undermined public confidence" and "distorted authoritative information" from official bodies. Combined with the principle of "when in doubt, delete," this is a weapon that can be used against anyone.
The report also addresses specific interventions by the Commission. It shows how, in the fall of 2020, when the COVID vaccination campaign was being prepared, it called on platforms to change their rules to prevent the spread of critical information about experimental vaccines. In 2022, it drew attention to alleged disinformation surrounding the war in Ukraine. Every election since 2023, when the ill-fated regulation came into force, has been a special case. The first was in Slovakia, followed by the Netherlands, Europe, France, Moldova, Romania, and Ireland.
It should be added that Moldova is not even a member of the EU, and Breton's statement proves that pressure was also exerted on platforms before the US elections. The report notes that these interventions also suited the Biden administration, which allegedly lacked such powerful tools for censoring political speech. The report does not address the extent to which the Atlantic allies coordinated their efforts. However, it would be surprising if they did not.
The report does not mention anything about censorship coming from domestic American sources: the influence of progressive ideology and American intelligence services. However, both occurred, and even before the presidential election, these censorship interventions began to be investigated in Congress, with Trump exposing part of the American censorship machine.
Trump's rise to power may bring freedom in some areas, but in others, censorship is intensifying. The CEO of TikTok recently boasted about how thoroughly his network eliminates criticism of Zionism. It should be added that TikTok was taken over last year by one of the richest people in the world, Zionist billionaire Larry Ellison.
American criticism of European attempts at extraterritorial regulation is understandable. Why should American social networks play by European rules? Why should the American presidential campaign be supervised from Brussels by people like Breton or Agarwal, not to mention Jourová? This is about the foundations of American democracy. However, the real masters of extraterritorial intervention have always been the Americans.
Ten years ago, their control over the dollar and the financial system prevented Europeans from normalizing economic relations with Iran, and today they are trying to use tariffs to restrict third countries' trade with Russia. With its Digital Services Act, Brussels is serving the Americans their own extraterritorial soup.
However, schadenfreude should be put aside. Brussels has created a monster that is still growing. Under the Orwellian slogan "shield of democracy," the Commission is now launching another attack on freedom and democracy, which includes the European Center for Democratic Resilience and the European Fact-Checking Network.
Everything is moving towards a unified Brussels definition of "hate speech" and a generally binding instrument of "protection," i.e., the ideological subjugation of European democracies.
The fight against this monster must be led primarily by Europeans themselves, but American conservatives can be valuable allies.