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The European Union (EU) pressured U.S. tech platforms to censor Americans’ online speech on topics including the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, according to a U.S. House of Representatives interim report published last week.
The House Judiciary Committee published the 160-page report, which French newspaper Le Monde described as “scathing.”
The report accused the EU of “trying to make an end-run around the First Amendment and censor US speech that does not align with its preferred narratives.”
According to the report, EU officials have held over 100 closed-door meetings with representatives of social media platforms since 2020. They pressured tech firms to apply EU speech laws, including the Digital Services Act (DSA), to U.S. content.
The report described these actions as an effort to “censor the global internet.”
“Though often framed as combating so-called ‘hate speech’ or ‘disinformation,’ the European Commission worked to censor true information and political speech about some of the most important policy debates in recent history — including the COVID-19 pandemic,” the report states.
The report noted that the EU targeted political satire, “populist rhetoric,” “anti-government/anti-EU” postings and “meme subculture.”
Xavier Azalbert, editor of France Soir, which previously reported on the EU’s speech restrictions, said the report’s findings are “not a surprise at all.”
“There are several dangers to freedom of speech in general and American liberties that arise from the EU’s actions on political and health issues,” Azalbert said.
He said that EU policies attempt to influence public opinion on people like U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “who is consistently portrayed as a conspiracy theorist or antivaxxer without providing him the opportunity to answer.”
Independent journalist Paul D. Thacker told The Defender the report shows that “any American can be targeted for running afoul of these vague, ridiculous EU laws designed to control what people can say and think.”
EU, other governments ‘fear of loss of control’ over key narratives
The report, released Feb. 3, was followed the next day by a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the threat the EU poses to U.S. speech.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), committee chair, said the hearing was “about whether American speech in the United States is being silenced by regulators across the pond in Brussels. The truth is that’s happening.”
In October 2025, as part of the same House investigation, Jordan revealed that EU officials participated in a “secret roundtable” at Stanford University earlier that year. The roundtable was “designed to encourage and facilitate censorship compliance with regulators from Australia, Brazil, the EU and the UK.”
In a post on X, Elon Musk wrote, “Tyrants love censorship.”
Tyrants love censorship https://t.co/BeYMrAeZKt
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2026
Musk’s X platform (formerly Twitter) has faced regulatory scrutiny in Europe. In December 2025, the EU fined X 120 million euros (approximately $139.9 million) for “transparency” violations under the DSA.
Last week, French police raided X’s Paris office as part of an investigation into allegations that X and its AI chatbot, Grok, recommended sexual deepfakes and other explicit content to users.
EU officials rebuked the report’s allegations. EU digital affairs spokesperson Thomas Regnier called them “Pure nonsense. Completely unfounded.” He said, “Freedom of expression is a fundamental right in Europe.”
Last year, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio imposed visa restrictions on several Europeans, including former EU Commissioner for Internal Market and Services Thierry Breton. Breton, described as the “mastermind” of the DSA, helped oversee its enactment.
Attorney W. Scott McCollough said the EU is attempting to censor Americans’ speech because it doesn’t want its citizens exposed to the wider range of opinions that U.S. free speech protections generally allow.
The EU “wants to very much limit discourse to only approved topics,” McCollough said. “The only way they can do that is to regulate the service providers that offer these platforms.”
McCollough said the EU fears losing control over key narratives. He noted that countries like the U.K. and Australia enacted similar policies for the same reasons.
“They’re scared. This kind of reaction is really representative of fear of loss of control,” McCollough said.
Biden administration ‘very much’ went along with EU on censorship
The report included copies of emails from EU officials urging social media platforms to regulate speech about COVID-19 and vaccines. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and former vice president Věra Jourová played a key role in such requests.
In an Oct. 30, 2020, email to social media platforms labelled as a “kind request” to respond to “disinformation with regard to vaccines and testing,” stated that it “will be essential in the next stages to pay special attention to the vaccination aspect.”
The report said this was part of a broader pattern of EU pressure on tech platforms during the pandemic, which included:
- An April 2020 call between the European Commission and TikTok on the importance of “addressing Corona disinformation.”
- The June 2020 launch, by von der Leyen, of a “COVID-19 disinformation monitoring program.” The program required tech platforms to regularly report their efforts to “demote” and “remove” content the European Commission considered false, and to “promote authoritative content.”
- A November 2020 call with a social media platform, during which Jourová said “vaccines will be our new focus on disinformation on covid.”
- A January 2021 request by the European Commission that platforms engage in “a stronger focus” on “measures to remove and/or demote dis- or misinformation related to COVID-19 vaccines.”
- A February 2021 meeting during which Jourová asked representatives of Facebook, Google, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube about their efforts to censor vaccine-related content, including “manifestly toxic content.”
- A December 2021 European Commission policy obliging social media platforms to demonetize creators of content deemed to be “misinformation.”
The report said that such EU actions are “precisely what the First Amendment forbids U.S. government officials from doing: targeting specific speech for censorship based on their personal belief about the speech’s truthfulness or utility.”
“The EU has embarked on a fight against free speech for several years, leveraging as many tools as possible to control narratives,” Azalbert said. “What the Judiciary Committee analysis shows is that this has been going on for a long time.”
According to EUobserver, the EU’s efforts exemplify the “Brussels effect,” in which policies enacted by the Brussels, Belgium-based EU have a global impact, because platforms typically opt to “apply a single set of content policies worldwide.”
McCollough said the Biden administration was “in lockstep” with the EU’s efforts.
“The prior U.S. administration, in particular, was very much going along with all of this,” McCollough said. “They put the same kind of direct and indirect pressure on these platforms.”
It “would be unfair to speak about the EU’s war on free speech without speaking about the way the Biden administration coerced some of the same media in curbing certain narratives since 2020,” Azalbert said.
Last year, the European Court of Justice ruled that the EU broke the law when it blocked the release of text messages between the commission’s president and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, who were negotiating the EU’s purchase of COVID-19 vaccine doses.
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‘Victims of European censorship’ testified before the House this week
Last week’s House hearing included the testimony of three witnesses described by Jordan as “victims of European censorship,” and opposing testimony by a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Irish comedian Graham Linehan, who was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport last year for posts on X critical of gender ideology, said “people from all walks of life are being silenced.” He called for “new whistleblower protections for the digital age.”
Finnish member of Parliament Päivi Räsänen, who faces prosecution on hate speech charges for quoting the New Testament in a social media post, testified that censorship “is one of the greatest existential threats” in Europe today.
The ACLU’s testimony did not mention the EU. It focused instead on “un-American … attacks on our rights” by the Trump administration in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the U.S.
Related articles in The Defender
- Stanford Under Investigation for Secret Scheme to Help Foreign Governments Censor Americans
- EU Broke Law By Refusing to Turn Over Text Messages Related to Pfizer COVID Vaccine Contracts
- ‘Unacceptable and Wrong’: Google Admits to Censoring COVID Content Under Pressure From Biden Administration
- Zuckerberg: White House Would ‘Scream’ and ‘Curse’ at Facebook Staff to Remove COVID Content
- State Department Colluded With Social Media to Censor Content, New Twitter Files Show
- Twitter Files: U.S. Taxpayers ‘Unwittingly Financing the Growth and Power of a Censorship-Industrial Complex’
