Washington is slamming Brussels for censorship - and coming from such a master manipulator, it should be taken seriously

The Committee on the Judiciary of the US House of Representatives has issued an important report. Its title is an officialese mouthful: "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." Yet even if the report's almost 160 pages may be a little dry, they pack a powerful and well-deserved punch. A punch directed at the EU.

In essence, the House Judiciary report shows how the EU, in particular its happily unelected and power-grabbing apparatchik rulers in the European Commission, have used the pretext of fighting online "disinformation" and "hate speech" to suppress legitimate speech, information, and debate. The report also details how this policy of behind-the-scenes (so much for public accountability) manipulation and censorship has already been deployed to finagle six national elections (so much for sovereignty, democracy, and the rule-of-law).

And that is not counting the fiasco that ensued when former EU Commissar -  pardon, Commissioner, of course -  Thierry Breton tried to pressure X into suppressing an interview with Donald Trump. Or the less well-known scandal of another high-ranking EU bureaucrat - a Commission Vice President, no less - telling TikTok representatives she wanted to discuss both EU-related matters (sort of her turf) and US elections (boundaries, please?).

In Europe itself, according to the Judiciary Committee report, "the European Commission has pressured platforms to censor content ahead of national elections in Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, Moldova, Romania, and Ireland." And note, please, that one of these countries, Moldova, is not even in the EU.

In addition, the EU has been taking care not only of national elections but itself, too. TikTok alone, for instance, "reported to the European Commission that it censored over 45,000 pieces of alleged misinformation," including clear political speech on topics including "migration, climate change, security and defense, and LGBTQ rights" ahead of the 2024 EU elections.

The nature of this EU interference has been bluntly biased. In the Slovak elections of 2023, for instance, content censored as "hate speech" included: "There are only two genders," "Children cannot be trans," "We need to stop the sexualization of young people/children." Whatever you think about these statements, it is absurd to label them "hate speech." To do so means suppressing legitimate speech and betrays bad faith as well as the intent to deceive and manipulate.

The key mechanism for this decade-long influence campaign was almost a hundred meetings - that we now know about - between representatives of the EU and of major social media companies, such as YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter (now X). But these meetings were only the tip of the iceberg. During the EU's push to bias the public debate on Covid-19 and vaccinations alone, there were over "100 opportunities for the European Commission to pressure platforms to modify their content moderation policies and identify which online narratives on vaccines and other important political topics should be censored." After Covid-19, another milestone of escalating manipulation was, as the report also notes, the Ukraine War, that is, the war between the West and Russia via Ukraine. Who would have thought?

In general, the Judiciary Committee report finds that the EU's censorship strategy has been regrettably successful. Although initially sold as based on "consensus" and "voluntary" participation, it was really aiming at coercion from the beginning - a very EU way of doing things, by the way - even before it became openly compulsory, a development marked by the Digital Services Act (DSA) passed in 2022 and entering into force in 2023.

Apart from generic Centrist ideologies, the systematic manipulation efforts of the EU Commission are also pursuing its very own selfish interests. Consider, for instance, this snippet from the Judiciary Committee report: A 2023 EU "handbook... for use by tech companies when moderating" lawful, non-violative speech has listed as targets "populist rhetoric," "anti-government/anti-EU" content, "anti-elite" content, "political satire," "anti-migrants and Islamophobic content," "anti-refugee/immigrant sentiment," "anti-LGBTIQ... content," and "meme subculture."

First, note that - as with the EU's ongoing campaign to stifle legitimate dissent by the use of life-wrecking "sanctions" against individuals (read: deliberate devastation of their economic and social life) - the speech in the EU's crosshairs is neither explicitly illegal nor "violative." This is a shameless strategy explicitly designed to suppress speech that does not break any laws.

And then, "meme subculture"? Including cats, must we assume? Why not just shut down the whole internet then?

But let's disregard the absurd comprehensiveness of this bureaucrat's wet-dream wish-list of "zip-it-peasants!" orders. Let's focus on a serious issue. In principle, you do not have to agree but you can argue that protecting migrants, Muslim believers, and LGBTIQ people from truly hateful and incendiary verbal attacks - calls for violence, for instance - is an aim worth suppressing some extreme speech. Never mind even that, in EU reality, such policies are virtually certain to be misused to suppress legitimate if politically inconvenient statements. Such restrictions, moreover, would hardly be applied to Israelis and their trolls when they run interference for the Gaza genocide and other Israeli crimes.

