Andreas Thon Aasheim on X - "Europe is KILOMETERS ahead of the US on free speech and free press. You're delusional if you think otherwise."
Preston Byrne on X - "US: freedom of speech means the government can't arrest you for what you say.
EUR: freedom of speech means we use state power to protect favored ideas and punish disfavored ideas"
Wall Street Apes on X - "WOW 🚨 Heritage Foundation exposes Hillary Clinton was directly behind getting the European Union to use their Digital Services Act to pressure Elon Musk and America back into censorship Hillary Clinton flew overseas for a meeting to facilitate this against America “They (The European Union) gathered in Berlin, and it was the most anti-free speech gathering I've ever been part of — Hillary Clinton was there, and she really fueled the anger. When Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk, she called on the EU to use the infamous Digital Services Act, which is one of the most anti-free speech pieces of legislation in decades. And she called upon the EU to use the DSA (Digital Services Act) to force the censorship of American citizens, force people like Musk to censor. It's an extraordinary act by someone who was once a presidential candidate” - Law professor Jonathan Turley"
Dries Van Langenhove on X - "Bad news. In the Netherlands🇳🇱, the two young men who projected "WHITE LIVES MATTER" on a bridge in Rotterdam have lost their appeal and their six months prison sentence was reaffirmed. Dutch media are calling this a "light sentence"."
MAGA’s the Fix™ on X - "Six months in prison for projecting “White Lives Matter” on a bridge, while actual rapists and knife-wielding migrants regularly walk free with community service or suspended sentences. The Dutch judiciary isn’t broken, it’s working exactly as intended in protecting everyone except native Europeans."
Matt Van Swol on X - "To be clear... they were NOT imprisoned for vandalism. They were thrown in prison due to: "Public dissemination of discriminatory expressions... group insult and incitement to discrimination" Which is a real law in the Netherlands. This is INSANE!!!!!!!!!"
Neil Stone on X - "X is coordinated disinformation packaged as Free Speech"
Mike Benz on X - "That explains what you’re doing here but don’t speak for everyone bro"
Fran Strajnar on X - "Neil is a known fake doctor spreading actual misinformation on behalf of the Pharma swamp. Mike why don't you do what you do best and look into him a bit hmmm ?"
Hunter Ash on X - "The concept of disinformation is inherently authoritarian. It presumes some faultless source from which truth flows, such that all speech can be judged by its alignment with this source. Yes, sometimes certain issues are fairly clear-cut and people are just lying, but more often people fundamentally disagree about both facts and methods. They disagree about who is trustworthy and what institutions and processes are most likely to produce truth. I, as a private citizen, might call some claim a lie or some person a liar. That’s discourse. I hope to persuade others that I am correct. But to institutionalize disinformation is necessarily to institutionalize a priest caste of truth determiners. This is antithetical to the scientific method and the process of knowledge production in general. Truth-seeking must start from a place of humility: we are not sure of our claims or our methods. We are doing our imperfect best. We demonstrate the value of our ideas via evidence, argument, and the practical utility they provide. Not by censoring competing ideas. It is ludicrous to assume that modern academic or journalistic institutions are bias-free oracles, yet this is the basis of the “disinformation” concept."
Helmut Brandstätter MdEP on X - "A Message to „piggy Land“: there is No censorship in Europe, and everybody has to follow our rules” Trump fights the free press, suing newspapers and TV stations. So leave us alone"
Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers on X - "In Europe you can refer to Americans as pigs, but not convicted rapists"
Alexandre Lores 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇨🇺 on X - "1. Issues $140 million fine 2. Says to “leave us alone” Sometimes the memes write themselves"
Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers on X - "I’m traveling in Europe on a diplomatic passport, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to say a few things ordinary Europeans (and Brits) can’t."
