Witnesses at a Wednesday House Judiciary Committee hearing, including Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage, sounded the alarm about yet another anti-free speech threat to Americans already battling Big Tech censorship.
While others delved into the threat of governments co-opting Big Tech to censor, Reform UK Party leader Nigel Farage pointed to the disturbing arrest of The IT Crowd creator and Irish citizen Graham Linehan in England over a few tweets on "transgenderism" as an example of British authoritarianism. Farage said that this case endangered Americans, noting that Linehan is not a British citizen and made the posts from Arizona well before his arrest.
“This could happen to any American man or woman that goes to Heathrow that has said things online that the British government and British police don’t like,” Farage said at the hearing titled “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation.”
Another witness, ADF International legal counsel Lorcán Price, warned that the U.K. and the EU will also use Big Tech to silence Americans. He specifically sounded the alarm about the “Brussels effect” on social media companies and countries, warning that the EU was deliberately exporting its censorship agenda.
Price warned that the Digital Services Act (DSA) “constitutes nothing more than an attempt to bring Brussels regulation of speech onto a global stage. Furthermore, when the European Union is now negotiating trade deals, including with your neighbors to the north in Canada, they insist that the [DSA] is part of that. So, it's very clearly a global intent. It means that the European Union will set the global standard when it comes to speech.”
Lorcan added that “It draws, I would suggest to you, a digital curtain where once there was an iron curtain. And US companies bear the brunt disproportionately of this. They're hijacked by the DSA to become essentially the EU's global censorship police,” Lorcan continued.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) made a similar point in his opening remarks, saying that anti-free speech laws in the EU and the U.K. were “the engines of a global censorship regime targeting political speech by European bureaucrats.”
Jordan argued that Americans will be impacted whenever platforms change their terms of service to appease EU authoritarians, adding that “even The New York Times and The Atlantic have acknowledged that these foreign censorship laws are meant to have a global impact.”
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.
