TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Whether it's control of Greenland, security strategy or tariffs, relations between the U.S. and Europe are dangling by a fraying thread. In recent months, major disagreements over the control of social media platforms and legislation to combat disniformation have come to the fore.
There are, Anja Bechman, a former member of the EU Commission high-level expert group on disinformation, told DW, "radical differences in the approaches to freedom of speech" between the two parties that appear tough to resolve.
Recent revelations from news agency Reuters that the U.S. is "developing an online portal that will enable people in Europe and elsewhere to see content banned by their governments including hate speech and terrorist propaganda," as a method to counter what it sees as excessive censorship in other parts of the world is troubling to the EU.
Even if the plans appear to have been delayed and detail is thin, the U.S. position is clear. Sarah Rogers, the U.S. undersecretary for public diplomacy, is spearheading the Trump administration's charge on this issue and has consistently attacked EU censorship and free speech provisions.
U.S. and Rogers weaponizing censorship?
Rogers has also courted many opposition far-right parties in Europe, including Germany's AfD and amplified a series of far-right causes on her social media accounts.
This has included referring to migrants in Germany as "barbarian rapist hordes" — before later clarifying that she was referring specifically to the migrant attacks in Cologne in 2015 — and retweeting a post stating that "European censorship poses a global threat."
British newspaper The Financial Times quoted a senior member of the UK's far-right Reform party in December as saying Rogers was looking to "fund European organisations to undermine government policies." This was later labeled a "lie" by Rogers, who said last weekend that "it's not America's decision to govern who's elected in Europe."
As well as meeting with members of Reform, Rogers has met Markus Frohnmaier of the AfD, who has been criticized for his links to Russia. Rogers' boss, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, told Hungary's far-right leader, Viktor Orban, that "as long as you’re the prime minister and the leader of this country, it’s in our national interest that Hungary be successful."
Bechman thinks that the U.S. is weaponizing censorship concerns for geopolitical ends. "We are dealing with a culture war here. It's not really about the specifics of the content, more it's a battle of ideals and values and using these values for a larger purpose, namely to create conflict and to escalate rather than trying to negotiate," said Bechman, who is now director of the Center for Digital Social Research at Aarhus University in Denmark.
EU Digital Services Act under fire from U.S.
Rogers has been an outspoken critic of the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), saying on X that its two purposes are to "one, extort and extract from American businesses and two, suppress speech flagged by left-wing NGOs."
Jacob Mchangama, the Danish founder of The Future of Free Speech think tank in the U.S. shares Rogers' distaste for the DSA — which the EU says was set up to "create a digital space that respects citizens and consumers' fundamental rights" — but sees her position as hypocritical.
"I agree with her on her criticism of the DSA," he told DW. "But the State Department has itself sought to deport people in the U.S. for having wrong opinions, is using AI to scan the social media profiles of foreigners and has scaled back its promotion of democracy and dissenters in authoritarian states. I would be happy if this was a more consistent position and if she was critical of her own government. Of course, she can't be because her job is to sell the Trump administration."
'Erosion of free speech' in Europe
Mchangama added that the U.S. government has "no credibility as a global champion of free speech" but is equally critical of how the EU is dealing with censoring information.
"No European democratic government should claim sovereignty to determine what kind of information people access," he said. "Unfortunately, I think there's this tendency, as a result of Trump's actions, for Europeans reflexively to then say, 'well, whatever our democratic governments do to oppose the Trump administration is at defense of the democracy.' And I just don't think that holds up."
The DSA and other EU measures to restrict online content have eroded free speech within the union, according to Mchangama, who believes this is the wrong way to defend democracy amid rising authoritarianism.
Blacklisted words indicative of U.S. censorship issues
Bechman, however, draws a distinction between what she sees as EU attempts to protect citizens from misinformation or harmful content and the U.S. push to blacklist certain words from federal bodies. These have included "climate change" and "green" for the Department of Energy, for example.
"That to me is the most core thing about censorship, when a state is actually not allowing things to be examined. So it becomes a bit weird that the Trump administration is claiming that the EU is engaging in censorship when they themselves are doing it in such a full-blown way," she said, before pointing to the relationship between the U.S. government and big tech firms as another significant cause of concern.
"We see now that big tech is actually very close to power. Maybe it always has been so, but right now it's very explicit," she added, referring to Trump's relationships with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and other tech bosses.
Big tech and a big election battleground
The EU has taken on U.S. tech firms including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, X and Microsoft recently, issuing significant fines using its new DSA and Digital Markets Act (DMA).
The U.S. administration has bristled at this, with the U.S. Trade Representative calling it "discriminatory” in a long social media post in December which also hinted at retaliatory measures.
Social media in particular is an increasingly decisive tool in elections, with foreign interference and the spreading of misinformation through social platforms a growing concern. Mchangama thinks there is also a danger that any government censoring free speech in any way gives carte blanche for their opponents from the far right to do the same.
"It's a very powerful martyr effect when you can say that the elites are cracking down or they're afraid of our message," he said "When they are not in power, they can say 'we're the victims of censorship and we believe in free speech.' Then when they come into power, they have no qualms about using censorship to crush their enemies."
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