Germany started criminal investigation into social media user for mocking politician for being 'fat' - "German officials attempted to start a criminal investigation into a Gab social media user who allegedly called a left-wing female politician "fat," but the platform refused to comply with the German authorities' invasive demands to uncover the person's identity... The Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt-BKA) contacted Gab about a user insulting the weight of politician Ricarda Lang, a prominent leader of an environmental party in Germany. It requested information that would identify who the individual was, under the suspicion they resided in Germany, so that they can continue their criminal investigation. Torba called Germany's request "one of the more ridiculous foreign data requests that Gab received… [T]hey wanted us to dox a user for calling a female politician fat.""
Bob Morgan 🇬🇧🇺🇦 💙 on X - "You don’t need a diplomatic passport to criticise leaders in the UK and Europe because we have free speech."
Laurie Wastell on X - "A YouTuber was jailed last year for saying “young white girls are being raped by these grooming gangs that worship the prophet Muhammad”. Having initially denied malicious communications, he was held on remand for four months and only let out after he pleaded guilty."
Lauren Chen on X - "Rulings like this make sense once you understand that the law does not exist to protect the citizenry The law exists to punish those who threaten the interests of the state And a woman who calls out migrant crime is a much bigger threat to global liberalism than a rapist"
Christopher Landau on X - "I remember thinking last year that this was one of the most chilling letters I’d ever read. It treats freedom of speech as merely one factor to be weighed in the balance against “detrimental effects on civic discourse and public security.” And the letter was targeted specifically at a conversation on this very platform between @elonmusk , an American, and @realDonaldTrump , also an American then running for the US Presidency. When the letter talks about “content that may incite violence, hate and racism in conjunction with major political—or societal—events around the world” in this context, it’s talking about core political speech. More than any other document I’ve ever read, this letter bares the fangs of the global censorship-industrial complex and underscores that unelected bureaucrats in the EU are ready, willing, and able to use their regulatory reach to try to influence elections and nullify the First Amendment in the US. When I wrote earlier this month about the glaring inconsistency between US relations with the EU and NATO, this is exactly what I had in mind. If the sovereign nations of Europe allow the EU to attack fundamental freedoms in the US, those same nations cannot expect the US to defend fundamental freedoms in Europe."
Tony on X - "Basically the letter is implying that an interview with a major political figure -- whom ~50% Americans voted for -- would be hate speech. Crazy."
Viktor Kovalenko on X - "In their pursuit of 'progressiveness,' some (not all) European political elites, like Thierry Breton, ended up mimicking Lenin’s, Stalin’s, and Putin’s totalitarian tactics to suppress freedoms. As a result, the travel restrictions for them serve as both a precaution against spreading this ideology to U.S. soil and a clear signal of awareness about how misguided their actions are."
DogeDesigner on X - "EU fined 𝕏 over its blue check system even though card payments already tie verification to real identity. Meanwhile they did not fine Meta, even though it also offers paid blue checks. Why penalize 𝕏 but not Meta?"
Camus on X - "The most epic middle finger in digital history just happened – and it came from millions of ordinary Europeans. The very same day the EU Commission hit X with a €140 million fine for the “deceptive” blue checkmark… …X shot straight to #1 on the App Store and Google Play in every single EU country. 27 countries. All #1. Overnight.
Elon Musk: “Record-breaking downloads.”
Marco Rubio: “This is an attack on all American tech and the American people.”
JD Vance (one day earlier): “The EU should support free speech instead of attacking American companies.”
Brussels tried to punish a platform. Europe answered by making it the most downloaded app on the entire continent. This wasn’t coordinated. It was spontaneous. It was millions of people quietly saying: “We decide what we use.” From Lisbon to Helsinki, Dublin to Bucharest – regular Europeans just proved who really holds the power in 2025. The message couldn’t be clearer. What does this historic download surge tell us about where Europe actually stands on open conversation?"
