March 26, 2026, will go down in history as a dark day for free speech. Finland’s Supreme Court convicted Paivi Rasanen — a grandmother, medical doctor, and sitting member of Parliament — of a “hate crime” classified under the Finnish criminal code as a “war crime and crime against humanity.”
Her offense? A pamphlet she wrote more than 20 years ago for her church, and at the request of her bishop, expresses her Christian views about sexual morality.
Rasanen had been acquitted twice before. Two Finnish courts looked at the evidence and found no crime. So when Rasanen got word that the Finnish Supreme Court would issue its ruling this week, she had every reason to expect that she could finally put the state’s long and unjustified crusade behind her.
Instead, Finland’s highest court found a creative way to convict her. It reached back 22 years, applying a law that did not even exist when Rasanen wrote the pamphlet. The court then ordered the pamphlet “removed from public access and destroyed.” The state’s message could not be clearer: We will rewrite the rules, apply them retroactively, and erase the evidence of your beliefs.
This is the kind of story Americans read with a mix of horror and false comfort. Horror at the injustice. False comfort in the assumption that it can’t happen here.
It can. And the mechanism is already built.
Here is what Americans need to understand: Rasanen’s conviction is not just a Finnish scandal. It is a live round loaded into a global censorship weapon called the European Union Digital Services Act.
Under the DSA, “illegal content” is defined as any speech that violates the law of the EU or any of its member states. As of March 26, a Christian pamphlet expressing the biblical view of marriage is a criminal offense in Finland. That means this viewpoint is now “illegal content” under the DSA — and every major American platform, from X to YouTube to Instagram, can be pressured to remove it or face billions in fines.
The platforms the DSA targets are the modern public square. They are where Americans debate politics, share their faith, and hold the powerful accountable. Under the DSA, even if an American posts from his backyard in Ohio, that speech can be subject to EU censorship standards too. In practice, EU enforcement authorities have indicated that it is “irrelevant” who is speaking or where the speech occurs. If a complaint is filed within the EU, platforms can be pressured to remove the content — placing American speech directly in the DSA’s crosshairs.
To operationalize this globally, the DSA relies on a system of “trusted flaggers” — EU-based and funded NGOs empowered to identify and report “illegal” speech. Because these entities are recognized by EU authorities and integrated into enforcement, they can trigger content removal decisions affecting users worldwide, including in the United States. It is censorship by proxy, designed to bypass the First Amendment entirely.
This is not theoretical. Last December, the EU Commission fined X and Elon Musk $140 million — the first fine ever levied under the DSA — after Musk refused to bend the knee to European censorship demands. This is the same commission that publicly pressured Musk to censor his live interview with President Donald Trump.
Musk and X fired back a month ago, filing the first-ever legal challenge to the DSA in European courts. My colleagues at Alliance Defending Freedom on both sides of the Atlantic were proud to support that effort. And Rasanen, with the backing of ADF International, is now weighing an appeal of her case to the European Court of Human Rights.
ANOTHER SHUTDOWN, ANOTHER CLOWN SHOW IN CONGRESS
The same censorship regime that convicted Rasanen for sharing a pamphlet about her faith is the regime the EU is exporting worldwide through the DSA. Every vague hate speech law in every EU member state is now a weapon that can be aimed at your speech, on your platform, in your country. Finland proved on Thursday that it does not matter how long ago you spoke, how many millions of people share your views, or how many times a court has acquitted you. Once the censorship machine starts rolling downhill, it won’t stop until something stands in its way.
As we prepare to celebrate 250 years of independence this July, we should remember what we declared independence from: a distant power that presumed to govern us without our consent. The EU’s Digital Services Act is that presumption reborn, and the fight against it is the free speech battle of our generation.
Jeremy Tedesco (@Jeremy_Tedesco) is senior counsel, senior vice president of counter censorship task force at Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal).
