Report from Reuters
In Brief – The US State Department is reported to be developing a government-run website hosted at freedom.gov to give international internet users, including in Europe, access to social media content that is available in the United States but banned by their government. In the EU, this includes material classified as hate speech and terrorist propaganda under local laws. The project is said to be headed by Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers. The Trump Administration, which has made free speech a centerpiece of its foreign policy, frames European social media content moderation rules as tools of political suppression, especially through EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA). In past years, the US government has funded commercial tools such as VPNs to support freer internet access in countries like China, Iran, Russia, Cuba, and Myanmar. A State Department spokesperson said that the US has no censorship-circumvention program targeting Europe specifically but added that digital freedom is a priority for the State Department.
Context – Many leading conservative populists in the US have built alliances in Europe and see the EU dominated by cultural and policy ecosystems akin to America’s progressive strongholds. Most conservative leaders believe that the top digital companies are products of the Bay Area’s progressive monoculture and discriminated against them as part of a US-Western European policy ecosystem of like-minded think tanks, advocacy groups, academics, researchers, foundations, media outlets, and government agencies. Undersecretary Rogers has said that the two purposes of the DSA are to “extort and extract from American businesses” and “suppress speech flagged by left-wing NGOs”, and in January, the US State Department issued visa bans on five Europeans, including from NGOs that work to counter so-called online hate and disinformation. Meanwhile, at an AI policy conference in India, French President Emmanuel Macron said the free speech defense of US social media platforms is “pure bullshit.”