{"id":315233,"date":"2025-09-14T07:08:28","date_gmt":"2025-09-14T07:08:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=315233"},"modified":"2025-09-15T07:51:57","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T07:51:57","slug":"europes-digital-speech-police-wont-stop-at-the-border","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=315233","title":{"rendered":"Europe\u2019s Digital Speech Police Won\u2019t Stop At The Border"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lorcan Price \u2013 Daily Wire Sept 13, 2025<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Imagine facing your nation\u2019s Supreme Court for the \u201ccrime\u201d of sharing a Bible verse. On October 30, that\u2019s the reality for P\u00e4ivi R\u00e4s\u00e4nen, a Finnish grandmother<\/a>, medical doctor, and parliamentarian. Her soon-to-be seven-year ordeal began in 2019, when she questioned her church\u2019s support for Helsinki Pride and posted a Bible verse on X. That single tweet triggered 13 hours of police interrogation, two full trials, and now a third prosecution under Finland\u2019s \u201chate speech\u201d law.<\/p>\n

R\u00e4s\u00e4nen\u2019s case might sound like an exclusively European story \u2014 but it also serves as a warning about the growing threat of censorship coming from the EU. While someone living outside of Europe might assume they are exempt from the troubling wave of censorship spreading across the continent, that assumption is dangerously mistaken.<\/p>\n

The EU has implemented an online censorship law that could turn stories like P\u00e4ivi\u2019s into a legalized norm. The law, known as The Digital Services Act<\/a> (DSA), poses one of the greatest threats to free speech online, not just in Europe, but worldwide.<\/p>\n

Presented as a way to create a \u201csafe online environment,\u201d the DSA is in fact a sweeping censorship regime. It compels major online platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, X, and Google to take down \u201cillegal content\u201d or face crippling fines of up to 6% of their global revenue. For companies like Apple or Meta, that could mean billions. With penalties this steep, platforms have every incentive to preemptively over-censor content, not just in Europe, but everywhere.<\/p>\n

And what counts as \u201cillegal\u201d content? That depends on the varying laws of 27 EU member states. One country\u2019s vague definition of \u201chate speech\u201d or \u201cmisinformation\u201d can ripple outward, forcing platforms to delete content across the entire internet. What Brussels bureaucrats decide could silence speech in Boston or Boise \u2014 posts fully protected by the First Amendment, gone in an instant.<\/p>\n

The enforcement system makes this worse. The DSA empowers \u201ctrusted flaggers,\u201d which can include activist groups, regulators, or even private entities, to demand removals. The European Commission itself sits at the top, monitoring and punishing companies that don\u2019t comply. In practice, this means platforms will act first and ask questions later, scrubbing lawful speech before it can cause \u201cproblems\u201d in Europe.<\/p>\n

P\u00e4ivi R\u00e4s\u00e4nen\u2019s case shows what happens when governments weaponize vague speech laws: peaceful expression treated as criminal conduct. The DSA threatens to make this dynamic global. By institutionalizing vague categories like \u201chate speech\u201d and \u201cdisinformation,\u201d it builds the architecture for censorship<\/a> that knows no borders.<\/p>\n

Americans should not be lulled into thinking this is someone else\u2019s problem. The internet is global, and so are the platforms that host our speech. Already, U.S. lawmakers \u2014 from the House Judiciary Committee to Vice President JD Vance \u2014 have warned that the DSA could chill constitutionally protected expression<\/a> here at home. The danger isn\u2019t hypothetical: EU officials have already floated the possibility of censoring American political figures under the law.<\/a><\/p>\n

The stakes are enormous. If the EU succeeds in exporting its censorship regime, authoritarian governments worldwide are likely to use it as a blueprint. They will point to Brussels as justification for their own crackdowns. Already, we\u2019ve seen Europe attempt to export the DSA model abroad. For example, at the EU-Canada Summit, Canada and the EU agreed to advance a Digital Trade Agreement that expands the reach of DSA principles.<\/a><\/p>\n

Free speech does not stop at national borders. If America cares about freedom of expression, it must push back against the DSA and its creeping global reach. P\u00e4ivi R\u00e4s\u00e4nen\u2019s trial is a human face on what\u2019s at stake. Her courage reminds us that when governments claim the power to police speech, no voice is safe.<\/p>\n

Lorcan Price is an Irish barrister and legal counsel for ADF International.<\/em><\/p>\n

Source\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

P\u00e4ivi R\u00e4s\u00e4nen questioned her church\u2019s support for Helsinki Pride and posted a Bible verse on X. That led to 13 hours of police interrogation and two full trials under Finland\u2019s \u201chate speech\u201d law. However, this sort of thing is not confined to the EU. Similar \u2018hate speech\u2019 legislation could be coming your way soon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":194266,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[42,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-315233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-controlling-the-news-andor-the-free-exchange-of-ideas-and-information","category-The_Media"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=315233"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":315234,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315233\/revisions\/315234"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/194266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=315233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=315233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=315233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}