To our European friends, the Trump administration’s campaign against censorship might come off as bewildering, or even intrusive. Why is the US State Department criticising European speech regulation, putting pressure on governments in countries that are, by any conventional measure, democratic allies? And why has the administration imposed visa restrictions on European officials and activists for facilitating censorship?
There is a difference in how the United States and much of Europe understand freedom of speech. The Trump administration’s State Department believes free expression is “a cornerstone of American global leadership”, and that it is essential not only to political liberty but to economic stability, innovation, prosperity and the free exchange of ideas. Largely due to the inherent transnational nature of the internet, European regulation of speech is not just a purely domestic matter, but something that reaches directly into the American public square.
The First Amendment, which we acknowledge is uniquely American, establishes a rather high barrier against government deciding which ideas are acceptable. That difference has become particularly important online. One of the best parts of the internet is that it is not neatly divided into American speech and European speech. It is one public square, connecting us and enabling countless opportunities to learn and understand one another. But this inherently means that regulations imposed by European governments affect what the American public sees, posts, shares or reads in Washington, Texas or California. This direct effect is the first reason the United States is paying attention.
Enter the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which stretches far broader than regulating criminal material online. It establishes obligations for large platforms concerning content moderation, systemic risks, advertising, transparency, data access and the relationship between platforms and entities designated to identify problematic content. Because of the global nature of the companies it regulates, it can have consequences well beyond Europe’s geographical boundaries.
On December 5, 2025, the European Commission fined X €120 million under transparency obligations of the DSA, the first non-compliance decision adopted since the regulation entered into force. Americans can understand the European Commission’s perspective: this is regulation of powerful platforms in the public interest. From Washington’s perspective, though, the larger question is what happens when regulatory systems create demands or incentives for American platforms to remove American speech because European governments have defined that speech as problematic.
European policymakers are not wrong to point to genuine problems online: coordinated foreign influence, child exploitation, incitement, fraud and deliberately fabricated information can cause real harm. The DSA contains some good measures to combat this. The disagreement is over where the line should be drawn, and who should have the authority to draw it.
A government does not necessarily need to order a platform to start deleting posts. It can create a regulatory environment in which the safest business decision is to delete anything remotely controversial in order to avoid the possibility of fines or other punishments. This is particularly significant when European rules reach beyond European borders. Britain’s Online Safety Act 2023 provides another example where extensive obligations on online services concerning illegal and harmful content, including age-assurance requirements for certain material, bleed into American audiences and content creators. Whatever the merits of individual provisions, the basic problem for Americans is straightforward: British law can affect American companies serving an international internet. That makes it entirely reasonable for Washington to ask whether European governments are imposing restrictions on American companies that affect the speech of American citizens.
Aside from the direct impacts on Americans, the free speech crusade has its merits in the nature of our bonds with our European partners; as allies that pride ourselves on common values and shared roots. Yet, one might ask, “if the United States cares about free speech, why pressure Europe when countries such as Iran, Russia, Venezuela or authoritarian states in the Middle East have vastly worse records?”
As stated by members of the administration, such as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Sarah Rogers, the answer is that American foreign policy considers both a country’s condition and its trajectory. The American concern is that some of our closest friends are moving away from the freedoms that have long anchored our shared civilisation. The recent examples of speech policing in the UK, Germany and Finland, for instance, point away from freedom: the arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport on September 1, 2025, the search ordered on the Berlin home of media theorist Norbert Bolz over a post on X and the conviction of Päivi Räsänen in Finland by the Supreme Court on March 26, 2026. An analysis cited by the Free Speech Union reported police forces in England and Wales made almost 10,000 arrests in 2024 in cases involving communications offences and social-media posts, following an estimated 13,800 in 2023. The British authorities have prosecuted fathers like Adam Smith-Connor for praying silently outside an abortion clinic and banned remigration activists like Martin Sellner from entering the country. These punishments are not trivial: They are alarming to us in the way they would be alarming at home. As allies who share not only strategic security and defence interests but deep historical and cultural roots, Americans have a legitimate interest in encouraging Europe to preserve a freedom that is exceptional and good in the modern world today.
The Trump administration has defended the legality of speech it itself dislikes, including pro-Palestinian expression. The point of free speech is precisely that governments do not get to protect only the opinions they find respectable. The United States is therefore entitled to ask whether the values underpinning the free world are actually being preserved.
Its critique of Europe is not to dismiss the very same issues we face at home. In many ways its foreign campaign against censorship grew out of its domestic confrontation with the federal government’s previous involvement in content moderation. The President has ordered the government to investigate and end federal censorship and pressure on private platforms through Executive Order 14149, signed on January 20, 2025. The administration has also sought to dismantle government programmes that it believes blurred the line between combating foreign propaganda and suppressing domestic political viewpoints, closing the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference hub, formerly the Global Engagement Center, in April 2025.
When the State Department imposed visa restrictions on five European figures who participated in online censorship on December 23, 2025, it was seen by many in Europe as an intrusion and insult. One of the affected individuals, former European commissioner Thierry Breton, responded on X saying: “To our American friends: Censorship isn’t where you think it is.” But if foreign officials use regulatory power to influence what Americans can say or see on American platforms, it means they have entered the American public square. European nations, or the European Commission, need not adopt the First Amendment to understand the American concern. But Europeans should recognise why Washington is no longer willing to treat speech regulation as a purely domestic issue. The internet has erased the boundaries of the past and it is not going anywhere. The West cannot call itself the free world while steadily narrowing the range of ideas its citizens are permitted to express. This tension between America and our European friends is much larger than Donald Trump, Elon Musk or any individual European regulation.
Writing in 2012, French philosopher Pierre Manent stated: “The progress of freedom in the West once consisted of measuring speech by the standard of visible actions; political correctness consists of measuring speech by the standard of invisible intentions.”
Manent goes on to explain: “The divorce between action and speech helps explain the new role of political correctness. Because speech is no longer tied to a possible and plausible action against which we might measure it, many take speech as seriously as if it were itself an action and consider speech they do not like equivalent to the worst possible action.”
In other words, the distinction between words and actions has increasingly been weakened. Speech is judged not only by whether it leads to a concrete unlawful action, but by what it supposedly reveals about a person’s intentions or what social harm it might cause. Once words themselves are treated as a form of action, the range of speech that can be considered dangerous becomes almost limitless.
The trajectory we fear our European friends are on is one in which certain categories of speech are increasingly treated as socially harmful in themselves. “Hate speech”, “disinformation”, “misinformation” and “harmful content” become grounds for intervention even when there is no direct, identifiable victim and no imminent unlawful action.
The underlying philosophy of the Trump administration’s free speech crusade is straightforward: expose what governments and institutions are doing, give citizens access to competing information, and let people decide what to believe. Entrust them with this responsibility.
