Brussels Is Preparing to Regulate Speech – in America

Päivi Maria Räsänen is the former Minister of the Interior of Finland, former chairwoman of the Christian Democrat Party, and in perennial danger of being sent to prison in her country because she dares to espouse traditional views about sexuality and abortion.
 
You might agree with Räsänen or loathe her views, but if she were an American, the First Amendment would afford her absolute protection from state prosecutors who want to imprison her for “hate speech.” And yet she remains in danger of going to prison in Finland for calmly and politely espousing traditional Biblically based views. She has long been a target for prosecution under Finnish law, which five U.S. senators in 2022 called a “secular blasphemy law” because it targets Orthodox Jews and Muslims, as well as traditional Christians.
 
So far, you might be thinking, okay, that’s a bad precedent for free speech in Northern Europe. Now what’s on Netflix tonight?
 
But you should care. You might not be all that invested in opposing the speech censorship regime in Europe, but that censorship regime is now preparing to try to regulate your speech here in the United States.
 
This is happening because at the start of this month, the European Union’s Digital Services Act’s (DSA) voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation transformed into an actual law that stamps out disapproved state speech. The threat this law, designed to “protect democracy” and promote “safety,” poses to speech in America was laid out by Thomas O’Reilly in National Review. He sets out Europe’s new requirements and their consequences that should concern any speech-loving American, regardless of your beliefs.
 

• Large social media platforms are required to remove ill-defined “illegal content” that is out of compliance not only with the regulations of Brussels, but also the laws of member states. This could be tricky. In Finland, making a traditional religious criticism of same-sex relations can be treated as a crime. In Hungary, the government tried to outlaw a peaceful LGBTQ march. Speech in Europe might easily become a game of Twister.

 

• In a move reminiscent of the now defunct system of Facebook “fact-checkers,” European speech will be subject to the approval of what O’Reilly describes as “EU-approved nongovernmental organizations and ‘trusted flaggers,’ which will identify content for removal.”

 

• Platforms that fail to remove content quickly enough will be subject to fines of up to 6 percent of global revenues. Even for a Big Tech social media company – most of which are U.S. companies – enough such fines could result in a financial death penalty. Why should Europe be able to fine the global revenues of American companies?

O’Reilly writes:

• “Alarmingly, the DSA does not matter for freedom of expression just in Europe – it threatens to censor the speech of Americans, too. There is the possibility that platforms will set their global content-moderation policies to EU standards, which would regulate online speech across the whole world in line with the regulation. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation exported EU data privacy standards worldwide and, in a similar way, the Digital Services Act could impose European speech controls beyond the continent.”

O’Reilly adds that the extraterritorial impact of the DSA “is that it applies to any platform accessed within the EU, regardless of where it is based. Online American speech could be geo-blocked within the EU if it is judged to be ‘disinformation’ or ‘hateful’ …”

• Rep. Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to the European Commission in January noting that “because many social media platforms generally maintain one set of content moderation policies that they apply globally, restrictive censorship laws like the DSA may set de facto global censorship standards … Indeed, the establishment of a global censorship law appears to be the DSA’s very purpose.”

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If this strikes you as science-fiction, consider the action of a high European Union official Thierry Breton, who last year threatened social media company X with severe legal consequences if it did not pull down a post. And what was the offending post? It was Elon Musk’s interview with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
 
Whatever your views about Donald Trump, it was a mind-blowing act of censorship to try to use state power to “protect” Europeans from an interview with a man who was a major party nominee in the United States and at the threshold of the presidency. That is representative of the hall of mirrors that European law has become, in which consumers are protected from exposure to world leaders and traditional views held by the Pope… all coming soon, to the American social media platform app in the digital device in your hand.

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