Western civilisation can only be saved if the EU is abolished - "Musk’s remarks were in response to the EU fining his social media company X a staggering €120m (£105m) for “non-compliance with transparency obligations under the DSA [Digital Services Act]”, citing the supposedly “deceptive design of its ‘blue checkmark’, lack of transparency of its advertising repository” and “failure to provide access to public data for researchers”. This has widely been seen as a highly political move against one of America’s largest corporations, with a vast online following in Europe. The real reason many suspect the European Commission is fining X is not because of its transparency or data practices, but because it has become a thorn in the side of those who hate and fear free speech. In other words, this is not about “checkmarks” or data. It’s about power and control by the Brussels machine, which sees Musk as a threat that must be muzzled. Increasingly, the EU stands for despotism, socialism, mass migration, the suppression of free speech and the destruction of national sovereignty. Many senior US officials and Members of Congress rightly view the European Union as fundamentally undemocratic, run by power-hungry unelected bureaucrats with practically zero accountability... The EU is a real problem for the United States and for the transatlantic alliance. It is dominated by big government, Left-wing ideology, and is sinking under the weight of decades of open-borders policies, threatening the very future of Western civilisation. As Trump and his vice-president JD Vance have made clear, Europe faces an existential crisis of its own making, while adversaries such as China and Russia are seeking to exploit Europe’s weakness. It is in America’s national interest to work with sovereign nation states that share its values, and are based on democratic accountability. As Musk has declared, “The European Union is not democracy – rule of the people – but rather bureaucracy – rule of the unelected bureaucrat.”"
Alexandra Marshall on X - "This is terrifying. Did anyone see Macron's statements? European leaders have pledged to 'retake control' of social media with a 'European agenda of protection and regulation'. He insisted that Europeans should only trust 'established news outlets'. Yeah - because the biggest threat facing Europe is definitely frustrated peasants talking about all the foreigners attacking them and destroying their country - not the politicians and their open-borders policy that put them there. How can anyone believe that online safety is about 'children'? It is about safety for the political class."
Macron has declared war on free speech | The Spectator Australia - "Emmanuel Macron says Europeans should stop relying on social media for their news and turn back to traditional public media. Speaking in Paris on Wednesday, he said people were ‘completely wrong’ to use social networks for information and should instead depend on journalists and established outlets... He accused X of being ‘dominated by far-right content’ and added that the platform was no longer neutral because its owner had ‘decided to take part in the democratic struggle and in the international reactionary movement’. TikTok, he warned, was no less dangerous. Macron called for ‘a much stronger agenda of protection and regulation in Europe’ to rein in what he views as the excesses of social networks. Macron is urging Europe to ‘take back control of our democratic and informational life’. This is not the first time that he has spoken in such terms. France and its allies, he warned, have been ‘naïve’ in allowing their public debate to be shaped by foreign-owned platforms and algorithms that no longer respect neutrality. To counter what he calls ‘a crisis of information’, he wants a new ‘European agenda of protection and regulation’. It is, in effect, a plan to bring the digital sphere under far stricter political control. Macron’s comments are an attack on how an entire generation gets its news. Over 40 per cent of people under 30 and nearly half of 18- to 30-year-olds now rely on social media for news. He appears to believe they should return to the days of reading and watching state-controlled media. The suggestion is astonishing. It’s frightening to even have to write this but democracy depends on access to competing points of view, not on state-managed television and subsidised newspapers. Macron cannot seriously believe that it would be good for democracy if Europeans were driven back to getting their news from government-aligned networks. Macron also blamed foreign interference, accusing Russia of being ‘the biggest buyer of fake accounts’ aiming to destabilise European democracies. ‘We’re facing interference on steroids’, he said. Macron has previously cited alleged manipulation of online content during recent elections in Eastern Europe, which he called ‘terrifying’. Yet observers found little evidence of large-scale manipulation in those cases. What really unsettled Paris and Brussels was often the result of those elections and the rejection of EU-backed candidates. His warnings about fake accounts look less like a defence of democracy than an argument for tightening state control over speech. The logical consequence of what Macron is proposing is that to abolish ‘fake accounts’ you must abolish anonymity itself. If Macron is serious about ending fake accounts, and he keeps repeating that he is, the only way to do that is through digital identity. His plan leads inevitably to a system where anyone who wants to post or comment online must first prove who they are. The architecture for full control of social networks in the Europe already exists. The EU’s eIDAS regulation requires every member