Censorship: EU online regulation is not about protection, it is about narrative control

It has been a tumultuous end of the year for transatlantic relations. From the institutional zenith of the Union to the capitals it still controls and the editorial boards of Europe’s subsidised press, the lament is the same: Washington has grown hostile, dismissive, insufficiently “respectful”. The evidence, we are told, is overwhelming — American resistance to Brussels’ censorship regime, Washington’s peace initiatives regarding Ukraine, and the blunt language of Washington’s new National Security Strategy, which dares to describe Europe as a weakening, unreliable partner flirting with illiberalism, mass immigration, societal implosion, and irreversible decline. But nothing has been more infuriating to the Eurocrats than the sight of former Commissioner Thierry Breton — one of their own — being hit by a series of US sanctions.

As the Union’s Commissioner for the Internal Market until September 2024, Breton authored the Digital Services Act (DSA). The DSA represented a transformative step in the von der Leyen Commission’s obsession with online censorship, a quest that has since been followed by other repressive measures such as Democracy Shield and attempts to enact Chat Control. Breton’s DSA forces Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), most of which are American, to remove contents flagged as “hate speech”, a concept broad enough to include virtually anything the Establishment might want it to include. In practical terms, this has meant the abolition of online freedom of speech in Europe, with right-wing discourse disproportionately suppressed. Corporations that refuse to practice this sort of draconian suppression of basic liberties can be fined hundreds of millions of Euros: This was the case of X in early December, when the platform was forced by the EU to pay €120 million for objecting to European requests for censorship. It was that episode that immediately preceded America’s sanctions on Breton, as well as a number of British, German, and French nationals similarly involved in digital censorship. 

As much as the Eurocrats have been trying to rally anti-American fervour around the continent, reasonable Europeans stand with Washington against Brussels and its gargantuan repressive apparatus. On this, the Trump administration is right — and most Europeans know it. The real transatlantic rupture is not between Americans and Europeans, but between both and Europe’s ruling classes — a caste of bureaucrats, technocrats, and professional moralists who have perfected the art of governing without responsibility while presiding over the steady implosion of the civilisation they were supposed to defend. 

Under the Orwellian banner of “digital safety” and “democratic resilience,” the globalist European leadership has built one of the most aggressive speech-control apparatuses in the world. Britain tops the global list, with over 12,000 citizens arrested in 2023 for “social media activity”. That was twice as much as Belarus, a country whose president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, has been often described as “Europe’s last dictator”. In the same period, German authorities arrested 3,500 people for similar offences, a figure that is more than twice as high as China’s — even though China’s population is 17 times larger than Germany’s — and seven times as high as Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, another nation often derided by bien-pensant liberals as a vile dictatorship. 

Brussels no longer even pretends that regulation is about competition or consumer protection; it is about narrative control. Platforms are expected pre-emptively to silence speech that challenges the official orthodoxy on immigration, war, or climate policy — or else face ruinous fines.

Brussels has framed Washington’s refusal to play along as American hubris. It isn’t. Think of them what you will, but the Americans are under no obligation to endorse a system in which unelected commissioners act as censors-in-chief, much less when the said caste makes no secret of its disdain for the American president and the worldview he represents. Trump has no reason to enable Brussels-led algorithmic repression or the criminalisation of political dissent, particularly not at the expense of America’s own corporations. Ordinary Europeans understand this — and growing numbers, themselves the victims of the EU’s online repressions, welcome any friend ready to lend them a hand against the anti-democratic threat represented by this European Commission. Thankfully, America is that ally.

The same dynamic is at work on immigration. Europe’s demographic and cultural destabilisation has not been accidental. It is a top-down, enforced policy, even if the Establishment now shamelessly claims that the continent’s migratory submersion has been mischievously engineered by its villain of choice, Vladimir Putin. For decades, the continent’s elites have treated mass immigration as both an economic crutch and a moral indulgence, dismissing public opposition as backward, racist or illegitimate. Europeans, as an increasing number of polls and elections prove, have finally understood the dimension of the problem. When American officials warn that this trajectory is unsustainable, they are not exporting supposedly “far-right” ideas. They are stating what European voters have been shouting, often in vain, at the ballot box.

The same goes for Europe’s penchant for issuing geopolitical cheques it can’t cover. Brussels’ toxic cocktail of sanctimony and recklessness is not something the Americans are ready to put up with anymore. For too long, the EU has tried to masquerade as a global power while outsourcing its security and deindustrialising its economy. Its political class has embraced geopolitical adventurism without strategic seriousness — moralising about the world while steadily diminishing its own capacity to shape it. Washington’s impatience with this charade betrays no hostility towards our continent. Instead, it shows cold, hard realism. Particularly so when the Eurocrats try to force this path down Europe’s throat by shaming dissenting views and banning online arguments as “misinformation”. To a large degree, that is what von der Leyen’s — and Breton’s — fixation online control is about.

None of this implies that American and European interests are identical. They are not. The United States is younger, richer, more cohesive, and more resilient. Europe is aging, indebted, and fragmented. For the US, a Pacific power, China’s rise represents an urgent and immediate threat; for Europe, on the opposing tip of Eurasia, the challenge just doesn’t seem as grievous. A degree of divergence is inevitable. But Washington’s growing bluntness reflects a recognition that indulging Europe’s elites no longer serves anyone — least of all, the Europeans.

European renewal would, of course, benefit the United States. A stable, prosperous, strategically serious Europe would be a genuine partner as Washington confronts powerful adversaries such as China. This is what Trump and his strategists have in mind. But the primary beneficiaries of such a renewal would not be the US. It would be Europeans themselves — peoples trapped in systems that tax them into misery and stagnation, censor them into silence, and import instability in the name of “diversity” and similar platitudes.

Most Europeans are not offended by Washington’s warnings. They’re certainly not offended when Washington rightly punishes Europe’s own incompetent, control-obsessed, persecutory political class. When called to choose between an ally that speaks uncomfortable truths and regimes that manage decline by suppressing dissent, Europeans see things as they are: Trump’s America is not Europe’s enemy. Its own elites are.