House Judiciary Committee witnesses warned Americans on Wednesday of the European Union’s attempt to export its authoritarian suppression of speech abroad.
Alliance Defending Freedom legal counsel Lorcán Price told the committee that the EU’s approach to speech regulation is fundamentally hostile to free expression and increasingly global in scope. “The EU's obsession with eliminating free speech means they have a global campaign to ensure that all speech online and platforms that allow it are banning illegal content to prevent ‘systemic risk to the discourse.’”
The hearing also featured testimony from Finnish Parliamentarian Päivi Räsänen and The IT Crowd Creator Graham Linehan concerning anti-free speech abuses across the EU and in the U.K.
Räsänen expounded on how Finland’s justice system sought to punish her for years for her speech and religious beliefs, saying that in the European country Finland, the “process itself becomes the punishment.” Linehan, an Irish citizen who was arrested by armed officers in the U.K. for posts made from Arizona, testified about his own case of extraterritorial censorship law enforcement.
Price additionally warned that the EU has already globalized its speech restrictions and is likely to continue imposing severe penalties on X and its owner. He predicted the recent fine would not be the last:
“I confidently predict that the next round of fines on X will be connected with illegal content and this content moderation for systemic risk. They identify so-called anti-migration narratives or others as a systemic risk to the discourse inside the European Union, and they have to stop it. And it's not just Europeans, and this is where this becomes global. If you're in Texas or South Carolina or New York, and you're commenting on what's going on in Europe, saying, you know, the migration situation is a disaster. They don't want that speech to leak across into Europe. So either X will start to globally moderate it by removing it, or we're going to see a firewall being set up in the center of the Atlantic, and that would be a disaster even further for free speech. It creates exactly what Vice President Vance described as a civilizational divide.”
Wednesday’s hearing followed the House Judiciary Committee’s release of documents exposing EU officials’ extensive efforts to expand the bloc’s jurisdiction outside Europe, interfere with elections and pressure technology companies to worsen their censorship policies.
On Feb. 3, the committee blasted the EU for past pressure on platforms such as TikTok and X over content moderation. In a thread on X, the congressional body made clear that incidents like former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton threatening Elon Musk over a conversation with now-President Donald Trump were not isolated incidents. The House Judiciary Committee wrote that ahead of the 2024 election, then–EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova traveled to California to discuss censorship of American content with U.S. tech platforms.
The EU also made other outrageous extraterritorial impositions on X. According to the House Judiciary Committee, the EU fined X almost $150 million for, among other things, failing to give unrestricted access to researchers, regardless of whether they live in the EU.
“Even more, in its order to X, the Commission applied the DSA’s data access requirements extraterritorially. It fined X for giving data access only to EU researchers and refusing to hand over data about American content,” the committee wrote.
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