state to issue digital identities. There is France Identité, Germany has eID, Italy its SPID. Originally designed for banking, healthcare and tax, these IDs could easily be integrated into online services. Macron’s vision would plug them directly into the Digital Services Act. The result would be an internet where every post is traceable to a verified name. It’s a short step from fighting ‘fake accounts’ to outlawing anonymous speech altogether. For years, Macron has argued that the internet must be brought to heel. When he cannot legislate at home, he does it through Brussels. The EU’s Digital Services Act already gives regulators the power to police what they call ‘systemic risks’ online, a term broad enough to cover disinformation, hate speech, or anything judged destabilising to democracy. Under the Act, platforms can be fined up to 6 per cent of global turnover, a threat that forces them to police themselves long before Brussels intervenes. The result is over-compliance and the quiet erosion of free speech. Add the eIDAS digital-identity framework, and Macron suddenly has the tools to pursue his long-standing ambition of ending online anonymity. In France itself, Macron is running out of power... Macron may be paralysed in Paris, but in Europe he can still act like a statesman. The danger is that he could still in the time that he has left in office shape the rules that define what Europeans can and cannot say. Macron insists he’s defending democracy from manipulation and hate. But that’s the excuse. His vision is of a Europe where free speech is tolerated only when it is traceable, and where platforms pre-emptively silence anything that might draw a regulator’s glare. He calls it a ‘resurgence of democracy’. It’s nothing of the kind. It’s the bureaucratisation of thought, and the beginning of a continent where debate survives only on licence. If Macron has his way, Europe’s public square will not just be regulated, it will be licensed."
Desperate Macron is now ready to use the French media to stifle dissent - "Emmanuel Macron has long been fixated by fake news and “disinformation”. In a speech in January 2018, he promised to “develop our legal means of protecting democracy against fake news”, singling out the threat from Russia. This obsession, however, is now being used to punish his enemies and marginalise media he dismisses as “far Right”. This is why, on Monday, Macron’s office denied in a social media post that the president was planning an Orwellian “ministry of truth”. It also rubbished the notion that he had a soft spot for Pravda – the official newspaper of the Soviet Union. The president was forced on the defensive after a barrage of justified criticism over the weekend from the conservative press and political class. They were alarmed at a speech made by Macron last week in which he declared his wish to introduce a “professional certification” of the media in order to distinguish between what is fact and what is fake. Macron has stressed that he would not issue the certification of veracity but it would be done by the journalists themselves. This would include greater powers to take broadcasters off air. In February this year one of France’s most popular free-to-air stations, C8, was shut down by the regulator; the decision had nothing to do with Russian interference but because its editorial control allegedly didn’t respect individual rights. Many on the Right, including Marine Le Pen, suspected the real reason was because C8 was more populist than progressive. It was, she claimed, a “worrying decision that rules in favour of the Ayatollahs of group-think”. C8 was part of the media group owned by Vincent Bolloré, the conservative tycoon who is the bête noire of the French elite. His other media interests include a Sunday newspaper, a radio station called Europe 1 and CNews, a television station that has in a short space of time become the most popular source of news in France. Its success enrages progressives. They refuse to appear on CNews because they claim it is “far Right”. By “far Right”, they mean it doesn’t shy away from confronting troubling questions about mass immigration and insecurity. On the other hand France Televisions, the state broadcaster, prefers not to tackle such sensitive issues. France’s state-owned radio stations are also tainted by Left-wing bias. A conservative think-tank used artificial intelligence throughout October to monitor the ideological orientation during the morning output of two stations, France Inter and France Culture. France Inter was 60 per cent Left-wing and 16 per cent Right-wing, and France Culture was 66 to six in favour of the Left. This came as little surprise. In 2023 the head of France Inter, Adèle Van Reeth, said she was proud that the station was “progressive”. Did she consult the French taxpayer about this ideological orientation? Evidently not, which is perhaps one reason why France Inter has lost 460,000 listeners this year. Public television is also shedding viewers as the French flock instead to independent broadcasters, particularly those which lean to the Right. They don’t believe they spread false information; they believe they tell inconvenient truths that the elite would rather not hear. CNews doesn’t champion Marine Le Pen but nor does it knock her. It gives her a platform, as does her protégé, Jordan Bardella, increasingly tipped to replace Le Pen as the National Rally’s presidential candidate in 2027. Bardella said that Macron’s idea to tighten media control was “tampering with freedom of expression”. It was, added Bardella, the act of a president who “has lost power and seeks to maintain it by controlling information”. That’s a truth unlikely to be heard in Macron’s new ministry."
