The U.S. House Judiciary Committee has released a new report on European Union efforts to criminalize speech.
Chairman Jim Jordan announced the report and its findings in an X thread Friday, explaining, “New secret docs show how EU regulators are pushing Big Tech behind closed doors to censor conservatives.” Since EU officials tried to censor President Donald Trump last August, the committee has been investigating the burgeoning censorship regime across the ocean.
The EU Digital Services Act (DSA) criminalized “hate speech” and other subjectively and arbitrarily defined categories of “harmful” free speech. But Jordan said his committee obtained documentation to “show that European regulators distort these terms to require censorship of legitimate political discourse that is neither harmful nor illegal.”
He highlighted a May EU DSA “workshop” closed to public viewing, an unusual restriction for such workshops, to discuss anti-free speech tactics. The workshop included a session on the “dissemination of illegal content” with a hypothetical scenario.
“[A] 16-year-old Muslim girl who has a history of feeling self-conscious about her identity” encounters a post with an image of a woman wearing a hijab with the words “terrorist in disguise,” Jordan’s screenshots of the workshop documents explain. “The post gets a lot of likes and comments, including some that use coded language to express anti-Muslim sentiment, such as ‘We need to take back our country.’” In response to the girl’s “surge of anxiety and fear,” the workshop advised “content moderating processes” or censorship of “discriminatory” memes, according to Jordan’s thread. No wonder the workshop was a secret.
Since the DSA allows countries to make censorship requests and crush speech on topics like climate and immigration, it presents a global threat. Poland, for example, requested that TikTok remove the statement “electric cars are neither ecological nor an economical solution,” Jordan explained. The congressman added that in France, a user became a target after mocking overly permissive French illegal immigration policies on X.
Even European courts and officials have made global censorship demands. For example, then-EU commissioner Thierry Breton tried to pressure Elon Musk into not promoting Trump‘s 2024 interview in Europe.
“Major platforms like Facebook and YouTube enforce their terms and conditions globally, meaning that EU-mandated changes will affect what Americans can say and see online,” Jordan insisted. “Under the DSA, companies are also expected to solicit feedback on content moderation from civil society organizations—many of which are entitled to make priority censorship requests.” Documents the committee obtained from an American company show the aggressive anti-free speech policies of these organizations.
The Judiciary Committee will continue to investigate international censorship efforts, Jordan promised. “Taken together, the evidence is clear: the Digital Services Act requires the world’s largest social media platforms (many of which are American) to censor core political speech affecting users in Europe, the United States, and around the world.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
