The First Amendment is the beating heart of American democracy, giving us the right to speak, think, question, criticize, worship, and organize.  And any attempt to narrow those liberties strikes at the core of who we are and how we govern ourselves

Meanwhile and unbeknownst to most Americans a significant challenge to free speech is emerging from the European Union in the form of the European Digital Services Act (DSA.)

The Digital Services Act (DSA) was proposed in December 2020 and formally adopted by the EU in October 2022.  Its enforcement was phased in, beginning in August 2023 with the largest online platforms and search engines, before extending to most digital services across the EU in February 2024.

Warnings about DSA come from a mix of free-speech advocates, independent critics, and industry voices—mostly centered on concerns about restrictions on free expression, regulatory overreach, and impacts beyond Europe.

The EU’s first major penalty under the DSA — a €120 million fine against Elon Musk’s X — illustrates the problem.  Regulators did not point to terrorist content or criminal activity. Instead, the violations cited involved two business decisions: converting the former blue-check identity badge into a paid subscription and secondly restricting free access to platform-wide user-data tools for researchers.  Both were business decisions, not public-safety failures.

The takeaway in the eyes of the EU is that government doesn’t need to ban speech, dissent, or opinion to eliminate it; it only needs to make it too expensive to allow.   And that should alarm every American.

The Europeans tells us harsh political rhetoric, provocative commentary, and religious criticism must be restricted in order to preserve social harmony.   Contrast that with the First Amendment that protects even offensive or unpopular opinions — not because they are harmless, but because robust debate is the only safeguard against abuse of power.

The key difference is that our system trusts the public to separate truth from falsehood through open discussion whereas the EU’s Digital Services Act reverses that trust.  In Europe, faith is now placed in regulators to decide which ideas the public may safely encounter, begging the question –  who are the regulators?

The continent that gave the world communism, fascism, Nazism and socialism is now designating national regulators — called Digital Services Coordinators — and “trusted flaggers” to oversee what speech is acceptable what speech is not.

These regulator have been given ability to audit systems, access algorithms, and impose massive fines.  Keep in mind, these decisions are made not by courts or elected legislators, but by bureaucrats who will be inclined to enforce the political preferences of the authority that granted them the power to do so in the first place.

These regulators are not elected, their machinations are not transparent, and they are not bound by due-process standards, nonetheless, they have the authority to remove speech before the public ever sees it.  In essence, this is little more than government censorship outsourced to third parties with privileged access.

~ You Can’t Make This Stuff Up  ~

The examples of how ludicrous this has become in Europe keep mounting – hardly earth-shattering events, but the shear ridiculousness of them should give us pause.  In the last year, the UK, authorities were arresting up to 30 people per day for speech-related offenses, retweets, and jokes that someone found offensive.  One woman was charged under a “buffer zone” law for silently praying outside an abortion clinic; in another case, two secondary schoolgirls were reported to authorities for saying another pupil “smelt like fish.”

Censorship doesn’t always arrive with jackboots and bonfires — sometimes it’s disguised as “safety and regulation.”  And because the internet has no borders, Europe’s rules don’t stay in Europe.  When U.S. companies must comply globally to avoid massive penalties, European regulators effectively gain the power to silence Americans on American soil.

The Founders placed their faith in the people, not in governments that fear open debate.  Free speech isn’t just one liberty among many; it is the safeguard of every other right we possess.