British politician Nigel Farage and Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Lorcan Price warned about European speech laws impacting American companies.
Online free-speech restrictions imposed by the European Union and United Kingdom could pose an existential threat to American liberties and jeopardize U.S. innovation, witnesses warned at a congressional hearing Wednesday.
British politician and activist Nigel Farage and Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Lorcan Price were two of the witnesses at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Europe’s threat to American free speech and innovation. Both of them described how European and British speech laws could impact American companies and have global ramifications.
“It doesn’t give me any great joy to be sitting in America and describing the really awful, authoritarian situation that we have now sunk into,” Farage said. He leads Britain’s reform party, an outsider populist party, and is best known for supporting Britain’s exit from the European Union.
Farage criticized the U.K.’s online safety act, a piece of legislation that synthesizes British criminal offense related to speech and draconian penalties on tech platforms if the platforms do not implement content moderation rules. The law applies to American companies with free-speech policies inspired by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution because those platforms have ties to the U.K. through their user base.
He also mentioned the case of Lucy Connolly, a British woman who was arrested and sentenced to prison time last year for an inflammatory post. Connolly’s post called for mass deportations after the Southport killings, where a British teenager of Rwandan descent killed three children in a knife attack. She deleted her post three hours later and she eventually pleaded guilty to stirring up racial hatred under a different law, the Public Order Act of 1986.
Price mentioned other cases he litigated across Europe in which ordinary citizens and politicians faced criminal penalties for online speech and religious expression. He focused primarily on the European Union’s Digital Services Act.
“The so-called ‘Brussels Effect’ changes regulation in every area that the European Union chooses to regulate and now they’ve entered the business of regulating speech,” Price said. He noted the European Union’s insistence on including the Digital Services Act in international trade deals as its way of spreading speech regulations worldwide.
“U.S. companies bear the brunt disproportionately of this. They’re hijacked by the DSA to become essentially the EU’s global censorship police whether they like it or not,” he added.
The DSA came under fire from U.S. lawmakers when former European tech regulator Thierry Breton threatened billionaire Elon Musk for airing an unfiltered interview with Trump on X ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Breton resigned shortly thereafter due to intense scrutiny from U.S. conservatives and other political leaders. House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) invited Breton to testify but he declined to because of the short notice he was given.
Vice President JD Vance, an avid social media user, strongly criticized Europe’s support for speech restrictions at the Munich Security Conference in February. Farage and Price praised Vance’s remarks for accurately diagnosing the problem and furthering the debate on Europe’s approach to free speech.
The other hearing witnesses were Morgan Reed, president of the App Association, and law professor David Kaye, a witness for the Democrats. Reed is a critic of European Union regulations under the Digital Markets Act that creates burdensome compliance costs for companies and limits the ability of small businesses to join the digital marketplace.
Democratic lawmakers sought to shift the conversation away from Europe and towards the Trump administration. President Trump has won multiple settlements in lawsuits against media companies and the Federal Communications Commission has attempted to use its authority to increase viewpoint diversity at mainstream media publications.
Representative Jamie Raskin (D., Md.), ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, set the tone for Democrats by dismissing the hearing as a stunt to attack an American ally to benefit Farage politically. Farage has campaigned against the Online Safety Act and his political party is seeing an uptick in the polls due to growing dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government.
The hearing took place days after the arrest of Irish comedian Graham Linehan at London’s Heathrow Airport Monday for social-media posts he made in America months ago. Linehan’s posts criticized transgender activists and constitute lawful speech in the U.S., and did not violate any platform’s terms of service. The arrest caused immediate outcry from American defenders of free speech for being an authoritarian, calculated act of state censorship.
British police have received scrutiny for the rising number of daily arrests for speech violations. Custody data analyzed by the Times, a British newspaper, showed that police are making more than 30 arrests a day for offensive speech, a 58 percent increase since 2019.