The US House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Wednesday on “Europe’s threat to American speech and innovation.” The panel is looking into what it calls a global censorship regime imposed by the EU under the guise of fighting “disinformation.”
The hearing took place place one day after the committee published a lengthy report detailing European Commission pressure on tech companies – first with ‘voluntary’ agreements and then with laws such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) – into demoting and removing legal but “borderline” speech. Content that went against Brussels’ position on Covid-19 and the Ukraine conflict was targeted, as was “anti-migrant,” “populist,” and “anti-elite” messaging.
By forcing platforms to censor this content for all users, the EU directly restricted the free speech rights of Americans, Republicans on the committee argue. The committee has also singled out the UK’s Online Safety Act as unfairly impacting Americans.
Witnesses at the hearing included Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan, who was arrested by British police last year for anti-transgender posts on X, and Irish lawyer Lorcan Price of Alliance Defending Freedom International, a Christian legal advocacy group.
Democrats on the committee, led by Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, brought Deepinder Singh Mayell of the American Civil Liberties Union as their witness, and focused their questioning almost entirely on the activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota.
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Under the DSA, a statement like “we need to take our country back” would be considered illegal hate speech, Price tells Rep. Russell Fry. Price thinks there’s a connection between Spain legalizing half a million illegal immigrants last week, then announcing a major crackdown on online speech.
“We’re seeing…a desperate attempt to hold together the civic discourse by using censorship and threats,” he says.
“There’s just a huge bubbling sense of frustration that could lead to some sort of societal collapse,” Linehan predicts.
Rep. Harriet Hageman agrees, adding that “the first act of a tyrant is to strip you of your right to speak, because they know that their policies and ideas cannot withstand scrutiny.”
“I think that we are seeing that repeatedly in England, in Spain, in France, in other countries.”
Price thinks that “the story of the next couple of decades will be watching Europe descend into a series of crises – demographic, economic and so on”
“It’s going to be a real tragedy, and the only solution they have is ‘don’t talk about it’.”
“Ultimately they want to ban your belief in scripture…they want to ban your ability to believe in the Bible and make it socially unacceptable to do so,” Rep. Brad Knott tells Rasanen.
“I find it grossly offensive that the resources of the state are going after wonderful people like you while crime of every sort has increased over the last number of years in your home country,” he continues. “That’s disgusting.”
Price believes that the EU is going after X “because X has decided to have the most possible free speech.”
Linehan adds that the EU’s “silencing of alternative voices” has left citizens with no means of debating issues like immigration. He warns that riots – like those on the streets of Dublin in late 2024 after a migrant stabbed multiple children – will only become more common as censorship is increased.
The Judiciary Committee’s report revealed that the EU has been coercing tech platforms into silencing a wide range of legal speech for more than a decade. Long before the DSA came into effect, platform executives were threatened with future legal action if they refused to sign up for the European Commission’s “hate speech” and “disinformation” codes of practice.
Once signed up, they were pressured to demote, remove, and ban “anti-migrant,” “populist,” and “anti-elite” content, and to censor content critical of Covid-19 restrictions and the bloc’s proxy war in Ukraine.
Read RT’s coverage of the report here, and discover how the EU used these censorship tools to purge dissent and rig an election in Romania, all while accusing Russia of doing the meddling.
Rep. Chuy Garcia dismisses the hearing as a “sham,” and “an effort to distract from the brutal assault on First Amendment rights by the Trump administration and its lackeys in Congress”
"The greatest threat to free speech and dissent is the Republican party today,” he declares, before – like all of his Democrat colleagues before him – complaining about ICE.
US Vice President JD Vance called out the EU censorship machine at last year’s Munich Security Conference, accusing “EU Commission commissars” of waging a war on free speech.
“The administration was shining a light on the nature of the problem,” Price says, adding that “this is going to get worse. You have people being arrested for praying silently in the UK, people being prosecuted for posting Bible verses, making jokes.”
Texas Rep. Troy Nehls brings the discussion back to the EU, but he’s got an issue with other regulations – namely the bloc’s corporate sustainability laws. These “nothing short of a full-blown assault on American sovereignty and energy independence.”
The mandates force Texas oil and gas companies to comply with environmental treaties never agreed to in order to supply Europe with liquefied natural gas, he explains.
