Robin Monotti

Europe On Cusp Of Mass Secret Censorship

Corporate news media and governments applaud crackdown on free speech as EU censorship officials open office in San Francisco

by @shellenberger

French President Emmanuel Macron; Thierry Breton, EU Commissioner for Internal Market and Services; German Chancellor Olaf Scholz

In Europe, as in the United States and other free nations, people are going about their business as normal. Christmas lights illuminate city centers, where people are shopping for gifts. Students are taking final examinations and preparing to come home from the university for the holidays. And people are having debates over social and political issues, in person and online, as though nothing has changed.

But something has changed: the European Commission, the executive branch of the 27-nation European Union, is in the midst of a sweeping crackdown on free speech. Its main target is X, formerly known as Twitter.

Unlike other large social media platforms, X has refused to comply with the secret censorship demands that Europe’s top censor, Thierry Breton, EU Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, has demanded.

In response, Breton opened “formal infringement proceedings” against the company owned by Elon Musk today. They include, according to Breton, “Suspected breach of obligations to counter #IllegalContent and#Disinformation.”

Breton has not yet imposed censorship or threatened punishment of X. There is still time for Breton to back off and allow free speech to flow freely on the social media platform.

But it doesn’t look good. It looks as though the EU and X are headed toward a head-on collision, with the EU demanding secret censorship by committees of “experts” to decide what is true and not true.

X pulled out of the “voluntary” EU censorship pact in May but today said it “remains committed to complying with the Digital Services Act and is cooperating with the regulatory process.”

Whether or not X complies with EU demands, the EU appears to be headed for mass secret censorship of its citizens. X may be forced to decide whether to comply or leave Europe.

Corporate news media celebrated Europe’s crackdown on free speech. “The inquiry is perhaps the most substantial regulatory move to date against X,” enthused the New York Times, “which has seen a rise in incendiary content on the platform, according to researchers.”

Reporting by Associated Press had the tone of a class tattletale. “The EU has called out X,” wrote the reporter, “as the worst place online for fake news, and officials have exhorted owner Musk to do more to clean it up.”

It’s unclear if these reporters realize that Europe is taking a big step toward becoming as closed of a society as China. If X leaves Europe, Europeans would need to use a VPN, or virtual private network, to illegally access the website, as people in China must do to evade government censors.

The mainstream news media organizations do not mention that they, and governments, have themselves been spreading false information, including about the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Many Americans may wonder why we should care. Europe is far away. Its leaders are doing what their citizens want. And we are still protected by the First Amendment.

We should care. Though Europe is backward on the free speech issue compared to the U.S., it has historically been allied with the United States in pushing for free speech worldwide.

What’s more, as Europe falls to totalitarian speech controls, the pressure will grow for social media to censor more in the U.S. Already, 7 out of 10 Democrats, up from 4 out of 10, want the government to help Big Tech censor wrongspeak.

And Europe’s ambitions are to censor us Americans, not just its own citizens. To make its intentions clear, the European Commission even opened an office near Twitter in downtown San Francisco.

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