david fant on X - "EU makes more from fines on US tech, than tax from ALL of public European tech in 2024 EU fined US tech companies €3.8B meanwhile public internet tech companies paid only €3.2B in income tax"
Hunter Ash on X - "> create economic system in which founding and scaling a tech company is basically impossible
> run out of money
> fine American tech companies which could only exist outside that environment for not complying with its rules
Not the biggest Kant fan, but c’mon."
Campbell on X - "not actually a parody anymore that Europe’s primary export is regulation."
Thread by @sunnyright on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Europeans play this delusional game where they insist they have complete free speech, and then when you mention the things they can’t say or read, they declare that to be hate speech which totally isn’t free speech. It’s “No True Scotsman” for a continent in cultural decline. They take everything they’re not allowed to say, post, or read, and conveniently declare that speech as “not free speech” and therefore by definition they have complete free speech because they can say all the things it’s approved and popular to say. Meanwhile, these delusional folks insist that the U.S. has book bans because a local library may not spend taxpayer money on a book which is still available for anyone to buy on Amazon. It’s a continent of deluded, watching their culture and freedom being torn down around them, trying to convince themselves that all is well and besides the neighbor’s grass is a bit overgrown."
Thread by @mmjukic on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "It's hard to over-emphasize how utterly unprepared educated progressive Europeans are for even the mildest open debate that challenges their positions. They are basically dodos living in a completely closed intellectual hugbox represented by publicly-funded state TV. These people have literally never, not once in their lives, encountered genuine intellectual opposition to any of their views, even second-hand. Every instance of "debate" in their lives, from university to TV, is just a carefully coordinated ritual with a predetermined outcome. At least American progressives have had to contend with Fox News, the College Republicans, and President Donald Trump, which means they at least need to go through the motions of coming up with counter-arguments. *None* of this exists for Euro progs. The closest thing to a debate Europeans have ever seen is when, once every few years, state TV brings on a "far-right activist" like some kind of exotic freakshow and they get ritually harangued and insulted by a panel of incredulous and appalled state TV commentators. The American progressive culture that includes loudmouth e-celebs and has a need to actually organize cancellations of opponents is way more free speech-oriented than European progressive culture, where debate is just unheard-of and cancellation means filing a police report. For all these reasons pressure to loosen speech restrictions will be bitterly resisted, but is also a very effective point of leverage for the Trump admin, since Europe in theory is committed to free speech and actual free speech would greatly reduce the power of incumbents. In my opinion, whether progressive or not, at least partially replacing the current crop of European political elites with people who are capable of understanding and responding to a simple argument rather than immediately calling the police in a panic can only be a good thing. Do we really want to open the floodgates for European Matt Yglesias, European Ben Shapiro, and European Richard Hanania? As much as we Europeans may shudder at this thought, this is an unfortunate but necessary byproduct of creating some positive selection for political elites. There are some benefits to the closed, static European system, yes, however Europe is no longer on a safe upward path but facing multiple serious crises of governance, so the static strategy is no longer actually safe."
Thread by @nic_carter on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I think most Europeans are actually completely ignorant about their track record for arrests for social media posts, probably because their press is captive and the data is almost always heavily censored / not released. But here are the facts:
- UK: >10k arrests per year for "offensive communications", basically mean tweets. in 2022 alone, 77k "public order offences" investigated by police. by far the worst offender.
