On Feb. 3, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee released a report titled, “The Foreign Censorship Threat, Part II: Europe’s Decade-Long Campaign to Censor the Global Internet and How it Harms American Speech in the United States.” As the title suggests, the report accuses the EU of enforcing a major censorship regime that specifically targeted “conservative” and “populist” political views, including so-called pro-American views, and toward this end interfered in the elections of at least eight countries. These include Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, Moldova, Romania, Ireland, and the EU parliamentary elections in June 2024. The European Commission “successfully pressured major social media platforms to change their global content moderation rules,” the press release announcing the report states.
“The [EU] Commission’s new legislative and regulatory proposals likewise indicate that it is only increasing its efforts to control online speech and regulate outside of the EU’s borders,” it adds.
The report usefully highlights the use of labels such as “hate speech” and “misinformation” as excuses to censor political speech with which EU bureaucrats disagreed. The topics it highlights as the subjects of censorship are the COVID-19 pandemic, mass migration, climate change, and transgender issues. This even included “Developing and applying inoculation measures that pre-emptively build resilience against possible and expected disinformation narratives,” the so-called “pre-bunking” insanity that EIR has covered previously. Documents provided by TikTok show that it censored over 45,000 pieces of “misinformation” ahead of the 2024 EU elections as part of the EU’s demands.
As the most egregious case, the report highlights that of Romania’s 2024 presidential election, where outsider Calin Georgescu won the first round of voting but was then forced out of the race, due to allegations of “Russian interference.” The Judiciary Committee report includes internal TikTok documents which show that there was never any evidence for such blatant interference: “In submissions to the European Commission, which used the unproven allegation of Russian interference to investigate TikTok’s content moderation practices, TikTok stated that it ‘ha[d] not found, nor been presented with, any evidence of a coordinated network of 25,000 accounts associated with Mr. Georgescu’s campaign’—the key allegation by the intelligence authorities. By late December 2024, media reports citing evidence from Romania’s tax authority found that the alleged Russian interference campaign had, in fact, been funded by another Romanian political party. But the election results were never reinstated, and in May 2025, the establishment-preferred candidate won Romania’s presidency in the rescheduled election.”
Romanian officials, including Georgescu himself and George Simion, chairman of Romania’s AUR party, the second-largest party in the parliament, have highlighted the significance of the report and called for new elections to return Romania to democracy.
