'Nonpublic' documents show global scope of Europe's censorship apparatus: House GOP probe

The European Commission's coercion of Big Tech to globally censor disfavored narratives goes much further than previously thought, according to a House Judiciary Committee interim staff report released Tuesday that tees up Wednesday's hearing featuring an Irish comedian who was arrested in London for criticizing gender ideology while visiting the U.S.

"Nonpublic" documents given to the committee by companies under subpoena show more than 100 "closed-door meetings" between the European Union's executive arm and tech platforms since at least 2020, the year before the Biden administration started its spree of pressuring platforms to censor supposed misinformation, GOP committee staff said.

The EC's supposedly "'voluntary' and 'consensus'-driven regulatory initiatives are neither voluntary nor consensus-driven," resulting in Big Tech suppressing "true information and political speech" about COVID-19, mass migration and gender identity under the banner of "combating hate speech and disinformation," the committee said.

One particularly farcical section, from a 2023 handbook by the EC-created EU Internet Forum, shows tech companies were expected to moderate content from "populist rhetoric" and "anti-elite" sentiment to "political satire" and "meme subculture."

The schemes predate 2022's Digital Services Act by seven years, according to a report timeline that starts in the late Obama and early first-term Trump administrations with the EUIF, officially voluntary codes on combating "illegal hate speech" and disinformation, and Germany's law predating the DSA, which required "global removals of content" illegal only under German law.

"From the very beginning of the EU’s censorship campaign, senior EU leadership envisioned a comprehensive digital censorship law giving the European Commission complete online narrative control," the report says. "European politicians and regulators were explicit about this objective, particularly when meeting with platforms directly."

Witnesses for the committee's hearing Wednesday include Graham Linehan, the creator of internationally beloved TV shows Father Ted and The IT Crowd, and Finnish member of Parliament Päivi Räsänen, who has been prosecuted repeatedly for sharing a Bible verse and is now awaiting a final verdict from Finland's Supreme Court.

Just as Heathrow Airport police played into the committee's hands by arresting Linehan shortly before House Judiciary's last European censorship hearing, Paris police fit the mold of the committee's narrative by raiding X's local office Tuesday and summoning owner Elon Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino for "voluntary interviews" April 20.

Musk discredited the raid, which was officially premised on how its algorithm recommends content to users and gathers data, as emblematic of politically motivated and baseless attacks on free speech by U.K. and EU authorities.

The EC fined X €120 million, or 6% of its global revenue, in the first such DSA action in December, "in obvious retaliation for its protection of free speech around the globe," the committee said Tuesday.

Days earlier House Judiciary published the full, unreleased commission decision against X, also obtained via subpoena, which showed the EC's specific objections and basis for each financial penalty, including that X doesn't let researchers worldwide automatically scrape its data, stores past ads in a spreadsheet and made the blue checkmark a paid feature.

"Distribution only on a ‘Need to know’ basis - Do not read or carry openly in public places," says the cover page of the 183-page EC decision, marked "sensitive" and dated Dec. 5. "Must be stored securely and encrypted in storage and transmission. Destroy copies by shredding or secure deletion," it says, linking to detailed destruction instructions.

Threat to Musk ahead of Trump livestream was not "unapproved freelance"

On the eve of the DSA taking effect, the EC updated the 2018 disinformation code to require platforms to participate in a "task force," further split into subgroups for subjects including "fact-checking, elections, and demonetization of conservative news outlets," the report says, apparently referring to the "ad scrutiny" subgroup for the last one.

The subgroups collectively met more than 90 times from late 2022 to 2024, bringing together platforms, EC regulators and "censorious civil society organizations." Regulators repeatedly interrogated platforms about "policy changes" related to "fighting disinformation" in the dozen-plus meetings of just the crisis response subgroup, the report says.

Various forums touching on content moderation, such as pertaining to hate speech and disinformation, met more than 100 times, the report says, pointing to a June 22, 2023, email thread among Google staff.

It shows the participants acknowledging that participation wasn't really optional and that they had limited ability to affect the agenda.

Referring to the EC's generative AI subgroup, one Googler told colleagues, "I assume we want to join (we don't really have a choice)" and asked if Google should at least co-chair it. Another responded that "co-chairs set the agenda under (strong) impetus" from the EC, and "consensus" in scare quotes "can be heavily pressed by the EC if they disagree with where it's going."

Taking advantage of the weaknesses of country-specific content moderation — namely privacy risks and ineffectiveness — the EC acted as the world's global internet cop by pressuring platforms to adopt their preferred moderation policies, GOP staff said, citing Oct. 30, 2020 emails between staff for the EC and TikTok. (Many footnotes cite TikTok.)

EU President Ursula von der Leyen and Vice President Věra Jourová even approved EC queries to TikTok on how it planned to update its terms of service and "promotion/demotion" of content ahead of the COVID vaccine rollout, the report says, noting TikTok will soon be "majority-American" owned under President Trump's negotiated deal.

A "characteristic" Dec. 14, 2023 agenda from the crisis response subgroup's dozen-plus meetings shows the EC goading platforms including YouTube and TikTok to share "new developments and actions related to fighting disinformation" about the Ukraine war and COVID, such as "policy changes," the report said, emphasizing actions.

The DSA's implementation perfected the years of pressure, as shown by TikTok's revisions to its community guidelines that prohibit unambiguously legal speech in the U.S., such as "marginalizing speech" that includes “coded statements," "misinformation that undermines public trust" and even "misrepresent[ed] authoritative information."

The executive summary of TikTok's changes specified the updates were "mainly" to comply with the DSA, as "advised by the legal team."

Platforms were expected to "continuous[ly]" review their community guidelines to comply with the DSA, according to the EC's own "takeaways" from a May 7, 2025, session on DSA "systemic risk assessment."

They didn't have to guess whether the EC wanted them to prioritize censoring American content, according to the report.

Emails between TikTok and EC staff in November 2021 show the latter asking how the former will fight disinformation from the U.S. on COVID vaccines for kids, including removing claims about efficacy.

A year later, EC staff demanded an explanation "in writing" from YouTube, Twitter and TikTok, through the disinformation code group, why they were allowing an American documentary on vaccines, with YouTube "promptly" reporting back it had removed the video.

Then-EU Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton's threat letter to X ahead of Musk's livestream with presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2024, soon disavowed by the EC, was not an "unapproved freelance from a rogue Commissioner acting alone," the report says.

May 28, 2024, emails between EC and TikTok staff show Jourová, the vice president, traveling to California to meet with TikTok's CEO and its safety chief to discuss "election preparations." When they asked if the conversation would be "mostly EU focused," she said they would discuss "both" U.S. and EU preparations for elections.

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