Thread by @JudiciaryGOP

🚨The EU Censorship Files, Part II

For more than a year, the Committee has been warning that European censorship laws threaten U.S. free speech online.

Now, we have proof: Big Tech is censoring Americans’ speech in the U.S., including true information, to comply with Europe’s far-reaching Digital Services Act.

In February 2025, the Committee subpoenaed Big Tech to understand how foreign censorship laws are hindering Americans’ free speech rights.

Thousands of internal Big Tech documents and communications with European regulators, released today for the first time, paint a clear picture: Europe has led a successful decade-long campaign to achieve global online narrative control.

It began as early as 2015, when the @EU_Commission created “codes” and “forums” through which it could pressure platforms to censor speech more aggressively.

These censorship codes and forums were supposed to be “voluntary” and operate on “consensus”—but they weren’t, and they didn’t.

From the very beginning, the Commission used them to pressure platforms to censor political speech and other legal content.

In private, companies state the obvious: the Commission sets the agenda, forces consensus, and platforms “don’t really have a choice” whether to comply.

The Commission’s target was clear: companies’ “Community Guidelines” that set the boundaries for what can be discussed in the global town square—a key pressure point for governments to censor content at scale.

Put simply, the boundaries of debate on political topics like mass migration, men in women’s sports, and more are set by community guidelines.

When governments pressure platforms to change their community guidelines, they are changing what Americans are allowed to post *in the United States* or anywhere else.

And they effectively must be global in scope. Country-by-country content moderation is a significant privacy threat—in addition to being ineffective and costly.

This censorship campaign started long before the DSA.

As early as 2020, EU President @vonderleyen and Vice President @VeraJourova told platforms to change their rules and take down content questioning established narratives about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine.

By 2022, the Commission had formalized its pressure campaign.

In more than 90 meetings organized under the Disinformation Code between 2022 and 2024, the Commission pressured platforms to change their global content moderation rules and censor more content.

And once the DSA was in effect, the Commission warned platforms that they had to undertake “continuous review of community guidelines” to comply.

The pressure campaign worked.

In 2024, TikTok changed its global Community Guidelines to “compl[y] with the Digital Services Act.”

TikTok now censors true information worldwide, as well as vague categories of First Amendment-protected content like “marginalizing speech.”

That’s right: because of Europe’s censorship law, TikTok censors true information in the United States.

It’s no surprise that the Commission is specifically focused on censorship of U.S. content.

During the pandemic, it pressured platforms to censor U.S. content about COVID-19 vaccines for kids.

Later, ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Vice President @VeraJourova flew to California to meet with platforms about their censorship measures for U.S. political content.

When asked whether the Europeans were flying to California to discuss EU and US elections or “stay mostly EU focused,” the Europeans made clear: EU AND US elections were to be on the agenda.

The clearest form of the Commission meddling in U.S. elections was Commissioner @ThierryBreton’s letter threatening X with regulatory retaliation for hosting a live interview with President Trump in the United States in August 2024.

Read our letter to Commissioner Breton here:

It turns out interfering with elections is standard fare for the European Commission.

Ahead of at least EIGHT elections across six European countries since 2023, the Commission met with platforms to pressure them to censor political speech in the days before the vote.

Internal platform documents show that after these meetings, TikTok censored “common” conservative political claims about transgender issues, such as “there are only two genders.”

The Commission’s DSA Election Guidelines state that platforms must “adapt their terms and conditions” to more aggressively censor so-called “disinformation” ahead of elections.

They are supposed to be “voluntary” best practices. But behind closed doors, a top DSA enforcer told platforms that they are mandatory.

And new, nonpublic documents cast doubt on the allegations of Russian interference that led a Romanian court to undo the country’s 2024 presidential election results.

TikTok told the European Commission that it found “no evidence” of a coordinated a Russian campaign to boost winning candidate Calin Georgescu—the key allegation made by Romanian authorities—and informed authorities of this finding.

Since then, public reporting has shown that the alleged Russian TikTok campaign was actually funded by another Romanian political party.

The Commission’s decade-long censorship campaign shows no sign of slowing down.

Last week, the Committee released the Commission’s secret decision that fined X €140 million for defending free speech and threatened to ban X in the EU.

Read the thread here:

To sum it all up: In its comprehensive 10-year censorship campaign, the @EU_Commission has

— Successfully pressured social media platforms to censor true information in the United States;

— Targeted U.S. political content for censorship; and

— Interfered in elections across Europe.

The Committee continues to investigate foreign threats to American free speech.

Read the Committee’s full report here: judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subs…

And tune in tomorrow at 10am, when victims of the European censorship campaign will testify before the Committee.

WATCH LIVE: youtube.com/live/vLHJJ_wjA…