President Donald Trump is well known for his America First agenda. Some have interpreted this as an isolationist stance of retreat from the world stage. If anything, the first few weeks have shown an energetic engagement on foreign policy. America First hasn’t meant disengagement with the world. Rather, it has meant taking seriously American foundational principles and believing those are core values that other nations will look up to when demonstrated proudly.
One of those fundamental American principles is free speech, and the Trump administration is making sure that the world sees America vigorously fighting for it.
This new posture of strongly proclaiming the American value of free speech on the global stage had its biggest demonstration yet for the new administration last week. On Friday, Vice President J.D. Vance spoke at the Munich Security Conference. Rather than focusing on external global threats from Russia and China – as important and real as they are – Vance turned his attention to a major worrisome trend in Europe: the rise of aggressive censorship.
Vance lamented the “retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.” For Americans, censorship is itself an attack on democracy. As the Vice President stated, “Dismissing people, dismissing their concerns, or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections, or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.” Free speech is not supposed to just be an American value but a universally shared fundamental right, protected in international treaties and charters enthusiastically signed onto by European allies.
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Vance highlighted one example in particular of the attack on freedom of expression, that of British Army veteran and ADF International client Adam Smith-Connor. Smith-Connor was charged in November 2022 for violating a “buffer zone” outside an abortion clinic in the UK when he had silently prayed outside of it. This past October, Smith-Connor was criminally convicted for his three minutes of silent prayer. Smith-Connor’s appeal will be heard in July.
But that is just one example of what has become increasingly systematic attempts in Europe at ever larger scales to censor and control public discourse to exclude “wrong” opinions.
Other cases abound, like that of Päivi Räsänen, the Finnish member of Parliament who has been hounded on “hate speech” criminal charges now for almost four years and investigations for even longer because she posted a picture of a Bible verse on then-Twitter.
But on a broader level, Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA) would make every European social media user subject to the censorship regime and potentially export that censorship throughout the world, including America. The DSA imposes enormous penalties on large social media companies that do not comply with orders to censor so-called “illegal content,” broadly defined as anything that is illegal under EU or national law. Notably, this can include vague and subjective terms like “hate speech,” “misinformation,” and “disinformation,” which are readily weaponized against disfavored religious views, as the stories above show.
Because large social media companies are often American companies, that means that the DSA could harm not just American business but lead to the censorship of Americans. Nearly every major digital service provider in the United States, from Adobe to Zoom, and most social media platforms, maintains these kinds of harmful policies prohibiting “hate speech” or “misinformation,” as reported by ADF’s Viewpoint Diversity Index. If you oppose the government’s position and voice that opinion on social media, there’s a very real chance that a European bureaucrat will try to silence your voice as “misinformation.” Just look at Smith-Connor’s and Räsänen’s cases.
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The concern that Europe’s mania for expanding and exporting censorship – as bad as that is by itself – will be felt on American shores was the animating principle for Vance’s push for free speech in his European trip last week and has become a major theme. Earlier in the week, during his speech on AI, Vance directly criticized the Digital Services Act and “the massive regulations it created about taking down content and policing so-called misinformation.” “America cannot and will not accept that,” he said.
Vance is not pursuing this free speech posture toward Europe alone. Congressman Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent the European Commission a letter at the end of last month “express[ing] our serious concerns with how the DSA’s censorship provisions affect free speech in the United States.” Last week, the Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the “Censorship-Industrial Complex,” highlighting censorship efforts abroad.
One of President Trump’s first actions was an executive order preventing any federal efforts to facilitate censorship against Americans, especially under the guise of combatting “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation.” This was a sharp turnabout from the Biden-Harris administration’s pressuring of social media companies to censor posts skeptical of government policies. Secretary of State Marco Rubio followed this up by announcing that he would terminate “any programs that in any way lead to censoring the American people.”
Vance and the Trump administration’s critics have tried over the weekend to make Vance’s position sound extreme, but instead have only confirmed how right he was to make a strong defense of free speech. No reaction was more egregious than CBS’s on Sunday, when Margaret Brennan absurdly blamed free speech for the Holocaust, while 60 Minutes promoted the German system of prosecuting thousands of cases of online “hate speech” and insults. Now that the weaponization of terms like “misinformation” and “disinformation” has been exposed, the rhetoric from opponents of free speech has become more direct.
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Vance’s speech has been a clarifying moment, laying down clearly the choice between free speech and censorship. When it comes to opposing global censorship, and especially when that censorship can affect Americans, the Trump administration is fulfilling its promises early on. Vance’s Munich speech is the clearest demonstration yet that America will take the lead again in ensuring the protection of free speech for Americans and worldwide.
Sean Nelson is an international human rights lawyer who serves as legal counsel for global religious freedom at ADF International.
Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.