February 5, 2026 - 3:45pm
European foreign policy experts were aghast when JD Vance lambasted the state of free speech on the continent at last year’s Munich Security Conference. It was not just that they disagreed with the US Vice President’s criticism. The whole speech was, in their eyes, a bizarre divergence from foreign policy, which is what they were there to talk about. So why use this forum to bring it up?
Simply, it represents a distinct substantive issue in transatlantic relations. But, unlike the Greenland dispute, there’s no foreseeable solution.
Earlier this week, the debate returned to the news. French officials raided the X offices in Paris as part of an investigation into suspected offenses, including unlawful data extraction and child sexual abuse material. The same day, a UK privacy watchdog opened an inquiry into Grok after the recent scandal over sexualized images on the platform. In the US Congress, however, Republicans have launched a report portraying Europe as a hotbed of censorship which limits free speech through so-called community guidelines.
The Republican majority House Judiciary Committee issued a long sequence of X posts, entitled “The European Censorship Files”, which outlined the main points of the report. It was the culmination of a year-long investigation into how the European Union pressures social media companies to change content guidelines based on their own domestic laws. Inside were claims that Ursula von der Leyen had personally pushed companies to censor certain views of Covid-19 vaccines, as well as evidence of pressure from others to censor views on gender. The focus for them was not what happens in Europe, but instead how US digital platforms are complying with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
Yesterday, there was a Congressional hearing by the House Judiciary Committee on the issue of online free speech, featuring testimony from, among others, the Irish comedian Graham Linehan. He told the committee that America should sanction Britain for free speech violations, after he was arrested at Heathrow in September of last year for online comments made about trans people. There is a great deal of anti-Europeanism in the US, just as there’s anti-Americanism in Europe.
It’s hard to see a solution to this conflict on the immediate horizon. The DSA is the law in Europe, and to back down would require a complete overhaul of the architecture of online free speech legislation. The solution would have to come from the tech companies. They could offer a separate version for the European market, in which offending material would be removed or in some way hidden. Those who want to see this content would then have to use a VPN.
Alternatively, the US providers could choose to relocate outside of the EU and offer their services from abroad. The reason EU legislation applies to them is because of their subsidiaries and branches in Europe. But this isn’t a simple process, and relocation would lead to a loss of revenue in the short run. Since the Europeans have no alternative providers of their own, US companies are in a relatively strong position. This is why the force of regulation by European countries is ultimately linked to the presence of domestic suppliers.
For as long as this conflict persists, it is very much a foreign policy story. Really, it’s more important than Greenland, an issue which is actually about whether the US has sovereign control of its military bases on the island. That is not settled and requires some nifty diplomacy. On the other hand, it’s hard to see how the two sides can reach a middle ground over the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act.
The White House is reportedly up in arms over proposed German legislation to force streaming services including Netflix and Amazon to invest part of their revenues in the country. The German embassy in America has dispatched alarming letters to the government with the note that Donald Trump would retaliate with tariffs if such a law were passed. It’s clear that online free speech is becoming a major point of friction in the transatlantic alliance, and could ultimately be the thing which drives a wedge between the two powers.
This is an edited version of an article which first appeared in the Eurointelligence newsletter.
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