As Big Tech and the U.S. government take steps away from their past censorship abuses, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) issued a warning to the anti-free speech bureaucrats across the pond.
Jordan, in a letter to Henna Virkkunen, the new executive vice president of the European Commission (EU), warned that America would not tolerate further European efforts to punish American tech companies for allowing free speech.
After noting that Virkkunen was in charge of enforcing the EU’s draconian Digital Services Act (DSA), Jordan wrote, “We write to express our serious concerns with how the DSA’s censorship provisions affect free speech in the United States.” He filled the letter with references to past and present EU actions that violate free speech and summoned the European Commission to explain itself to the House Judiciary Committee.
Jordan’s letter follows Virkkunen’s decision to double down on censorship. Days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, she told CNBC that the European Commission would not lighten up on American tech companies and that “now we are fully enforcing those rules we have in the place.”
EU bureaucrats have repeatedly harassed companies, like Elon Musk’s X, for allowing free speech. The harassment tactics range from launching investigations and issuing threats to sending over a hundred Stasi-like minders to listen in on Musk’s conversation with a German political candidate to see if they engaged in wrongthink.
But Musk isn’t alone. Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the EU has fined American tech companies “more than $30 billion.” Since announcing that he would dismantle the censorship regime on his platforms, Zuckerberg has repeatedly called for the U.S. to defend its companies from foreign governments. Trump did reference fines against American tech companies during his recent speech at the World Economic Forum.
In his letter, Jordan referenced the severity of the fines imposed on American tech companies and warned EU rules would impact Americans: “The DSA requires that social media platforms have systematic processes to remove ‘misleading or deceptive content,’ including so-called ‘disinformation,’ even when such content ‘is not illegal.’ Though nominally applicable to only EU speech, the DSA, as written, may limit or restrict Americans’ constitutionally protected speech in the United States.”
Jordan went on to note that former censorship-prone EU Commissioner Thierry Bretton explicitly tried to censor Americans to avoid “‘potential spillovers’” into the EU. The House Judiciary Committee chair further blasted the EU bureaucrats for their arrogant rejection of free speech:
“Attempts to censor so-called ‘disinformation,’ as you seem intent to do, miss the fundamental point about free speech. To oppose censorship is to acknowledge that a government with the authority to define disinformation will inevitably do so in a way that benefits those in power at the expense of the truth. No entity has a monopoly on good ideas. Dissenting voices matter because the ‘expert consensus’ can be, and often is, wrong, as shown most recently by the devastating consequences of government-imposed lockdowns.”
Notably, some infamous anti-free speech figures are putting their hopes in foreign governments and organizations such as the EU to censor free speech when Big Tech or the United States refuse to do so.
Nina Jankowicz, who was briefly placed in charge of the Biden administration’s short-lived Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board,” believes that foreign governments intend to step in to promote censorship if the U.S. Government and Big Tech won’t.
In a Jan. 21 interview with the U.K.-based Disorder podcast, Jankowicz defended an Australian official who tried to make Musk censor content not just for Australia, but for the entire world. She also gloated that pro-censorship European countries “see it as their job to fill in the gap that other democracies are leaving open, other democracies, namely the United States,” and disturbingly called for “online safety regulators” to “harmonize legislation across borders.”
Additionally, Jankowicz praised Brazil’s infamous crackdown on free speech before suggesting that foreign governments could save Americans from free speech. “We’ve had so much harm caused by social media. And now, all the bumper lanes in the bowling ally are coming off in the United States and it's up to folks like these regulators in other countries to stand up for the rest of us,” she said, “And you know, we’ll do our part here in the states too, but we’re just trying to put out the fire.”
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