by Dan Frieth, Reclaim The Net:
Europe’s regulators used its leverage to make Silicon Valley enforce their speech rules worldwide.
A newly released report from the House Judiciary Committee reveals a coordinated effort by European Union regulators to pressure major technology companies into enforcing censorship standards that extend far beyond Europe’s borders.
The findings, drawn from thousands of internal documents and communications, detail a long-running strategy to influence global content moderation policies through regulatory coercion and the threat of punishment under Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
The Committee’s latest publication, “The EU Censorship Files, Part II,” coincides with a scheduled February 4 hearing titled “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation: Part II.”
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We obtained a copy of the report for you here.
According to the materials, European officials have been meeting privately with social media companies since at least 2015 to “adapt their terms and conditions” to align with EU political priorities, including restricting certain kinds of lawful political expression in the United States.
Internal records from TikTok, then-Twitter, and other firms show that the Commission’s so-called “voluntary” DSA election guidelines were in fact treated as mandatory conditions for doing business in Europe.
Companies were told to intensify content moderation ahead of elections and report compliance measures to EU officials.
Internal Commission guidance acknowledged that platforms were not formally bound to follow the election guidelines word for word.
At the same time, the documents make clear that deviation was only acceptable if companies could demonstrate that any alternative approach achieved outcomes at least as effective as the Commission’s preferred mitigation measures.
Because the Commission retained authority to judge whether those alternatives were sufficient, the discretion functioned more as a compliance test than a genuine choice.
Platforms faced a narrow path: adopt the guidance as written or persuade the regulator that their substitute controls met an undefined but regulator-determined standard.
In Romania, declassified national intelligence documents cited in the report call into question claims of Russian interference that had prompted a court to overturn the 2024 presidential election results.
