by Raw Egg Nationalist
Europe’s censorship regime increasingly reaches across the Atlantic, threatening Americans’ First Amendment rights—and Congress and the states are finally fighting back.
Protecting freedom of speech has been a key commitment of the second Trump presidency. On his first day back in office, Trump set the tone with an Executive Order, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.”
Then in February 2025, at the Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance shocked and scandalized Europe’s leaders by telling them that they, not Russia or China or Iran, are the greatest threat to the future of their continent, because they’re the ones who’ve turned their backs on the cherished beliefs and high ideals that made Europe the envy of the world. Not least among those values, Vance said, is freedom of speech. If Europe wants to step off that dangerous path, the United States, led by President Trump, will walk with her. But the United States will not provide support for a European elite that censors, stifles dissent and destroys its culture, history and peoples with mass immigration nobody ever voted for but that somehow can never be voted against either.
During the election campaign, there had been clear hints of a direct confrontation with the EU over censorship—most notably, Vance had suggested a second Trump administration might withdraw from NATO completely if the EU didn’t stop menacing Elon Musk—but nobody, and certainly not Europe’s complacent politicians, technocrats and journalists, expected that confrontation to be quite so spectacular.
It’s clear the Trump administration recognizes that American values at home are inseparable from American values abroad, especially among America’s oldest and closest allies. And it’s not just that censorship in Europe imperils America’s freedoms in the civilizational sense Marco Rubio described in his speech at Munich this year, which struck a far more conciliatory tone than Vance’s but still made the same essential point. In fact, Europe’s censorship regimes are directly restricting what Americans can say in the 21st century’s digital public square, and most Americans are blissfully unaware of what’s going on.
Since the heady early days of Trump’s return to office, much of the impetus for pushing back against European censorship of American citizens has shifted to private individuals and individual lawmakers, rather than the administration itself. The main thrust has been a series of acts under the rubric of GRANITE (“Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion”). The first GRANITE Act was introduced into the Wyoming legislature in February by Rep. Daniel Singh. The Wyoming GRANITE Act was the first U.S. law specifically designed to create a private right of action against foreign censorship and impose significant punishments for violations.
I discussed the Act with Preston Byrne, legal head at Arkham, a cryptocurrency exchange and blockchain-analysis platform. Byrne has represented a number of American clients, including the forum website 4chan, in cases where European governments have tried to censor them. The UK media regulator Ofcom has demanded tens of thousands of pounds in fines, compounding daily, if 4chan does not provide the information it has requested. 4chan continues to refuse the fines, although other U.S. platforms have not been so resolute.
“The GRANITE Act is a tightly tailored response to a very new problem: foreign governments assuming that the transnational nature of the Internet entitles them to govern American speech and conduct conducted wholly and exclusively on American soil,” Byrne told me.
“The model law was developed as a direct response to the conduct of the UK’s Ofcom in its pursuit of my American clients, where Ofcom asserted that UK law governs the conduct of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, and also that Ofcom was entitled to sovereign immunity with respect to its activities on U.S. soil.”
Byrne explained how the law would make it harder to censor U.S. citizens.
“GRANITE makes it clear that foreign censorship orders are not enforceable on U.S. soil, bars executive branch cooperation with those orders and extradition in relation to those orders, and creates a private right of action allowing victims of foreign censorship that targets Wyoming to sue foreign censors in U.S. courts.”
The Act provided that any resident of Wyoming, business based there, or U.S. citizen with a server there could sue foreign governments that attempted to censor them. Each violation would have cost the offending entity at least $1 million or 10 percent of its U.S. revenue, whichever was higher.
The GRANITE Act would also have prohibited Wyoming courts and state agencies from recognizing or enforcing foreign censorship requests, including extradition requests or demands for data, if the request had been linked to constitutionally protected speech in the U.S. Any local participation in foreign attempts to investigate, penalize, or prosecute individuals and businesses over lawful expression would have been barred.
The first GRANITE Act passed the Wyoming House by a vote of 46-12, but then stalled in the Senate and didn’t become law. There’s now talk of reintroducing a lighter “shield-only” version of the Act in 2027, which is more likely to pass because it omits the parts that would prove trickier from a legal and a diplomatic standpoint. The next iteration would include the original bill’s “shield” against foreign censorship—the state block on enforcing censorship judgments and cooperation with them—and omit the “sword” aspect, which is the private right of action to sue, as well as the punitive damages.
Last week, a pared-down “shield-only” version of the original Act was introduced at the federal level by Republican Congressman Michael Rulli of Ohio again under the GRANITE rubric.
“Foreign bureaucrats do not get to decide what Americans can say,” Rulli told The Times of London.
“My bill makes clear that if a foreign government tries to punish an American for speech protected by the First Amendment, that judgment is dead on arrival in our courts. The Constitution protects our right to speak freely. It does not bend to Brussels or London.”
In publicity for the new federal act, much of the focus has been on censorship by the UK regulator Ofcom, perhaps because of the attention-grabbing scale of the damages that can be imposed on companies that do not comply: up to 10 percent of global annual turnover. The bigger fish that needs to be fried, however, is the EU’s Digital Services Act. The full malignancy of the Digital Services Act was laid bare last year by Joel Rosenthal, in a very useful piece in The Claremont Review of Books.
The Digital Services Act was introduced in 2022, as an extension of a piece of German legislation, the 2017 Network Enforcement Act, often abbreviated as “NetzDG.” By a stroke of the legislator’s pen, NetzDG effectively made the entire internet subject to German law. Online platforms would be held responsible by German lawmakers for the content that was posted on them, wherever the platforms and their users were based.
