Free Speech Under Siege: How Europe is Becoming the New China

The Decline and Fall of Free Speech in Europe

In the middle of the twentieth century, Europe lay in ruins, having learned, or so we thought, the dark lesson that when speech is regulated, tyranny flourishes. That lesson has now been forgotten. A continent once hailed as the cradle of liberal democracy has become the laboratory of a new digital authoritarianism. This is not an exaggeration. It is, rather, the consequence of a steady drift toward control, clothed in the language of safety, decency, and order. And today, that drift has become an avalanche.

The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act, France’s criminal investigation into X, and the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) are not merely legislative developments. They are declarations of war against the free exchange of ideas. What unites them is a belief, common to technocrats in Brussels and bureaucrats in Whitehall, that ordinary people cannot be trusted with unfiltered information. To preserve democracy, it must be preemptively constrained.

This inversion of means and ends has accelerated since Elon Musk restored viewpoint neutrality to X, a platform that had, under previous management, cooperated with government actors to throttle disfavored speech. What Europe fears now is not misinformation, but competition. Competition of ideas. With the Biden administration, that fear was shared. But with Trump back in the White House and Secretary Marco Rubio at the helm of the State Department, the US has become once again the principal global guarantor of free speech.

Let us examine the facts.

Britain’s Online Safety Act, which came into force yesterday on July 25th, is a case study in bureaucratic excess. Ostensibly designed to protect children from harmful content, the law extends far beyond illegal material. It empowers the Office of Communications (Ofcom) to police "legal but harmful" speech, a category so vague that it becomes a weapon. Among the priority targets of censorship are foreign influence, disinformation, and content deemed injurious to public health or electoral trust. All are, of course, euphemisms for political heterodoxy.

The mechanisms of enforcement are equally chilling. Platforms face fines of up to 10 percent of global revenue and criminal charges against executives who fail to comply. In response, X announced that it would default users to a restricted mode unless they verify their age, employing invasive AI-based identification to filter content. In practice, this amounts to algorithmic ghettoization: speech not officially banned but rendered invisible, unreachable, and unsearchable.

If Britain’s law is sweeping, France’s assault is surgical. In early 2025, French prosecutors launched a criminal probe into X, accusing the company of algorithmic manipulation to promote divisive political content, including material critical of the French government’s stance on immigration and LGBT issues. But the legal framework under which this charge was levied is what ought to alarm any student of liberty. Prosecutors invoked Articles 323-2 and 323-3 of the French Penal Code, which target cybercriminals who distort data systems. They did so while declaring the company an "organized crime group," the very designation used against narcotics cartels.

In other words, France is treating the operation of a social media algorithm as a felony, and the platform’s executives and users as gangsters. It is difficult to imagine a clearer betrayal of liberal norms. The response from the Trump administration was swift and sharp. The State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) issued a statement condemning the investigation as an affront to the speech rights of American citizens and companies, noting that governments must not suppress voices they disfavor under the guise of regulation.

That brings us to Brussels, where the European Union’s Digital Services Act has taken aim at the global information ecosystem. Under the DSA, platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU, including X, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok, are designated as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and subjected to a draconian compliance regime. They must submit to algorithmic audits, provide content takedown systems, establish risk mitigation protocols, and grant data access to academic researchers. These may sound innocuous. They are not.

The risk assessments required under the DSA demand that platforms identify and reduce threats to democratic processes, public health, and civil discourse. But who defines these risks? Who decides what constitutes a threat to democracy? In practice, the answer is European regulators whose notion of democracy excludes populism, nationalism, and conservative dissent. The effect is predictable. As revealed in documents obtained by the House Judiciary Committee, platforms are modifying algorithms not to protect users, but to conform to a political orthodoxy that elevates some voices and buries others.

This is not merely an internal European affair. American citizens are affected. American companies are compelled to enforce rules that conflict with the First Amendment. European law is being globalized through the extraterritorial compliance of US-based firms, thereby exporting censorship to the last country in the West where speech remains constitutionally protected. The Trump administration has rightly characterized this as digital colonialism, and in response, it has begun to act.

Executive Order 14149, issued by President Trump on January 20, 2025, prohibits federal agencies from colluding in censorship and directs the Attorney General to prosecute such collaboration where found. More pointedly, Secretary Rubio has launched a campaign of diplomatic retaliation. In May, the State Department imposed visa bans on foreign officials who attempt to suppress American speech online. Among those targeted were members of France’s interior ministry and German regulators affiliated with the European Commission.

This is not just policy. It is philosophy. The Trump administration is reasserting a principle once understood and now forgotten: that the freedom to speak is not a gift from the government, but a right to be defended against it. That principle has been invoked in lawsuits filed by US firms against foreign judges, including the suit by Truth Social and Rumble against Brazilian Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who ordered censorship of American content. A federal judge recently ruled that US companies are under no obligation to comply with foreign censorship mandates, affirming the territorial integrity of the First Amendment.

These actions underscore a broader point. The war for speech is no longer domestic. It is international. And Europe, once the defender of Enlightenment values, has become the staging ground for a counter-Enlightenment led not by kings or priests, but by regulators and prosecutors. That is the novelty. The new censorship is procedural, not ideological. It hides behind audits, compliance regimes, and "safety by design" architectures. But the result is the same: fewer voices, less dissent, and a public square scrubbed clean of deviation.

Some will object: do we not have a responsibility to prevent harm? Certainly, but that is not what is happening. These regimes do not surgically remove incitement or criminality. They blur the line between disagreement and danger. A platform that allows a conservative view of gender to trend is now suspected of extremism. A politician who questions climate policy is accused of disinformation. The censor has changed outfits. He now wears a badge that says "compliance officer."

What is to be done? First, the US must extend its protective umbrella over its citizens wherever they are. The principle that an American cannot be silenced by a foreign government must be codified, not merely asserted. Second, American platforms must be encouraged, even compelled, to defend their users against extra-constitutional demands. If that means declining to operate in censorious jurisdictions, so be it. Freedom has a price. Better to pay it now than to live forever in rented liberty.

Finally, we must recognize that this is not just a legal conflict. It is a civilizational one. Europe has chosen managed democracy over free society. The US must not follow. We must lead. And if our allies bristle, let them. Better to be isolated and free than integrated and gagged. The American Revolution did not begin with gunfire. It began with speech. We owe it to our forebears, and our future, to keep that flame lit.

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