Deutsche Welle: US and EU Battle over Online Censorship

By Matt Pearson

Recent revelations from news agency Reuters that the US is “developing an online portal that will enable people in Europe and elsewhere to see content banned by their governments including hate speech and terrorist propaganda,” as a method to counter what it sees as excessive censorship in other parts of the world is troubling to the EU.

Even if the plans appear to have been delayed and detail is thin, the US position is clear. Sarah Rogers, the US undersecretary for public diplomacy, is spearheading the Trump administration’s charge on this issue and has consistently attacked EU censorship and free speech provisions.

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EU Digital Services Act under fire from US

Rogers has been an outspoken critic of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), saying on X that its two purposes are to “one, extort and extract from American businesses and two, suppress speech flagged by left-wing NGOs.”

Jacob Mchangama, the Danish founder of The Future of Free Speech think tank in the US shares Rogers’ distaste for the DSA — which the EU says was set up to “create a digital space that respects citizens and consumers’ fundamental rights” — but sees her position as hypocritical.

“I agree with her on her criticism of the DSA,” he told DW. “But the State Department has itself sought to deport people in the US for having wrong opinions, is using AI to scan the social media profiles of foreigners and has scaled back its promotion of democracy and dissenters in authoritarian states. I would be happy if this was a more consistent position and if she was critical of her own government. Of course, she can’t be because her job is to sell the Trump administration.”

‘Erosion of free speech’ in Europe

Mchangama added that the US government has “no credibility as a global champion of free speech” but is equally critical of how the EU is dealing with censoring information.

“No European democratic government should claim sovereignty to determine what kind of information people access,” he said. “Unfortunately, I think there’s this tendency, as a result of Trump’s actions, for Europeans reflexively to then say, ‘well, whatever our democratic governments do to oppose the Trump administration is at defense of the democracy.’ And I just don’t think that holds up.”

The DSA and other EU measures to restrict online content have eroded free speech within the union, according to Mchangama, who believes this is the wrong way to defend democracy amid rising authoritarianism.

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