How would you like America to abide by European censorship rules? Brussels’s censorship machine could change what Americans can say online.

American Thinker ^ | 10 Mar, 2026 | Wendi Strauch Mahoney

[MtnClimber]

According to a 160-page interim staff report released on Feb. 3, 2026, nonpublic documents produced to the House Judiciary Committee under subpoena reveal that the European Commission successfully pressured social media platforms to change their global content moderation rules, directly harming American online speech in the U.S. The report suggests that the European Commission has been working for a decade to censor speech.

The European Commission says platforms have already changed their systems and interfaces under the DSA. The law requires easier reporting of illegal content, priority handling for “trusted flaggers,” and statements of reasons for moderation decisions, as well as broader risk-management obligations for very large platforms. These obligations go beyond obviously illegal content and extend into recommender systems; terms and conditions; and “systemic risks” tied to civic discourse, elections, and public security. The Commission has used that authority to investigate X’s recommender systems and Grok; to press TikTok for information about elections, media pluralism, and civic discourse; and to pursue Meta over notice-and-appeal mechanisms and researcher access.

The House Judiciary Committee’s focus sharpened in August 2024 after then–E.U. commissioner Thierry Breton threatened X with regulatory retaliation under the Digital Services Act for hosting a live interview with President Trump ahead of the 2024 election. From there, the committee subpoenaed ten major tech companies. It later sought records from outside groups, including Access Now and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and also requested documents from Stanford after discovering a 2025 event involving foreign regulators and censorship coordination. The committee has received tens of thousands of pages of nonpublic platform records and regulator communications.

The report’s appendix lays out an extensive exhibit trail divided into Internal Platform Exhibits, External Platform Exhibits, E.U. Internet Forum Exhibits, Hate Speech Code Exhibits, and Disinformation Code Exhibits.

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TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: 2020; covid; covid19; leftism; stolenelection; wendistrauchmahoney

[bobbo666]

F@#$ EU and all the ‘tards who think they represent Europe. Treat them as you would hamas and their supporters.

[Carriage Hill]

F-U-EU!

[Varda]

Public utilities are for basic services (water, electricity, ) Internet connections may fall under that but social media platforms definitely don't .
X is a big social media platform that doesn't need the government to tell it how to operate. People don't like it, go somewhere else.

[FLT-bird]

The airwaves they operate under are public. The internet was created as a DARPA project via public funding. The only thing the government would be telling them to do is respect people’s constitutional rights - not the dictates of the EU.

Its the EU that’s trying to FORCE its censorship standards on everyone. I think the US Government should push back and make it clear that Big Tech platforms may not impose those standards on Americans.

What I’m advocating is not for the government to dictate to them - exactly the opposite.

[Varda]

Sorry no. Constitutional rights are protections against the government not protections from the restrictions that might be imposed by private business owners. All public utilities are used by private parties. Those parties don’t give up their right to restrict the use of that property by using utilities.

Companies that may feel squeezed by the EU are going to have to choose how to operate. If they choose poorly, their users are free to use other platforms or to create one themselves.

BTW - remembering friends who worked on DARPA. Feeling old.....

[FLT-bird]

But these aren’t just private entities. They use public airwaves. They used public research, etc. The courts in the past have ruled that a mall (ie private property) could not exclude people who wanted to hold political protests on their property because they were effectively the town square.

It was the same in company towns - they too could not exclude people from protesting, signing petitions, etc on their property even though they were private companies because they owned the whole town and thus could not exclude people from the town square.

In the modern era, social media is the digital town square.

[Varda]

Using public airwaves has never required any entity using them to allow any kind of speech (TV stations). I don't agree with the courts allowing abuse of property for protests either. A mall is not a town.
Just because a court allowed this doesn't make it good. Public takings of private property is something I consider an abuse of power by the government.
This cure is worse than the disease.

[FLT-bird]

You may not agree with it....but there is over a century of legal precedent that would allow for it.

And in this case, we’re not talking about imposing censorship. We’re talking about preventing censorship required by a foreign government. Otherwise, the social media companies will abide by the EU standard globally because its much easier/cheaper to do that than have an EU version of their platform and an American or global version.

[minnesota_bound]

It would be like reddit.com and yahoo.com and abc.com and etc. etc.