US House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan has written to the EU Commission’s Executive VP for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen regarding the bloc’s censorship law, the Digital Services Act.
Jordan wants the EU to, by February 13, inform the committee of how it plans to enforce the law when it comes to US tech companies, and also about investigations that are at this time underway, against Meta and X.
Jordan, as usual, doesn’t mince words and has no problem with referring to the DSA as legislation that has “censorship provisions” – to express what he said was the committee’s serious concern over how those might affect free speech in the US.
Here, he was referring to the nature of social platforms that are global, and how they typically use the same set of policies regarding speech – meaning that if those policies were aligned with the EU’s restrictive legislation, the result could be the setting of “de facto global censorship standards.”
Even though for a long time criticized by speech and privacy advocates, the DSA was flying under the radar of the previous White House, now it is emerging as a significant point, as the two sides clash on a number of issues.
Under the DSA, which the EU and the law’s supporters treat as a set of “moderation” rules for the good of the internet – companies can be forced to pay up to six percent of global turnover or even get blocked.
Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and President Trump have been among those who previously publicly criticized the DSA. Previously, Virkkunen denied that the DSA enabled censorship and even claimed that free speech is “respected and protected” by the law.
Jordan and the commission he heads have been involved in multi-year efforts to expose online censorship practices in the US, but this is not the first time that these investigations have also turned toward the EU.
Last summer, during the presidential campaign in the US, he wrote to then Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton because of this EU official’s scandalous warning issued to Musk regarding a live stream of an interview with then-candidate Trump.
The letter to Virkkunen was reported by Politico, but the EU Commission is yet to publicly comment on its contents.
