Speak now or forever hold your…

Duct Tape Across the Sea

For most of American history, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans have been our fortress moats, protecting our civil liberties, fundamental freedoms, and free speech rights almost to the point of invincibility, one notable exception aside.

That is to say, we could sit back on the beach, play in the sand, and watch foreign governments jail their citizens for heretical speech without fearing that they could swim ashore and do the same to us. They could—and did—shutter newspapers and execute satirists. But here, nah. The dictators could not control what we Americans said or did.

Not that our own home-grown wannabe dictators didn’t try to do exactly that from within during the pandemic. Every questioned government narrative could bring the Wrath of Anthony Fauci down upon you. But, as Americans are wont to do, we soon set our own house right and cleaned it by sweeping Fauci out the door. Our speech was safe, even if Fauci was still somehow free to roam the streets.

Suddenly, though, over the past few years, a new and unique threat has begun to stalk us from beyond the Atlantic tides. On the other side of the pond, Europe was indeed planning—and implementing—an invasion, primarily aimed at conquering our voice and expression and thought, and subjecting us to the dismal, guilt-ridden European way.

They planned nothing less than the end of our republic as we know it.

Most of us don’t realize the existential danger Europe poses. While vast oceans could protect us from a land invasion, they cannot stop the technology of digital censors, and that is just what the European Union has become. Virtually every European government is in the process of taking itself down with suicidal globalist policies that disdain free speech—Italy is one exception—and the sad news is, they aim to take us down with them.

And just how? Specifically, with their content moderation policies on social media. Everybody knows this by now, but, just in case, it’s accurate and apt to switch out the word ‘moderation’ for ‘censorship.’ In Europe, if they don’t like what you are saying, they aim to moderate it out of existence.

In Munich last year, at the 2025 Munich Security Conference, Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a scathing speech warning of the dangers of following such a historically hapless path.

“Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent,” Vance reminded the conferees. “And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not and thank God they lost the Cold War.”

They lost, Vance said in his extraordinarily significant speech, because they neither valued nor respected all the extraordinary blessings of liberty, the freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, to invent, and to build.

“As it turns out, you can’t mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can’t force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe,” he said. “And we believe those things are certainly connected. And unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners.”

Vance said he recoiled when he gazed at what was happening on the once-free continent.

“I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be, ‘hateful content,’” he said. “Or to this very country [Germany], where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of ‘combating misogyny on the internet, a day of action.’”

There was Sweden, Vance observed.

“Two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder,” he said. “And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant ‘a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.’”

That was and is a dire situation the vice president described, and now a newly released congressional investigative report fills in many of the details. “Europe’s Decade-Long Campaign To Censor the Global Internet” is an interim staff report by the House Judiciary Committee, released on February 3, that explains how the European Commission (EC) has pressured American technology companies to censor speech globally, including speech by Americans within the United States.

According to the report, the EC, the executive arm of the European Union (EU), purposefully weaponized the Digital Services Act (DSA), a law regulating online speech, to impose global online censorship requirements on political speech, humor, and satire.

“Since then, pursuant to subpoena, technology companies have produced to the committee thousands of internal documents and communications with the European Commission,” the report stated. “These documents show the extent—and success—of the European Commission’s global censorship campaign.”

And just how successful was said campaign?

“In more than 100 closed-door meetings since at least 2020, the European Commission … repeatedly pressured platforms to change their globally applicable content moderation rules to more aggressively censor content and directly infringe on Americans’ online speech in the United States,” the staff report stated. “In response to this pressure campaign, major social media platforms censored true information and political speech about some of the most important policy debates in recent history—including the Covid-19 pandemic, mass migration, and transgender issues, claiming it was combating hate speech and disinformation.”

The thing is, social media companies do not maintain a different rulebook for every nation. They can’t, and that’s how the EU can serve up its shared dish of oppression. Platforms operate under unified global policies because country-by-country moderation requires almost logistically impossible tracking of user locations.

“Critically, platform content moderation rules are—and effectively must be—global in scope,” the report stated.

So, when European regulators pressure platforms to restrict certain categories of speech, the restrictions follow Americans home. They sail on the ship with us right across that vast sea. That matters because Europe regulates speech very differently from the United States.

