The War on the Internet
Europe is moving quickly to censor free speech in the West, and especially towards censorship of American free speech. They formed a coalition in 2015 to silence free speech in the West. This is the Western Industrial Censorship Complex.
Censorship is evil and authoritarian.
Spain’s Radical Censorship
Spain’s communist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón, says Spain will criminally target platform executives, ban social media for children under 16, pursue probes of various platforms, and build a European coalition to enforce tougher social media rules.
The coalition already exists as the House Judiciary report explains below.
This follows France’s summoning of Elon Musk and the raiding of X’s Paris offices.
Ian Miles Cheong writes:
Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez just declared war on the open internet. Under the guise of “safety” and “accountability,” his government is launching a full-scale assault on free speech, specifically targeting platforms that refuse to bend the knee to state-approved narratives.
In a direct hit to the “freedom of reach,” Spain will now criminalize the amplification of content the state deems “illegal.” This gives the government the power to dictate how software is written. If an algorithm happens to show a truth that makes the ruling party look bad, it’s a “criminal offense.”
Under the pretext of “protecting the children,” Spain is banning anyone under 16 from social media and demanding “real barriers” for age verification. This is a massive Trojan Horse for a National Digital ID. To “save the kids,” Sánchez is effectively demanding that every Spanish citizen hand over their private biometric or legal data just to scroll a feed.
He has also vowed to make platform executives like Elon Musk legally accountable for what users post, effectively holding tech leaders’ personal freedom hostage. It’s a transparent attempt to force Silicon Valley (and Austin) to build “kill switches” for any content the Spanish government doesn’t like.
Sánchez dropped the mask at the end, specifically naming Grok, the one AI committed to the unvarnished truth, alongside TikTok and Instagram for investigation.
Sánchez is the true fascist totalitarian https://t.co/b2U17fEwa7
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2026
The Guardian of Speech
The UN regulator and EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency, Vera Jourova, said the US will obey. She made her comments at the World Economic Forum.
Věra Jourová, the vice president for “values and transparency” at the EU’s executive European Commission, indicated to a fellow panelist at the World Economic Forum that such policies were about to cross the ocean.
“What qualifies as hate speech, as illegal hate speech, which you will have soon also in the U.S.,” she said, directing her comments to fellow panelist Seth Moulton, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts. “I think that we have a strong reason why we have this in the criminal law; we need the platforms to work with the language simply and to identify such cases.”
Zero Hedge reports that hundreds of unelected EU bureaucrats will decide what constitutes disinformation. They then instruct Big Tech firms to censor it.
They will appoint “trusted flaggers” to decide what people are allowed to see and say. If you think any of these people are democratic, you’d be misinformed. These are authoritarians, and the majority of people in Europe probably don’t want this any more than we do.
So, totalitarians in Europe will take away Americans’ free speech if they communicate in the EU.
The House Judiciary Findings
Elon Musk points out that Big Tech is censoring Americans’ speech in the U.S., including true information, to comply with Europe’s far-reaching Digital Services Act. The community guidelines are intended to conform to the European Digital Services Act. The Europeans are censoring American speech.
EU Censorship files https://t.co/LX5Psr1RQT
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2026
The House Judiciary report: the plan to censor the West began in 2015.
It began when the EU Commission created “codes” and “forums” through which it could pressure platforms to censor speech more aggressively.
These censorship codes and forums were supposed to be “voluntary” and operate on “consensus”—but they weren’t, and they didn’t. From the very beginning, the Commission used them to pressure platforms to censor political speech and other legal content. In private, companies state the obvious: the Commission sets the agenda, forces consensus, and platforms “don’t really have a choice” whether to comply.
The Commission’s target was clear:
Companies’ “Community Guidelines” that set the boundaries for what can be discussed in the global town square—a key pressure point for governments to censor content at scale.
Put simply, the boundaries of debate on political topics like mass migration, men in women’s sports, and more are set by community guidelines. When governments pressure platforms to change their community guidelines, they are changing what Americans are allowed to post *in the United States* or anywhere else.
And they effectively must be global in scope. Country-by-country content moderation is a significant privacy threat—in addition to being ineffective and costly. This censorship campaign started long before the DSA.
As early as 2020, the EU President, von der Leyen, and Vice President, Vera Jourova, told platforms to change their rules and take down content questioning established narratives about the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccine.
By 2022, the Commission had formalized its pressure campaign. In more than 90 meetings organized under the Disinformation Code between 2022 and 2024, the Commission pressured platforms to change their global content moderation rules and censor more content. And once the DSA was in effect, the Commission warned platforms that they had to undertake “continuous review of community guidelines” to comply.
The pressure campaign worked.
In 2024, TikTok changed its global Community Guidelines to “comply with the Digital Services Act.” TikTok now censors true information worldwide, as well as vague categories of First Amendment-protected content like “marginalizing speech.”
That’s right: because of Europe’s censorship law, TikTok censors true information in the United States.
They Concentrate on Censoring the US
It’s no surprise that the Commission is specifically focused on censorship of U.S. content.
During the pandemic, it pressured platforms to censor U.S. content about COVID-19 vaccines for kids. Later, ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Vice President Vera Jourova flew to California to meet with platforms about their censorship measures for U.S. political content.
EU and US Elections Were on the Agenda
When asked whether the Europeans were flying to California to discuss EU and US elections or “stay mostly EU focused,” the Europeans made clear: EU AND US elections were to be on the agenda. The clearest form of the Commission meddling in U.S. elections was Commissioner Thierry Breton’s letter threatening X with regulatory retaliation for hosting a live interview with President Trump in the United States in August 2024. Read our letter to Commissioner Breton here: https://x.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1824564435853197820
It turns out interfering with elections is standard fare for the European Commission. Ahead of at least EIGHT elections across six European countries since 2023, the Commission met with platforms to pressure them to censor political speech in the days before the vote.
Internal platform documents show that after these meetings, TikTok censored “common” conservative political claims about transgender issues, such as “there are only two genders.”
You Must Adopt the Terms and Conditions
The Commission’s DSA Election Guidelines state that platforms must “adapt their terms and conditions” to more aggressively censor so-called “disinformation” ahead of elections. They are supposed to be “voluntary” best practices. But behind closed doors, a top DSA enforcer told platforms that they are mandatory.
And new, nonpublic documents cast doubt on the allegations of Russian interference that led a Romanian court to undo the country’s 2024 presidential election results. TikTok told the European Commission that it found “no evidence” of a coordinated a Russian campaign to boost winning candidate Calin Georgescu—the key allegation made by Romanian authorities—and informed authorities of this finding. Since then, public reporting has shown that the alleged Russian TikTok campaign was actually funded by another Romanian political party.
The Commission’s decade-long censorship campaign shows no sign of slowing down. Last week, the Committee released the Commission’s secret decision that fined X €140 million for defending free speech and threatened to ban X in the EU. Read the thread here: https://x.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/2016619751183724789
To sum it all up:
In its comprehensive 10-year censorship campaign, the EU Commission has — Successfully pressured social media platforms to censor true information in the United States; — Targeted U.S. political content for censorship; and — Interfered in elections across Europe.
The Committee continues to investigate foreign threats to American free speech. Read the Committee’s full report here: https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/2026-02/THE-FOREIGN-CENSORSHIP-THREAT-PART-II-2-3-26.pdf
And tune in tomorrow at 10am, when victims of the European censorship campaign will testify before the Committee.
WATCH LIVE: https://t.co/PjZK02Ub0V
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) February 3, 2026
And so the question remains, who rules? And the answer is…the violent rule.