But targeting "populist rhetoric?" What is that even supposed to mean? Every statement not coming from or agreeable to the establishment in politics, media, "think-tank" indoctrination outfits, and academia? And "anti-government/anti-EU?" Frankly: What?!? There's no lack of clarity here: anything, clearly, principally opposing and displeasing those that rule us is VERBOTEN! Welcome to a censorship regime that, at least, is refreshingly clear about its petty, sulking egotism.

Likewise for "anti-elite." Oh, no! We must have been uppity about our touchy betters! And the pice de resistance (or rather of submission): No jokes! "Political satire" also VERBOTEN! Indeed, how dare we laugh at the likes of, say, Kaja "I will be very smart" Kallas or Annalena "360 Degrees" Baerbock?

In short, this type of suppression isn't even about potentially plausible principles. Instead, we see a prickly, vain power "elite" protecting itself from perfectly legitimate forms of opposition and criticism.

Yet there are, of course, layers of dark irony here. First, here we have an American House of Representatives committee, that is, a part of the US establishment - together with its "mainstream media" information war outlets the single largest and most contaminating source of propaganda on the planet - going after EU censorship and manipulation. Mote, beam, eye.

The American motivation is transparent and - surprise, surprise - dishonest: The Judiciary Committee's report seeks to undermine other countries' national sovereignty by attacking in general what it calls "country-by-country moderation" of US-based social media platforms as "a significant privacy threat." That may well be the case. Yet, in reality, what Washington feels threatened by is obviously, not being able to wield a monopoly on censorship and manipulation to promote its own rapacious geopolitics abroad, including regime change subversion. Or as the report puts it disingenuously, content moderation rules "must be global," read: American-only.

Perhaps the single most important political argument advanced by the Judiciary Committee's report is that the EU's pervasive suppression of free speech has affected not only its own citizens - or would that be subjects, really? - but those of the US as well, because the EU Commission "specifically sought to censor American content" and in addition, as a side-effect of the fact that the EU's "censorship campaign" is "global." True, and, as they say, it takes a well-established global villain to know an upstart one.

The irony here will be obvious to those who have followed the brutal US (and British) hounding of publisher and journalist Julian Assange. There, US prosecutors invented the bizarre - and very American - theory that the US has a right to go after foreign citizens (Australian) in foreign countries (the UK) on the basis of American laws, but that those foreign citizens prosecuted abroad under American laws do not enjoy even the flimsy protections granted by the American constitution.

Wrap your head around that, if you can: "I, the US," Uncle Sam says, "can prosecute you, foreigner, wherever and whenever I want with my laws. But you, foreigner, have no right to use those same American laws to defend yourself. My law applies to you only so I can punish you, but not so that you can defend yourself. Because, you see, you are not a citizen."

And now, the same US is all worked up because the EU has found a way to make its laws inconvenience Americans. Let's just say, those two, Washington and Brussels, really richly deserve each other. One day, maybe they'll work out their respective kinks regarding logic and consistency when it comes to defining jurisdictions.

This is, of course, moreover, a branch of the same US government whose presidency has also massively censored its extremely unwilling release of merely one half of the Epstein Files, a trove of documents for which the world, not just the US, needs full transparency. Yet as they incriminate swathes of the American establishment and its cronies in the West and also expose massive Israeli subversion, the Epstein Files remain very "moderated," if that is the word.

Finally, let's not be sentimental about the American social media companies either. They also practice their own regimes of "boosting" and "deboosting" content, that is, of manipulation and censorship, all of them, including, of course Elon Musk's X. They may differ in degree but none have permitted unbiased and open reflection of the worst crime of the twenty-first century, the Gaza genocide committed by Israel and large parts of the West together.

And yet, notwithstanding Washington's hypocritical motivations and its own awful record as well as the social media companies' own manipulations, the new US report does have a solid case about the EU's censorship and manipulation regime and plenty of good evidence, which is probably why mainstream European media hardly mention it. Ironically, that too is merely illustrating the larger point: The EU has a big problem with freedom of speech and the spaces in which to practice it. If its bureaucrat barons dislike the uncouth US indictment, they only have themselves to blame.