The United States Congress is amping up criticism of the European Union’s social media law — and this time, they’ve brought receipts.
The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee is releasing a report on Friday that singles out the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) as a “foreign censorship threat.” The report, shared exclusively with POLITICO, describes the flagship social media law as a “comprehensive digital censorship law” that threatens the freedom of speech of American citizens.
The White House and U.S. State Department have been going after the EU’s digital rulebook for months, accusing the bloc of unfair, burdensome rules that target American companies and free speech.
On the European side, proponents of these laws want to see them enforced strictly, including on U.S. technology giants. Some EU officials have argued that Washington officials are simply fronting the arguments of their homegrown tech firms.
The Judiciary Committee’s 37-page “interim staff report” is the result of a five-month, still-ongoing inquiry that started with subpoenas issued by the U.S. Congress in February to Big Tech companies.
Evidence attached to the report includes correspondence between top European Commission officials and Jim Jordan, the Republican representative from Ohio and chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.
It also includes non-public information about how the European Commission and national authorities implement the rules, including confidential information from EU workshops, emails between the EU executive and companies, content takedown requests in France, Germany and Poland and readouts from Commission meetings with tech firms.
“On paper, the DSA is bad. In practice, it is even worse,” the report said.
“European censors” at the Commission and EU countries “target core political speech that is neither harmful nor illegal, attempting to stifle debate on topics such as immigration and the environment,” it said. Their censorship is “largely one-sided” against conservatives, it added.
Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said in a comment that freedom of expression “is a fundamental right in the EU. And it is at the heart of our legislations, including the DSA.” He added: “Absolutely nothing in the DSA requires a platform to remove lawful content.”
According to the Commission, “more than 99 percent of content moderation decisions are in fact taken proactively by online platforms to enforce their own Terms & Conditions” and “content removals based on regulatory authorities’ orders to act against illegal content account for less than 0.001 percent,” Regnier said.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Jordan is set to lead a bipartisan congressional delegation to Europe in the coming days to discuss issues of censorship and free speech, a source familiar with the planning said.
The delegation is set to meet with the European Commission’s Executive Vice President for tech policy Henna Virkkunen on Monday, Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told POLITICO.
Behind closed doors
The Commission’s line is that the DSA is apolitical and doesn’t determine what speech is illegal. But the U.S. committee said that behind closed doors it draws a line in the sand.
At the workshop, which POLITICO reported exclusively in March, the Commission asked Big Tech platforms, regulators and civil society how they would react to different scenarios.
One scenario involved a user being exposed to the phrase “We need to take back our country.” In this scenario on “illegal content,” the statement appeared under a photo of a woman in a hijab with the caption “terrorist in disguise,” the documents show.
The Commission said the user in question would be exposed to “illegal hate speech.” The committee argued that the phrase “take back our country” is “a common, anodyne political statement” used by the likes of Kamala Harris.
The Commission also instructed platforms to address memes and satirical content at the workshop.
According to the U.S. committee’s report, the EU kept the workshop secret because the “Commission wants to hide its censorship aims.”
The Commission regularly meets with technology companies and other stakeholders to give information on its policymaking. Some of these meetings — including those informing its competition cases — occur in public, while others take place under varying levels of confidentiality.
The committee report also criticized a system of third parties, comprising trusted flaggers and out-of-court settlement dispute bodies, as being neither impartial nor independent of authorities.
The report criticized the need for fact-checkers to be approved by regulators. It stated that it had identified various conflicts of interest stemming from these organizations’ goals, funding, or litigation against tech platforms.
The report also criticized the regime set up for Very Large Online Platforms, those with more than 45 million monthly active users in the bloc. VLOP designations are “used to burden” non-EU firms, while EU firms are afforded workarounds, it said.
One case that drew the attention of U.S. representatives: Spotify has been allowed to split its products into music and podcasts, thus avoiding the more cumbersome VLOP rules. In the first quarter of 2025, the Swedish firm reported 689 million monthly active users with 37 percent of its subscribers based in Europe.
This article has been updated to include details of a meeting between the U.S. House delegation and the European Commission on Monday.