- Germany: hides and obscures the data. but 4,486 cases of Volksverhetzung (incitement to hatred) in 2018. most of these are online posts. this means we're talking a few thousand arrests for online speech per year
- France: hides the data. about 3000 cases a year for racist offenses that are purely speech-related and carry no actual physical harm (“injures, diffamations, provocation à la haine”)
In the US, posts for merely offensive speech are not criminal. Yes, you can still be arrested for making specific threats, stalking, etc. But you won't get arrested for calling a politician fat, as happens in Europe. These are plain facts.
the EU is welcome to be fundamentally more restrictive about speech if they want to, but don't try to pretend otherwise with some fake metric by an astroturfed nonprofit funded by the EU. Objectively, America has the freest speech and press on the planet, and it's not even close. i know this is a successful form of euro ragebait and probably not a sincere post, but it's worth reminding people because the truth about europe today is just so absurd."
Bad Kitty Unleashed 🦁 💪🏻 on X - "🔥🔥🔥Breaking! The European Union is utilizing AI bots and human RESISTANCE to brainwash and re-educate social media users! This is thru their new program called HateDemics, which is also used to counter deportations by politicians. We will literally have tyrant forced, re-education camps, on social media. “Hate speech holds a dangerous power, as when used by the wrong politicians, it means deportation, disappearance, etc. Hate Speech is the phenomenon, and Al the technological development.” And they also coined US social media billionaires as the, “Speech Mafia”. “What we can call the "speech mafia", meaning a group of bilionaires, are benefiting from the repression of free speech to serve their own economic interests: they are monopolising speech and using it as a weapon.” Anyways let’s discuss what Hatedemics advertises. “The Aim is to : strengthen the preventive and reactive measures against hate speech and disinformation online. It aims to empower NGOs/CSOs, factcheckers, public authorities, and youngsters as activists to effectively prevent and combat polarisation, the spread of racist, xenophobic and intolerant speech, as well as conspiracy theories.” Counter narrative interventions 😏: “Automatically assess behavioural changes determined by the counter-narrative intervention. The combination of these technologies will allow for more focused and timely online interventions (i.e. advanced targeted search followed by relevant textual suggestions), resulting in a more efficient and effective professional and volunteer effort.” Acts of resistance 😏: “Over the long term, counter-narratives must evolve into acts of resistance, with humans playing an active role in this process.” “The project will empower these target groups (NGO’s, youth activists etc) to counter instances of hate speech and hate crimes that are rooted in disinformation and affect several vulnerable groups. They will have access to a variety of tools that enhance their capacity to effectively prevent and combat polarisation, as well as the spread of racist, xenophobic, intolerant speech, and conspiracy theories online in an impactful manner.” And they are quite literally going to have the RESISTANCE wrecking havoc online. The original name for these types of trolls are Elves, as I have previously exposed. They were first used for the UK spook led Integrity Initiative. Here’s what we have to look forward to: Recall for the CTI League files, they used Reality Team elves on folks. Reality Team turned out to be quite vicious if you thought differently. A totally psychotic moral superiority complex prevailed. My entire house was hacked as a result because they were after some of my research. Similar ops resulted in bullycide, mental disorders, and institutionalization of their victims. They actually celebrated when they bullied a conservative to death. I’ve seen it.. You get what appears to perfect ladies and gentlemen who turn into literal tyrants. It’s a power trip. Key skills needed of their trainees: “Key skills expected: how to debunk online misinformation that fuels hate speech, CREATING NEW or ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES.” Here’s info on their consortium, I’ll show more on this later: “The Hatedemics Consortium of 13 partners and 1 associated partner representing 6 MSs brings forward a broad European perspective with exceptional expertise.” “The Hatedemics platform is co-created with the expertise of fact-checkers, NGOs operators for civil society members. It wil be available in 5 languages (Italian, Spanish, English, Polish and Maltese).” Sources and additional info to follow."