American law protects offensive speech, satire, political dissent, and harsh criticism of institutions. European law often treats those same categories as harmful and hateful. Indeed, as the report states, internal documents show that in all those meetings with tech companies regulators urged moderation—that is to say, censoring—of “populist rhetoric”; “anti-government content”; “political satire”; “anti-refugee/immigrant sentiment”; “anti-LGBTIQ . . . content”; and and even “meme subculture,” whatever that is.

But guess what? Those are not fringe expressions in the United States. Here we call that not hate but debate.

The European Union, in all its woke folly, has long wanted to censor its population’s speech, not to mention that of our own, precisely because, unless they do, we might poison their well of purely noncritical thinking. We might plant a revolutionary thought, or even just a different one.

Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which took effect in 2023, finally gave the enforcers the teeth they had wanted for so many years. Under that law, companies can be fined up to 6 percent of their global revenue for not removing certain content. They can also be banned entirely from the European market.

As the House report observes, the commission used that authority in December 2025, issuing a major fine against Elon Musk’s X on an absurd pretext:

“The European Commission fined X €120 million—slightly below the statutory cap of six percent of global revenue—for alleged violations including ‘misappropriating’ the meaning of blue checkmarks by changing how they were awarded.”

LOL. That’s like saying a manufacturer misappropriated the very definition of a car by changing the way it offered financing to its customers.

What’s more, under the DSA’s researcher access provision, X must hand over American data to researchers around the world—all because of a European law, the report stated, and the European Commission threatened to ban X in the EU if it did not comply with its censorship demands:

“The European Commission’s decision to fine X is chilling in at least two distinct ways: it penalizes X for its global defense of free speech, and it claims the authority to enforce the DSA globally,” the report stated. “It is everything the committee has warned about for well over a year.”

Over time, the congressional investigation found, other companies changed their worldwide rules to comply: “For example, in 2023, TikTok began editing its global Community Guidelines for the express purpose of ‘achiev[ing] compliance with the Digital Services Act.’”

The new censorship rules went into effect in 2024, the committee reported.

“In response to the European Commission’s decade-long censorship campaign, TikTok instituted new rules censoring ‘marginalizing speech,’ including ‘coded statements’ that ‘normalize inequitable treatment,’ ‘misinformation that undermines public trust,’ ‘media presented out of context’ and ‘misrepresent[ed] authoritative information,’” the report stated. “These standards are inherently subjective and easily weaponized against the European Commission’s political opposition.”

The fact is, the staff reported, internal documents show that TikTok systematically censored true information worldwide to comply with the European Commission’s censorship demands under the DSA.

The consequences were global. The report documents the removal of American content—including debates over Covid policy—after European intervention. In one case, regulators demanded that an American documentary be removed, and multiple platforms complied worldwide.

“A year later, European Commission regulators pressured platforms to remove an American documentary film about vaccines, demanding that YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok ‘check . . . internally’ and respond ‘in writing’ why the film had not been censored,” the report stated. “YouTube responded to the European Commission promptly, stating that it ‘removed’ the film in question after the European Commission raised the issue. Put plainly, the European Commission treated American debates around vaccination as within the scope of the European Commission’s regulatory authority.”

For the first time, at least in the democratic world, the internet became subject to extraterritorial regulation.

Election Speech, Transatlantic Reach

The pressure extended well beyond health debates. European officials sought information about moderation policies ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election and warned platforms about hosting a live interview of Donald Trump by Elon Musk.

“Most infamously, then-EU Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton sent a letter to X owner Elon Musk in August 2024 ahead of Musk’a interview with President Donald Trump,” the report stated.

Now if that’s not election meddling, what is? Beyond election integrity, though, the horse’s head they put in tech’s bed could still whinny very clearly: Comply with our global rules or face penalties in European markets.

For American companies dependent on global access, the incentive structure was obvious.

Washington Responds, Sort of

All of this is clearly still going on—see the fine of Musk just this past December—and the United States has begun to respond, in ways that may or may not be effective. In December, the State Department and secretary of state Marco Rubio announced visa restrictions on foreign actors who pressured platforms to censor American speech.

“The State Department is taking decisive action against five individuals who have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose,” Rubio said. “These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states—in each case targeting American speakers and American companies. As such, I have determined that their entry, presence, or activities in the United States have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

The sanctioned and banned totalitarians included Breton as well as researchers from the Global Disinformation Index and HateAid. And it wouldn’t just be five, Rubio said.

“Based on these determinations, the Department has taken steps to impose visa restrictions on agents of the global censorship-industrial complex who, as a result, will be generally barred from entering the United States,” he said. “Further, based on the foreign policy determination, the Department of Homeland Security can initiate removal proceedings against certain individuals pursuant to INA section 237(a)(4)(C), which renders such individuals deportable.”

