Aggressively attacking fake news and terrorist propaganda, President Emmanuel Macron received widespread applause from across Congress.
Yet in practice, there is little consistency between U.S. and European regulations targeting online speech. That’s because the Europeans, Britain very much included, want a grand deal in which U.S. social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter are forced to withdraw content that they deem to be hateful or inspirational to extremists. To that end, the Europeans have been pressuring the U.S. government to enforce their legal orders and have U.S.-based companies remove content that they seek to have brought offline.
The issue here is that the First Amendment (rightly in my view) protects much of this speech as beyond the reach of government censorship. Correspondingly, it will be almost impossible to find consensus between the European and U.S. perspectives.
What does that mean?
Well, put simply, that U.S. social media companies will face an increasingly challenging regulatory environment in Europe. At some point, these companies may decide to simply shut up shop.
