The European Commission’s coercion of Big Tech to globally censor disfavored narratives goes much further than previously thought, according to a House Judiciary Committee interim staff report released Tuesday that tees up Wednesday’s hearing featuring an Irish comedian who was arrested in London for criticizing gender ideology while visiting the U.S.”Nonpublic” documents given to the committee by companies under subpoena show more than 100 “closed-door meetings” between the European Union’s executive arm and tech platforms since at least 2020, the year before the Biden administration started its spree of pressuring platforms to censor supposed misinformation, GOP committee staff said.
The EC’s supposedly “‘voluntary’ and ‘consensus’-driven regulatory initiatives are neither voluntary nor consensus-driven,” resulting in Big Tech suppressing “true information and political speech” about COVID-19, mass migration and gender identity under the banner of “combating hate speech and disinformation,” the committee said.
One particularly farcical section, from a 2023 handbook by the EC-created EU Internet Forum, shows tech companies were expected to moderate content from “populist rhetoric” and “anti-elite” sentiment to “political satire” and “meme subculture.”
The schemes predate 2022’s Digital Services Act by seven years, according to a report timeline that starts in the late Obama and early first-term Trump administrations with the EUIF, officially voluntary codes on combating “illegal hate speech” and disinformation, and Germany’s law predating the DSA, which required “global removals of content” illegal only under German law.
“From the very beginning of the EU’s censorship campaign, senior EU leadership envisioned a comprehensive digital censorship law giving the European Commission complete online narrative control,” the report says. “European politicians and regulators were explicit about this objective, particularly when meeting with platforms directly.”
Witnesses for the committee’s hearing Wednesday include Graham Linehan, the creator of internationally beloved TV shows Father Ted and The IT Crowd, and Finnish member of Parliament Päivi Räsänen, who has been prosecuted repeatedly for sharing a Bible verse and is now awaiting a final verdict from Finland’s Supreme Court.
Just as Heathrow Airport police played into the committee’s hands by arresting Linehan shortly before House Judiciary’s last European censorship hearing, Paris police fit the mold of the committee’s narrative by raiding X’s local office Tuesday and summoning owner Elon Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino for “voluntary interviews” April 20.
Musk discredited the raid, which was officially premised on how its algorithm recommends content to users and gathers data, as emblematic of politically motivated and baseless attacks on free speech by U.K. and EU authorities.
The EC fined X €120 million, or 6% of its global revenue, in the first such DSA action in December, “in obvious retaliation for its protection of free speech around the globe,” the committee said Tuesday.
Days earlier House Judiciary published the full, unreleased commission decision against X, also obtained via subpoena, which showed the EC’s specific objections and basis for each financial penalty, including that X doesn’t let researchers worldwide automatically scrape its data, stores past ads in a spreadsheet and made the blue checkmark a paid feature.
“Distribution only on a ‘Need to know’ basis – Do not read or carry openly in public places,” says the cover page of the 183-page EC decision, marked “sensitive” and dated Dec. 5. “Must be stored securely and encrypted in storage and transmission. Destroy copies by shredding or secure deletion,” it says, linking to detailed destruction instructions.