Price agrees that these EU regulations are part of a wider effort by Brussels “to make the world in its image.”
Mayell has become the star witness of the hearing, as Democrats and Republicans go back and forth about whether protesters in Minnesota are exercising their Constitutional rights, or obstructing law enforcement agents.
“The feeling in Minnesota is one of disruption,” Mayell says, after multiple rounds of questioning without any mention of the EU.
“You’ve come here for a hearing on whether the First Amendment should have global reach,” Rep. Darrell Issa tells Mayell. “And instead of being here to testify about that…you go dumb!”
Issa accuses the ACLU of becoming “an arm of the Democratic party.”
Here’s Jordan’s full exchange with Mayell. By the end, Jordan complains “we can’t even get the guy from the ACLU to admit that the previous administration censored speech.”
“Did the Biden administration censor people?” Jordan asks Mayell, after Rep. Jerry Nadler and Mayell spend another five minutes condemning ICE.
Mayell refuses to answer, telling Jordan he’ll only talk about the situation in Minnesota.
There are two parallel hearings happening here. Jordan and the Republicans are sticking to the theme of censorship in Europe, while Raskin and the Democrats are focused entirely on ICE.
“We’re having another hearing about the imaginary threat to the transphobic material of Irish comedians…and we can’t seem to have a hearing about ICE agents shooting Americans in the face,” Raskin shouts, before allowing Mayell to describe the “authoritarian and violent” tactics of ICE agents in Minnesota.
Raskin’s witness is Deepinder Singh Mayell of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Minnesota branch. He focuses his statement on the ICE crackdown in his state, accusing federal agents of killing two Americans for exercising their First Amendment right to protest.
“We urge you to demand that federal forces withdraw from Minnesota now,” he tells the committee.
“Gender ideology and free speech cannot coexist,” Linehan tells the hearing.
He mentions reports of male rapists in US women’s prisons, men in women’s sports in Ireland, and the British government refusing to implement a court ruling confirming that a person’s sex is a biological reality because it’s “trans-exclusive.”
“If the British government can ignore its own Supreme Court to appease gender activists, so can yours,” he warns.
“Hate speech has no real meaning other than speech they hate.”
Price warns the committee that the US “cannot allow the EU’s rules on hate speech to be imposed on the entire digital world via the DSA.”
The DSA “is the tip of a massive censorship industrial complex,” Price tells the committee.
The EU uses the act as a tool to “eliminate free speech” worldwide, by threatening companies like X with punitive fines for failing to remove illegal content, he continues, pointing out that “in Europe, illegal content can mean calling a German politician an idiot.”
“Free speech is such a threat to the European elites that they will either cripple X with fines and investigations, break up the company, or force them to bend the knee at the altar of censorship.”
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, the most senior Democrat on the committee, is using his opening statement to attack President Donald Trump and his “masked agents” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Raskin doesn’t mention Europe once, instead recounting tales of ICE agents shooting protesters in Minnesota.
“We’ve subpoenaed foreign companies over censorship abroad, but look what’s happening here before our own eyes,” he declares, before accusing Jordan of protecting “Epstein pal” Elon Musk from Europe’s “proactive” regulations.
Finnish parliamentarian Dr. Paivi Rasanen joins Linehan and Price as a witness. Rasanen is on trial for “hate speech” over a 2019 tweet in which she accused her church of “elevating shame and sin” over its sponsorship of a gay pride parade.
The threat of legal action under the EU’s Digital Services Act directly influenced social media platforms’ terms of service. TikTok explicitly states that its current community guidelines were drafted “to achieve compliance with the Digital Services Act.”
“And what did TikTok censor in the US to placate the Europeans?” Jordan asks. “TikTok censored true information and political speech on topics like immigration in the US because of European censorship demands.”
Committee Chairman Jim Jordan opens the hearing by reading former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton’s 2024 letter to Elon Musk, threatening Musk with legal action for broadcasting an interview with Donald Trump – which took place on American soil – on X.
“Here’s someone from the European Commission writing an American citizen, about an American company, and about the American presidential election,” Jordan states.
“This hearing is about whether American speech is being silenced by regulators across the pond in Brussels, and the truth is, that’s happening.”