The right to free speech is a crucial one that is only honored in the United States. Bureaucrats in Europe and elsewhere are trying to impose their own restrictions on American speech and their American counterparts are, unfortunately, keen on joining them.
The problems have been most evident with the treatment of X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter that was purchased by Elon Musk. His purchase wrestled control of the website away from the censorious American liberal mindset, full of “safety teams” and executives who were receptive to censorship requests from government officials. Musk, his own contradictions aside, replaced Twitter’s censorious regime with one that allows for far freer political discussions.
More free speech? That is unacceptable to the average European bureaucrat. In a public letter, the European Union’s commissioner for internal markets threatened X’s ability to operate in Europe unless Musk addresses the “potential risks” to the EU posed by "content that may incite violence, hate and racism” regarding political debates or elections. He also made it clear that formal proceedings were already taking place with X around “the effectiveness of the measures taken to combat disinformation.”
France is also taking up a war on free speech targeting X, alongside other social media sites. This comes after the Olympic controversy surrounding whether Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who was competing against female boxers, is a biological male. Khelif filed a criminal complaint in France, and the French Office for the Fight against Crimes against Humanity and Hate Crime opened 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.”
The complaint was filed against social media platforms instead of named individuals, which means, thanks to French law, French investigators get to pick who they target in this investigation so long as their posts are on one of the named social media sites. In the case of X, that includes Musk, famed author J.K. Rowling, and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), who may be a few months away from becoming the vice president.
These censorship threats are not exclusive to Europe, as X has seen in its dealings with the Brazilian government. They also aren’t exclusive to X, with British police dedicating police officers to “scouring social media” to identify and arrest people who commit “online violence” with their words. This kind of thing is not surprising in France, Brazil, or the United Kingdom, because freedom of speech does not exist in any real form outside of the U.S.
The same left-wing forces behind these censorship efforts abroad also exist in the U.S. You will regularly hear Democratic politicians, such as Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), the party's vice presidential nominee, falsely assert that “there’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation and hate speech.” Those keywords, “misinformation” and “hate speech,” are reserved for anything Democrats don’t like, and thus many Democratic politicians want them to be First Amendment carve-outs.
Who would decide what constitutes “misinformation” and “hate speech”? Why, none other than liberal bureaucrats who support the Democratic Party. Case in point: the Department of Homeland Security’s outrageous plan for a “Disinformation Governance Board.” The board’s proposed director, Nina Jankowicz, was herself a disinformation peddler when it came to partisan politics, promoting the discredited Steele dossier to damage former President Donald Trump while dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation.
You are then expected to believe that a DHS “Disinformation Board” run by a liberal partisan was never going to censor anything. No, instead it was going to prevent mass shootings, which stem from “things people see on the internet” that “we would be looking to address,” according to Jankowicz. Just as the French or British may argue, the concept of the DHS Disinformation Governance Board is that online speech must be monitored by agencies with policing power, or else people will be “unsafe.”
Similarly, entities backed by the State Department have given funding to the “Global Disinformation Index,” a British organization that keeps a list of conservative or right-wing outlets to blacklist them from advertisers. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center is part of this censorship effort. After coming into existence to counter propaganda from the Islamic State group and al-Qaida, the agency is now helping censors target conservative news outlets, including the Washington Examiner.
The cultural decay around free speech principles is similarly concerning. It is how you end up with roving bands of left-wing activists shutting down speeches or events they don’t like at college campuses, and doing so with the support of diversity, equity, and inclusion officials and other university bureaucrats, even at prestigious academic universities such as Stanford. This cultural decay has led around 53% of people to argue that the First Amendment is too broad.
Democrats continue to feed the fire that is eating away at America’s free speech principles. Every comment that is labeled “misinformation” or “hate speech,” whether intentional or not, invokes an implicit suggestion that people should be prevented from speaking it. On college campuses, “hate speech” is the popular accusation from left-wing activists who wish to shut down speakers and events, alleging that their lives are put in danger simply by people they don’t like speaking. Such an accusation is the kind of thing that invokes police powers in the U.K.
“Misinformation” or “disinformation,” meanwhile, are the default censorship calls from politicians and bureaucrats. They complain when politicians or pundits or people who are simply influential, such as podcaster Joe Rogan, are allowed to speak freely, without the weight of the liberal media industry bearing down on them, at best, or the weight of the federal government, at worst. Liberal media themselves contribute to that latter category as well, with the Washington Post’s Cleve Wootson Jr. asking the White House what role it had in “stopping” or “intervening in” Musk having a conversation with Trump on X.
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That is a journalist for a liberal media outlet practically begging an administration that is flirting with censorship to become more censorious. It is a world that British police and French prosecutors would love nothing more than to see, as the world’s only bastion of free speech falls closer and closer to the arrogant safetyism of European left-wingers who believe they should be in charge of who can say what.
The Constitution offers a legal barrier that prevents this, but it is only as strong as the resolve of the society that is tasked with enforcing it. As the years go by and left-wing censors continue their war of attrition on free speech, the U.S. moves closer to the reality that Europeans face, where free speech does not exist in any real way and where law enforcement is chomping at the bit to find digital speech offenses that it can turn into criminal cases.
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