The US GOP’s disinformation on Europe’s Digital Rules
The Republican-led US House Judiciary Committee’s interim staff report, The Foreign Censorship Threat: How the European Union’s Digital Services Act Compels Global Censorship and Infringes on American Free Speech, presents itself as a defence of free speech. In reality, it defends the ability of major online platforms to avoid responsibility for the content they amplify. By calling the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) “foreign censorship,” the report portrays democratic safeguards as an authoritarian threat. This framing is not a misunderstanding, but a political tactic that seeks to maintain an unregulated online environment where disinformation and harassment can persist without meaningful checks.
The DSA was created through public consultation, parliamentary negotiation, and rigorous legal refinement. It operates under judicial oversight from the European Court of Justice. Its rules set out obligations for transparency, due diligence, and risk assessment. These measures are designed to ensure companies serving European citizens and residents cannot exploit harmful content for commercial gain without facing accountability.
The committee’s description of the DSA as “digital fascism” and a “foreign threat to US speech” distorts both its intent and its mechanisms. The act’s enforcement is anchored in fundamental rights and subject to legal tests that examine necessity and proportionality. Trying to depict democratic oversight of a corporation as political censorship is a deliberate distortion. It twists the meaning of rights and free speech to protect those who want the rules of the digital sphere set by tech companies rather than democratic institutions. By describing the DSA’s due diligence and transparency requirements as “compelled moderation of lawful speech,” the report deliberately erases the distinction between commercial content governance and government suppression of dissent.
The lack of federal standards for platform transparency, due diligence, and risk assessment in the United States creates space for organized disinformation campaigns and targeted harassment to persist with little public accountability. In this regulatory gap, the rules of the digital sphere are largely set by corporate fiat rather than democratic oversight. The report’s rejection of the DSA indicates a Republican intention to sustain this permissive status quo. The report also ignores the DSA’s grounding in judicial oversight, due process, and proportionality; key safeguards that contradict its portrayal of an unaccountable European bureaucracy.
The transatlantic relationship should focus on cooperative solutions to shared challenges. While federal action in the United States remains stalled, some state-level laws such as California’s Social Media Transparency Act and New York’s Hateful Conduct Law mirror key aspects of the DSA’s transparency and accountability model, albeit on a more limited scale. The DSA is not a blueprint to be applied wholesale in the United States, but it offers approaches to platform oversight that align with democratic governance.
Framing the DSA as “censorship” benefits those who gain from an absence of democratic rules in digital spaces. That absence does not protect freedom; instead, it creates an information environment shaped by private entities and outlaws with no public accountability. Europe has chosen the path of accountability. The United States still has an opportunity to do the same.
Chris Kremidas-Courtney is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the European Policy Centre.
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