The House Judiciary Committee has released an interim staff report titled “The Foreign Censorship Threat, Part II,” alleging that the European Commission has conducted a comprehensive decade-long campaign to pressure major social media platforms into changing their global content moderation policies, thereby infringing on American free speech rights within the United States.
Based on tens of thousands of pages of nonpublic documents produced under subpoena from ten major technology companies, the report claims that since at least 2020, European regulators held over 100 closed-door meetings with platforms to aggressively censor content. The Committee asserts that these efforts targeted core political speech regarding COVID-19 policies, mass migration, and transgender issues—often under the guise of combating “hate speech” and “disinformation”.
The report frames the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) as the culmination of this campaign, following earlier “voluntary” codes of practice on disinformation and hate speech that allegedly served as precursors to binding censorship legislation. It cites Germany’s 2017 NetzDG law as an early model and claims the European Commission treated compliance with these codes as de facto safe harbors under the DSA.
The Committee highlights the European Commission’s December 2025 €120 million fine against X (formerly Twitter) as evidence of retaliation for the platform’s defense of free speech, noting that the decision allegedly asserted extraterritorial authority to force American companies to hand over U.S. user data to researchers worldwide.
The report also alleges coordination between EU regulators and civil society organizations to expand censorship, noting that one NGO advocated removing “everything that can be considered as hateful and harmful” beyond illegal content. It claims the Commission disproportionately targeted conservative viewpoints and interfered in elections across France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, and Moldova between 2023 and 2025.
Committee Chairman Jim Jordan stated the investigation will continue developing legislative solutions to defend against what the report calls an “existential risk” to Americans’ First Amendment rights.