While the Trump administration has focused the bulk of its immigration policy on deportations, it seems the real foreign threat to our rights is still covertly streaming across our border digitally.
A newly released report from the House Judiciary Committee alleges that the European Commission has spent more than a decade pressuring U.S.-based technology firms to alter their content moderation policies in ways that affect speech well beyond the European Union’s borders.
The report, titled “The Foreign Censorship Threat, Part II: Europe’s Decade-Long Campaign to Censor the Global Internet and How it Harms American Speech in the United States,” outlines what committee Republicans describe as a sustained effort by EU regulators to influence how major platforms police political and cultural content globally, including content created and consumed by Americans.
According to the report, internal documents obtained through congressional subpoenas show that EU officials have held more than 100 closed-door meetings with major social media companies since at least 2020. In those meetings, regulators urged platforms to adopt stricter moderation rules that would apply worldwide, not solely within EU jurisdictions.
On the third page of the report, committee staff members list categories of content that EU officials sought to see more aggressively policed. These include “populist rhetoric,” “anti-government or anti-EU content,” “anti-elite content,” “political satire,” “anti-migrant and anti-refugee sentiment,” “Islamophobic content,” “anti-LGBTIQ content,” and material associated with “meme subculture.”
Needless to say, government censoring such speech in the U.S. is unconstitutional. And while companies have their own free speech rights and can set content moderation standards as they see fit, such broad suppression of political topics flies in the norm of the free speech culture most Americans expect in our public discourse.
It seems the EU is carrying out these activities under its Digital Services Act, which it’s been implementing over the past couple of years. The law focuses primarily on so-called “Very Large Online Platforms,” based on the premise that their market size creates “systemic risks” to markets and society. EU regulators are empowered to levy significant fines for noncompliance, including penalties tied to a company’s global revenue.
House Judiciary Committee Republicans argue that the effects of these policies are not confined to Europe, though. For efficiency purposes, platforms often adopt a single global moderation standard rather than region-specific rules, so changes made to satisfy EU regulators can directly affect speech in the U.S. The report points to content moderation decisions involving COVID-19 policy, immigration, and transgender issues as examples of political speech that was restricted in the states following EU pressure.
In December 2025, the European Commission fined X nearly 6% of its worldwide revenue. The report describes the penalty as a response to the platform’s approach to content moderation and frames it as a signal to other companies about the costs of noncompliance.
The efforts being undertaken under the DSA are not happening in a vacuum. They’re part of a broader regulatory push that argues “big is bad” and that market prominence in and of itself invites government intervention. This is, of course, anticapitalist nonsense, the kind we’ve seen pushed, albeit without success, by socialists such as former President Joe Biden’s FTC chairwoman, Lina Khan. In actuality, a company’s size is almost always indicative of the fact that it is offering products consumers love and rely on, but the populist contingencies in both parties have often been persuaded by such arguments simply because they hate corporations and the rich.
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The EU’s efforts also coincide with ongoing policy fights in Congress over legislation such as the Kids Online Safety Act. This bill has found populist support among both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, and its implementation would look eerily similar to the goals of the EU. This bill creates a “duty of care” for tech platforms to prevent or mitigate certain harms to minors online, including eating disorders, suicidal behavior, and harassment. Needless to say, these are extraordinarily broad categories, and it would be virtually impossible for tech platforms to remove all content that might trace back to these problems. Ultimately, this is a very big censorship bill meant to silence discourse on everything from gun rights to gay rights — cloaked under the guise of “protecting children,” per usual.
For now, the House Judiciary Committee says its investigation into foreign censorship efforts is ongoing. Committee members have indicated they plan to continue examining how foreign regulatory regimes may influence American speech through indirect pressure on U.S.-based companies. But until some action is taken, it is abundantly clear that our free speech rights are under attack both domestically and by foreign forces.