Social media companies objected, because they knew the provisions of the law would be anticipatory—which is to say, they knew they’d be forced to act in advance to censor “harmful” content, rather than waiting to be told by the Germans when and where to pull the trigger. If you’re going to be held responsible for what your users post, and liable for fines and other forms of censure, it makes obvious sense to monitor content proactively and remove anything that might fall foul of the authorities before they ever have to get involved. And that means creating a whole new apparatus of moderators and censors, far in excess of anything companies like Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, had ever maintained before. The companies didn’t want this new burden, but then of course they gave way and complied.
NetzDG was why, if you’ve been on social media long enough as I have, and if you’ve been posting the kind of things I have, you’ll remember those weird notifications you’d get by email about how one of your Tweets was in contravention of German law, and you could be banned if it wasn’t removed. At one point, I was getting them on an almost daily basis. Nothing ever happened, but that didn’t stop the emails from coming.
NetzDG remained in force until 2022, when it was supplanted by the Europe-wide Digital Services Act. Now the internet is not just subject to German law. It’s subject to the law of all 27 EU member states: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. Non-compliance is punishable with ruinous fines: up to 6 percent of a company’s global turnover.
Individual member states can flag posts for censorship and so can the European Commission itself. National governments and the Commission can also name “trusted flaggers” whose reports are fast-tracked and given extra weight.
But the DSA goes even further than NetzDG. The focus isn’t simply on content that’s illegal in the EU. Internet platforms must also act against “misinformation” and “disinformation”: content that isn’t illegal as such, but is judged to be “harmful,” for whatever reason, by the authorities in Europe.
This is the censorship model of the pandemic, enshrined in EU law, and it means Americans on the internet in 2026 are, for all intents and purposes, still stuck in the dark days of 2022 and the Biden presidency, before Elon Musk bought Twitter. The same censorship remains. It’s just less overt, and in a very real sense that makes it worse, because it’s harder to fight something you can’t even see.
Yes, people on Twitter—now X—aren’t being banned like they were, but they’re still subject to measures that often amount to a form of soft banning. They’re being hidden from view. Made invisible. When Elon Musk said, not long after he bought Twitter, that “freedom of speech isn’t freedom of reach,” he was offering a clear sop to the censors in Brussels, and he was careful to ensure that distinction was observed.
In the vast majority of cases, instead of removing people from X or putting them on a three-strikes-and-you’re-out path to being banned, the new moderation regime at X sweeps “harmful” posts under a vast digital rug where nobody can see them. The posts are still there, but the “harm”—their visibility—is limited.
The EU is satisfied, for the most part, with this approach.
Like I said, it’s very difficult to get a true sense of the scale of censorship taking place on platforms like X, and exactly how far it affects Americans in particular. Now, when safety labels are attached to posts that have been flagged, they’re usually visible only to internal moderators.
We can get a feel, though, by looking at the regular “transparency reports” platforms must provide the EU about their compliance with the Digital Services Act. X’s April 2024 report, for example, shows that in the previous five months, the platform took action on 226,350 of 238,108 “harmful” items reported by the EU. That’s 95 percent compliance.
The X report also states that 90 percent of the company’s 1,726 content moderators listed English as their primary language. That means the vast majority of censorship on X in compliance with EU law is in English, despite only 1 percent of the EU population speaking English as their first language. So we can safely assume the majority of that majority is material being posted by Americans.
But be aware: These reports contain only items reported by the EU. They don’t include items reported by individuals, organizations, or the “trusted flaggers” I mentioned earlier. They also don’t make any reference to the proactive censorship being carried out by the platform’s algorithms.
The EU-enforced censorship regime is the proverbial large floating chunk of ice, and the vast majority of it can’t be seen below the waterline, unlike what Ofcom is doing very publicly with platforms like 4chan.
Congressman Rulli’s federal bill is unlikely to become law, but supporters are optimistic that some form of GRANITE Act could be on the statute books, at least at the state level, next year.
“GRANITE is not a single bill, but rather a published specification for how to use American law to stop foreign censorship,” said Preston Byrne.
“There are other versions kicking around various federal offices. The odds that something GRANITE-shaped will be enacted somewhere in the U.S. in 2027 are good.”
There are other options too, some of which were laid out by Joel Rosenthal. Censorship fines from the EU and the UK could be challenged at the World Trade Organization. If American companies have no reason to fear the fines, there’s no reason to comply. The federal government could go further and make it illegal for American companies to comply with orders from foreign censors. As Rosenthal notes, the First Amendment prevents Congress from making any law abridging freedom of speech, “but now it needs to enact a specific law protecting freedom of speech from foreign interference.”
Or how about creating the U.S.’s own European Commission with all the powers of the Digital Services Act—except to enforce freedom of speech rather than curtail it? What if federal authorities could seize company records, investigate foreign requests for user data and demand access to algorithms, then impose whacking great penalties—say, 10 percent of all global revenue?
If the EU and other foreign censors refuse to back down, American companies could be offered a choice. Just last week, President Trump told Canadian companies they had a choice if they didn’t like his new 50 percent tariffs: Come to America instead. A similar ultimatum could be put to American companies: America or somewhere else. You choose. If you stay in America, you have no right to censor American citizens. If you want to do that, leave. You were never welcome in the first place.
Photo: Symbolic image on the topic of online surveillance
Dr. Charles Cornish-Dale, an Oxford- and Cambridge-educated historian and anthropologist, rose to prominence as “Raw Egg Nationalist.” He has a large social media following, is a bestselling author, has appeared on national television, and has influenced debates on health, fitness, politics, and culture. His latest book is 'The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity.'
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/09/02/right-to-censor-why-the-u-s-needs-to-get-a-handle-on-foreign-censorship-of-protected-speech/
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