The Foreign Censorship Threat: How the European Union’s Digital Services Act Compels Global Censorship and Infringes on American Free Speech | Report
judiciary.house.gov
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, House Judiciary Committee Republicans released an interim staff report titled, "The Foreign Censorship Threat: How the European Union’s Digital Services Act Compels Global Cen

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(…) The report details how the European Union (EU) uses the Digital Services Act (DSA) as a censorship tool that requires the world’s largest social media platforms to engage in censorship of core political discourse in Europe, the United States, and around the world. The Committee obtained under subpoena nonpublic documents, including email communications between Commission staff and tech companies regarding “voluntary” codes of conduct and internal documents showing a recent May 2025 DSA Workshop that the Commission hosted with platforms behind closed doors.

The DSA incentivizes social media companies to comply with the EU’s censorship demands because the penalties for failing to do so are massive, including fines up to six percent of their global revenue. If “extraordinary circumstances lead to a serious threat to public security or public health in the Union,” regulators are even empowered to temporarily shut down platforms within the EU. The EU has explicitly stated that the DSA penalties are intended to be dissuasive to companies that would otherwise permit free speech and open political debate on their platforms.

  • The DSA is forcing companies to change their global content moderation policies. Nonpublic materials obtained by the Committee from the May 2025 workshop make clear that Commission regulators expect platforms to change their worldwide terms and conditions to comply with DSA obligations;
  • The DSA is being used to censor political speech, including humor and satire. Documents produced to the Committee under subpoena show that European censors target core political speech that is neither harmful nor illegal, attempting to stifle debate on topics such as immigration and the environment;
  • Exercises from the Commission’s May 2025 workshop show the true definitions of key terms in the DSA and Commission regulators’ censorship expectations of social media platforms. For example, the Commission’s workshop labeled a hypothetical social media post stating “we need to take back our country”—a common, anodyne political statement—as “illegal hate speech” that platforms are required to censor under the DSA;
  • The censorship is largely one-sided, almost uniformly targeting political conservatives.