Adding More Context to The Wall Street Journal’s Reporting on Europe’s Free Speech Crackdown
Major outlets are catching on to a reality we've warned about for years: Europe's model of speech regulation is fueling a dangerous decline in free expression.
Although it has become increasingly trendy among American elites to frame Europe’s approach to free speech as responsible and “balanced,” the cracks in that narrative are starting to show, as more people are being tangibly harmed by Europe’s speech restrictions.
For years, The Future of Free Speech has been warning about the increasingly censorious direction that European policymakers have been taking in recent years — from the UK’s draconian enforcement of hate speech laws to Germany’s crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protests and more. So we were pleased to see comprehensive reporting on this issue in a recent Wall Street Journal article entitled “Europe’s Crackdown on Speech Goes Far and Wide.”
The free speech chasm between Europe and the U.S. has become even clearer in the digital age, with European governments conducting police raids, making arrests, and imprisoning people for social media posts that offend minorities, “stir up hatred,” or even insult politicians, as the WSJ article describes.
Other major outlets are also starting to catch up. A recent Economist essay pulls no punches, declaring that “Europe really does have a problem with free speech,” and criticizing laws that punish speech for being offensive, insulting, or politically inconvenient. A separate Economist article details how British police now arrest more than 30 people a day for online speech, and how outdated laws have allowed minor disputes — including in private WhatsApp groups — to escalate into criminal cases. Meanwhile, in the Financial Times, Camilla Cavendish warns that the UK’s approach has become so muddled and arbitrary that “we should look with envy at [America’s] First Amendment.”
These are welcome additions to the conversation, and they reinforce what our research has long shown: that Europe’s speech laws are neither balanced nor principled — they are vague, subjective, and increasingly prone to abuse.
In the U.S., free speech, even hate speech, is protected except in narrow circumstances such as direct incitement to violence. But the European Court of Human Rights has held that governments may “sanction or even prevent all forms of expression which spread, incite, promote or justify hatred.”
The WSJ notes that Europe’s approach to hate speech stems from the fact that it is a “continent scarred by the Holocaust.” But as I have chronicled in my book and elsewhere, it is not the case that the Nazis took advantage of unrestricted free speech in Weimar Germany to rise to power; in fact, they were frequently censored and punished for their extremist rhetoric.
We have also warned about how the push for stricter prohibitions against hate speech in Europe will undoubtedly be used against the very minority groups such laws are intended to protect. In the UK, for instance, a young black man was arrested in his home, had his phone seized, and was prosecuted for the ‘crime’ of tweeting a raccoon emoji and using the word ‘coons’ towards a black Conservative politician. I highlight several other egregious examples in these two essays for the WSJ.
The WSJ authors also note the recent UK court decision finding Hamit Coskun guilty of “religiously motivated public disorder” for burning a Quran in front of the Turkish embassy. For years, we have pushed back on the re-emergence of blasphemy laws in Europe as countries like Sweden and Denmark, and now the UK, have made it a crime to insult religious texts.
The arrests related to the crackdown on defamation, hate speech, and blasphemy make for jarring headlines, but Europe’s approach to digital regulation also raises red flags. As my colleagues Joan Barata and Jordi Calvet-Bademunt have continued to point out, the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and AI Act’s obligation for social media platforms and AI companies to address the vague concept of “systemic risks” undermines international standards for freedom of expression and will likely encourage platforms to overremove legal content.
In a few recent, glaring examples of the DSA’s worrying impact, the EU Commission’s former “digital enforcer,” Thierry Breton, suggested that social media platforms could face shutdowns if they do not remove problematic content during riots. He also sent a letter to Elon Musk warning that hosting an interview with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump on X could violate the DSA.
The WSJ article also notes how NGOs in Germany “scour the internet for instances of hate speech.” Under the DSA’s Hate Speech Code of Conduct, the EU Commission has delegated to NGOs the task of flagging content in a similar manner. My colleague Natalie Alkiviadou has recently expressed concerns about how free expression experts are severely lacking among these “trusted flagger” NGOs.
It might also interest WSJ readers to learn that what happens in Europe doesn’t stay there. In what is often deemed the “Brussels Effect,” our research has shown time and again how regulations in Europe often become blueprints for authoritarian regimes like Russia and Pakistan to justify crackdowns on digital dissent. We have also recently been tracking the same trend wherein the DSA has been used as a cover for censorship in Latin America and the Asia Pacific.
While the U.S. is currently grappling with its own problems — from attacks on the press from the Trump administration to the crackdown on unpopular speech through immigration enforcement actions, among many other troubling examples — European governments lack the strong and principled First Amendment protections that have already begun to curtail some of these most egregious abuses of power. (It should also be noted that European governments have also used immigration enforcement to punish speech.)
We are glad the WSJ and others are drawing additional attention to the creeping intolerance of European speech regulations and their disproportionate enforcement. Europe’s commitment to free speech will continue to deteriorate so long as its civil society neglects the need for free speech as the “bulwark of liberty” in a democratic society.
Jacob Mchangama is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University. He is also a senior fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the author of Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media.