The Digital Services Act enables bureaucrats to control online speech — in Europe and globally — under the guise of ‘safety’ and ‘protecting democracy.’
O n July 1, the European Union’s flagship online censorship tool, the Digital Services Act (DSA), expanded its scope. The DSA has severe implications for free speech not just in Europe, but potentially across the whole world, and must be repealed. A few days later, Elon Musk added his voice to endorse its abolishment, raising the global stakes.
The act is a binding regulatory framework that gives the EU authority to enforce “content moderation” on platforms and search engines with over 45 million monthly users. It is one of the most dangerous censorship regimes of the digital age, enabling bureaucrats to control online speech at scale — both in Europe and globally — under the guise of “safety” and “protecting democracy.”
July 1 marked a critical milestone, as the previously voluntary DSA Code of Practice on Disinformation became a binding Code of Conduct. What was once framed as a cooperative initiative now has teeth, with financial penalties and regular audits to remove or suppress content seen as misleading or harmful by EU regulators.
What the Digital Services Act does is require platforms to remove “illegal content,” defined as anything not in compliance with EU or member state law at any time, now or in the future. This creates a “lowest common denominator” for censorship across the EU, exporting the most restrictive speech laws in any individual state across Europe.
What has emerged is a vast censorship infrastructure with coercive enforcement tools and an opaque network of EU-approved nongovernmental organizations and “trusted flaggers,” which identify content for removal. If platforms fail to quickly remove flagged content, they face enormous fines — up to 6 percent of global revenue — and even EU-wide suspension. Individuals can also be suspended from platforms if they “persistently” post “illegal content.”
Platforms must also report users to police if flagged content is suspected to involve threats to “safety” — opening the door to criminal prosecution under national “hate speech” laws even if the content is entirely peaceful.
The shocking case of Finnish parliamentarian Päivi Räsänen gives an example of what this censorship could look like in practice. Päivi has been dragged through the courts in her country for alleged “hate speech” for a Twitter post, in which she peacefully expressed her faith-based views and included a picture of Bible text. With legal support from ADF International, she now faces her third trial in the supreme court, despite being unanimously acquitted in two previous trials. Under the DSA, draconian “hate speech” legislation, like that used to prosecute Päivi, could be applied across the EU.
Threats of DSA censorship are made even more serious by the now mandatory Code of Conduct on Disinformation. The EU defines the “disinformation” it seeks to address as “verifiably false or misleading information” created to deceive the public and cause “public harm” to democracy, health, or security.
This vague and open-ended definition gives regulators vast discretion to interpret harm as potentially anything from anti-lockdown dissent to critiques of migration or gender policy. The Covid pandemic period showed just how broadly framed “public safety” concerns could be, when it came to justifying crackdowns on online speech.
Under the Code of Conduct, annual audits of platforms will determine their disinformation “risk scores.” Platforms will now need to conduct “risk mitigation” of disinformation, which will likely result in large-scale preemptive censorship and filtering of information through algorithmic moderation.
Alarmingly, the DSA does not matter for freedom of expression just in Europe — it threatens to censor the speech of Americans, too. There is the possibility that platforms will set their global content-moderation policies to EU standards, which would regulate online speech across the whole world in line with the regulation. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation exported EU data privacy standards worldwide and, in a similar way, the Digital Services Act could impose European speech controls beyond the continent.
An additional extraterritorial impact of the DSA is that it applies to any platform accessed within the EU, regardless of where it is based. Online American speech could be geo-blocked within the EU if it is judged to be “disinformation” or “hateful” and, worryingly, there is even precedent from the Court of Justice of the EU, such as Glawischnig-Piesczek v. Facebook Ireland, that platforms could be ordered to remove content across the whole world.
It is therefore no surprise that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan warned about the threats the DSA poses to American speech online, in a letter to the European Commission in January, followed by highlighting its role furthering global censorship in a June investigative report. Thanks to the DSA and the newly integrated Code of Conduct on Disinformation, the First Amendment is now on a transatlantic collision course with Brussels’s definition of public harm, and only one can prevail.
If this censorial legislation is not amended or repealed to protect freedom of expression, future U.S. election cycles could be shaped not by American voters, but by the EU and its fact-checking auxiliaries. Because of its incorporation into EU legislation, the Code of Conduct, which began as a voluntary initiative, today risks becoming a blueprint for international speech regulation.
July 1 marked more than a dry policy change. It was the day the quiet expansion of a potentially cross-border censorship regime took place — bureaucratically elegant, ideologically loaded, and entirely unsuited to a free society, in Europe or elsewhere.
It is clear that the Digital Services Act must be repealed or reformed substantially. The Trump administration should employ every diplomatic tool at its disposal to advocate for the protection of free speech online. If Americans allow foreign governments and their ideologically curated NGOs to dictate the boundaries of permissible speech, the First Amendment will be respected in name only online.