Congress Faces Pressure As Europe’s ‘Censorship Regime’ Threatens American Free Speech

Free speech advocates are urging Congress to take action to protect Americans from the European Union’s “censorship regime.” 

The House Judiciary Committee will hear testimony on Wednesday about the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which empowers the European Commission to impose significant financial penalties on tech companies they say are not doing enough to combat so-called disinformation. In some circumstances, American tech companies could be fined up to six percent of their global revenue if they violate certain conditions. 

“Europe wants to be the global leader in censorship,” wrote the Alliance Defending Freedom International’s Lorcán Price in written testimony shared with The Daily Wire. “Its obsession with harmonization and regulation is at odds with the values of free speech and a free press. Those are universal human freedoms as well as traditional European values, but increasingly they are treated by some as a social ill that should be purged from enlightened society.”

Price’s written testimony noted that the Digital Services Act empowered private organizations to be used to monitor speech rules and that the steep fines would lead to companies proactively censoring content. 

“When 6% of your global revenue is at stake, complying with speech codes is never voluntary. And now that the DSA is mandatory and additional add-ons are coming, American companies will be, at best, forced to stop innovating and start policing speech,” Price wrote. 

Others who will testify before the House Judiciary Committee include British Member of Parliament Nigel Farage and App Association President Morgan Reed. 

Alliance Defending Freedom lawyer Jeremy Tedesco said on a background call on the hearing that Congress should try to create incentives to encourage companies to promote and protect free speech. He also praised the committee for drawing attention to the issue of European censorship. 

“Our speech could be deleted without you knowing it, and certainly, without you understanding the reasons for it. I mean, most of the censorship under the DSA happens behind the veil,” Tedesco told The Daily Wire. 

During COVID, he noted that the European Union was a major force pressuring companies to restrict speech critical of masking and other COVID measures, leading to hundreds of thousands of posts being deleted and accounts suspended. 

Just months before the 2024 presidential election, EU industry chief Thierry Breton threatened Elon Musk before he interviewed President Donald Trump on X. Breton told Musk that he must comply with regulations put in place by the Digital Services Act.