There is no saving Europe from their morally...

Editor's note: ...bankrupt leadership and arrogance that is off the charts. The EU leaders are displaying a striking mix of bureaucratic arrogance and cowardice by trying to project their speech controls beyond Europe: rather than confronting dissent with open debate, EU regulators lean on expansive digital laws that pressure American platforms to pre-emptively silence lawful expression. The EU is attempting to export a censorship model born of elite anxiety and institutional self-protection. Americans should tell European bureaucrats to go screw themselves like the Russians have. Professor Sergey A. Karaganov's observation that "Europe, on the other hand, is becoming negligible … so it's better just to push them aside and let them stew in their juices" encapsulates European influence, and this viewpoint is being shared by more and more Americans who argue that EU efforts to export restrictive online speech laws to Americans reflect regulatory overreach born of diminishing geopolitical confidence rather than anything constructive.
________

European Official Warns That Americans Can Be Silenced By EU Online Speech Laws

By Zero Hedge | February 14, 2026

Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Europeans who face criminal charges for what they said or wrote warned that Europe's speech laws can silence Americans as well, regardless of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protections.

While testifying before the House Judiciary Committee last week, Paivi Rasanen, a member of parliament in Finland, recounted how she has been prosecuted since 2021 for quoting Bible verses to church members and on social media that questioned her church’s participation in a Gay Pride march. Although she was acquitted, first by a local district court and then by an appellate court, prosecutors appealed the decision to Finland's supreme court, where the case currently sits.

Rasanen told The Epoch Times:

"My prosecution shows how quickly democratic societies can abandon free expression when the state decides which beliefs are acceptable."

"I never imagined that quoting the Bible in a Twitter post would lead to years of criminal charges, yet this is now the reality in Europe," she said. "Americans should be concerned because once censorship is normalized, it never stays confined to one country."

The trend among Western countries to restrict religious speech has spread beyond Europe, with the Canadian government currently advancing a bill that would remove a religious exemption from "hate speech" laws in the country's Criminal Code. Similarly, newly proposed legislation in Queensland, Australia, would criminalize certain symbols and phrases, with penalties of up to two years in prison.

While speaking before Congress, Rasanen was joined by Graham Linehan, an Irish writer and comedian who was arrested upon traveling through Heathrow Airport in 2025 for statements he had made in America on transgender issues.

Linehan stated:

"For a decade, the British police have harassed me for expressing views that the majority of the public share," Linehan stated. "We have simply been punished for objecting to fashionable yet incoherent orthodoxies."

'Foreign Censorship Threat'

Their testimony was underscored by the release of a Feb. 3 House report titled "The Foreign Censorship Threat," which charged that "The European Commission, in a comprehensive decade-long effort, has successfully pressured social media platforms to change their global content moderation rules, thereby directly infringing on Americans’ online speech in the United States."

More specifically, the report states that "though ostensibly meant to combat ‘misinformation' and 'hate speech,' nonpublic documents produced to the Committee show that for the last 10 years, the European Commission has directly pressured platforms to censor lawful, political speech in the European Union and abroad."

This included regular meetings between U.S. tech companies and European Union regulators to put "content moderation" policies and algorithms in place to conform to European laws regarding "hate speech" and "misinformation," the report states. The EU claims these initiatives were voluntary, but subpoenaed emails from tech executives stated that "we don't really have a choice."

Judicial Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told hearing attendees that, based on subpoenas issued to U.S. tech companies regarding their correspondence with EU officials, a pattern of compelled censorship emerged that included U.S. citizens.

"The European Commission successfully pressured social media companies to change their global content moderation rules, directly harming the speech of Americans in the United States," Jordan stated. He also referenced an incident in which European commissioner Thierry Breton warned X owner Elon Musk that his company may face penalties for posting an interview with Donald Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign.

Jordan said:

"The European Commission is trying to censor speech and meddle in elections worldwide," Jordan said. "When the European Commission makes censorship demands, platforms have to listen."

Please go to Zero Hedge to continue reading.