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Europe continues to escalate its war on free speech, and the continent is rapidly becoming a poor protector of Western values.
European leaders are seeking to export their crusade against free speech to American companies, courtesy of the European Union. The specific target in the news now is X (formerly Twitter), which has been fined $140 million by the EU, the first penalty handed down under its Digital Services Act. The fine was given for three violations: the determination that X’s blue check mark is “misleading,” a lack of “transparency” for European investigators, and a lack of an advertising catalogue that Europe can examine.
EUROPE ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT HAVE FREER SPEECH THAN THE US
Put aside the checkmark debate, where the European position presumes that Europeans aren’t smart enough to realize that the checkmark is a subscription verification now, despite a long and highly-publicized campaign by X to make it clear. Both the “transparency” violation and the advertising violation stem from speech restrictions. The “transparency” Europe is asking for is to give European “researchers” access to X’s data and algorithm so that they could give proper “scrutiny” to “issues like political content, hate speech, and algorithmic biases.”
What Europe would do with that information is fairly obvious. The initial investigation into X was opened in 2023, with a focus on “disinformation” and “illegal content.” The goal was always to hit X with fines or other restrictions for not playing by European censorship rules, which is likely part of the reason why X has refused to play ball with this fishing expedition.
What Europe intends to do with a catalog of X’s advertisers is also fairly clear. For that, we look to the London-based nonprofit known as the Global Disinformation Index. That organization worked with the State Department under President Joe Biden and is dedicated to scaring advertisers away from “disinformation” sites, which it deems to be any website that covers politics and does not adhere to the dominant left-wing politics of Europe. The Global Disinformation Index targeted multiple conservative American websites, including the New York Post, Reason, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, the Federalist, and, of course, the Washington Examiner.
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The Global Disinformation Index has happily worked with government agencies (such as Biden’s State Department) and boasted to quasi-governmental organizations (the United Nations) about its desire to “defund disinformation.” One memo from the group singled out Amazon for hosting Washington Examiner ads. Sure enough, the Global Disinformation Index cheers the EU’s “Code of Conduct on Disinformation,” part of the Digital Services Act, so long as the EU can acquire “transparent data” and is “willing to follow through” on punishing “disinformation” sites.
Now, recall that the EU wants “transparency” from X as part of an investigation into “disinformation,” and you can imagine exactly why it wants a full list of X’s advertising partners. After all, the EU is funding a “disinformation” class held by the CEO of the Global Disinformation Index, to the tune of $4.3 million in 2022.
The EU is just a collection of European nations that themselves are hostile to free speech, and that can be seen in any number of its most prominent members. Algerian boxer Imane Khelif claims to be a woman but has previously been disqualified from international competition after failing genetic tests. This fact hung over the Olympics, as the likely male Khelif brutalized multiple female boxers before effectively exiling him/her/xerself by refusing to partake in mandated genetic testing imposed by the rest of the boxing world.
In the aftermath of that Olympic run, Khelif faced plenty of criticism from people who do not want to see men punch women in the face repeatedly in a women’s boxing tournament. So Khelif ran to the French government to file a criminal complaint. France complied, opening an investigation for “cyber harassment based on gender, public insults based on gender, public incitement to discrimination and public insults on the basis of origin,” using an open-ended investigation that would allow French officials to prosecute anybody so long as their comments about Khelif were made on one of the named social media websites.
German prosecutors, meanwhile, boast about prosecuting people over online speech, with one prosecutor’s office boasting that it secured 750 hate speech convictions over a four-year span. When one German politician was called a “pimmel” online (the equivalent of an American politician being called a “d*ck”), he complained, resulting in a police raid targeting the poster. These German prosecutors insist that Germans have free speech; it is just that sometimes, if they are too mean to an elite politician online, they may have police breaking down their door before sunrise.
The United Kingdom is no longer part of the EU, but it is part of the same anti-free speech crusade as its fellow Europeans. Comedian Graham Linehan was arrested upon landing in London for daring to offend transgender activists, including saying a photograph of protesters was “a photo you can smell.” He was swarmed by five police officers and held in a cell for 19 hours over that content.
The United Kingdom regularly arrests people for mean words on the internet, typically in politically charged debates about transgenderism or immigration. As you can guess, with any of the typical, influential European countries, those arrests target people who do not support the approved left-wing narrative of their government.
Through it all, Prime Minister Keir Starmer insists that “we protect [free speech] jealously and fiercely and always will,” even as he supports criminal prosecutions of people who make racist posts about migrants online. Much like the EU’s targeting of X, this does not stop at European borders: The chief of London’s Metropolitan Police service has threatened to arrest Americans for things they say or post while they are in America.
UK TAKES ANOTHER LEAP DOWN THE PATH TO SOCIALIST DECLINE
Domestically, the result of these censorship regimes is a population scared into silence, blocked from partaking in the political process in any way other than voting. While European countries deal with large, recently imported migrant populations, European citizens are threatened with prosecutions should they try to offer their opinion, resulting in emboldened populations using the might of government to break down Western principles. One such example comes from the U.K., where antisemites mobilized the government to ban Israeli fans from attending a soccer match, arguing that they couldn’t protect Israelis from being attacked by antisemites who, notably, are not afraid of the government cracking down on them the way it cracks down on comedians who offend transgender protesters.
But Europe is now constantly trying to export this censorship to America as well, threatening American citizens with arrest and American companies with fines if they don’t adhere to Europe’s authoritarian speech codes. While European leaders pander to Palestinian terrorists and make their countries reliant on Russian gas, they are also trying to stamp out the First Amendment in the U.S., wielding government power and trying to infiltrate American policymaking through nonprofit groups such as the Global Information Index. Europe is turning its back on America, free speech, and Western values, spiraling toward authoritarianism.