The EU was guilty of violating American sovereignty, Rubio said bluntly.

“Extraterritorial overreach by foreign censors targeting American speech is no exception,” he said. “The State Department stands ready and willing to expand today’s list if other foreign actors do not reverse course.”

Meanwhile, officials are reportedly developing a portal—Freedom.gov—designed to allow users overseas to access content restricted in their countries using U.S. routing technology. According to Reuters, the portal would allow users in Europe and elsewhere to access content banned by their governments, including alleged hate speech.

In effect, if Europe is going to invade our shores with an army of digital censors, America may soon respond by exporting the First Amendment digitally. It’s like tunneling in behind enemy lines to free the prisoners, in this case, speech.

So far, there’s been no official announcement, and opponents—some within the administration—are worried this might offend Europe, but then, self-censoring out of fear and weakness is just another form of censorship, so isn’t that the point?

A bigger question is whether any of these counter tactics are enough to blunt the weapons that Europe is firing at us.

The Risk at Home

There is a second tension running parallel to the foreign one.

While Washington objects to foreign censorship, policymakers in both parties have proposed their own domestic online restrictions, most recently regarding minors.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly for protecting children from online predators and whatever else is swimming in the swamp, and, heck, some adults could use some oversight, too. Still, adults can make their own beds, not so the children. Regulation is needed, but we have to tread carefully lest we slide down the slippery slope of slapping down European censorship only to turn around and censor ourselves.

Most immediately, calls for blanket bans on social media use for minors under the age of 13, or 16 in some cases, are gaining traction, but it is not good policy, and it would almost certainly encounter constitutional headwinds. While the government may regulate certain content for minors, courts have held that minors retain First Amendment protections and that speech restrictions must be narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest.

One less restrictive alternative—though not out of the litigation woods, either—is to require parental consent for minors’ social media accounts. Parents are, or should be, in charge of their children’s education, as well as their social activities, and those intersect wickedly on social media. Only parents have the knowledge needed to provide the proper guardrails and oversight for that. Only parents know if their 14-year-old son or 15-year-old daughter is mature and developed enough for a social media account and able to undertake parentally regulated activity.

It is the parents’ job to make those choices, not the government’s.

Frankly, much of the regulation of internet speech for minors should fall to the states anyway. President Trump was rumored to be mulling a federal teen social media ban this past week. If he is, he should stop. For the federal government to tell Wisconsin how to regulate the internet for minors is as bad as Brussels telling Washington how to do it.

A number of states have acted, or are acting, for better or for worse, and in Wisconsin, a Speaker’s Task Force on Protecting Kids, led by state Rep. Lindee Brill (R-Sheboygan Falls), released its report in January and offered up some refreshingly sensible, if tweak-able suggestions, especially concerning social media accounts for minors.

The recommendations encompass 12 bills covering a lot of territory, from prohibiting wireless communication devices during the school day to warning labels on explicit content, restrictions on children using companion chatbots, required safety features for minors, and, most important, suggested regulations for social media accounts.

Instead of banning social media for minors, the panel proposed a targeted platform. The core proposal would require platforms to estimate user age using certain protocols—and to regularly update those estimates—and obtain verifiable parental consent for minors’ accounts. Other provisions would require default private settings for minors; limits on addictive features like infinite scrolling; restrictions on targeted advertising to minors; provisions for civil enforcement and parental lawsuits; and requiring termination of an account if verifiable parental consent is not obtained.

Crucially, the recommendations would regulate platform conduct rather than speech content. It governs design, not ideas.

Globally, the raging and ongoing fight over speech is not about whether harmful content exists online. It does. It is about who decides what counts as harmful. Europe’s approach focuses on regulating categories of expression and allowable content within those categories. America’s constitutional tradition focuses on regulating conduct rather than content—fraud, coercion, exploitation—while leaving expression free and unbound, with parents making the ultimate judgments for their minor children.

The Wisconsin task force’s recommendations land firmly in the second camp, and they may determine whether the laws, if enacted, would survive court challenges and whether the United States preserves its distinct speech tradition in a globalized internet.

In the end, the future of American speech may depend less on Washington confronting Brussels and more on whether states can craft policies precise enough to protect children without granting anyone, foreign or domestic, the power to tread on our constitutional freedoms.