There is much you could reasonably criticise the Trump administration for, but you ought to be equally quick to praise it where and when it does good. And nowhere is this more the case than with the free speech pressure it’s applying to Europe at present, as evidenced by this week’s report from the House Judiciary Committee.
That report contained the bombshell claims that Coimisiún na Meán regulators worked with the European Commission in the run-up to Ireland’s 2024 general election and the 2025 presidential election in order to disadvantage conservative or populist political parties and candidates.
It said that ahead of elections, An Coimisiún sent tech platforms a list of questions they should be prepared to answer, “including several about platforms’ DSA risk assessment, cooperation with left-wing NGOs and biased fact-checkers, and platforms’ censorship “processes [and] procedures”.
The picture that emerges, as critics of the European Commission’s digital regime have long argued, is one of intense, coercive pressure applied to tech companies with operations in Europe, ostensibly with the aim of cracking down on “disinformation” and “misinformation”, with the ultimate effect that political alternatives were disproportionately affected.
One of the most egregious transgressions, what the Americans describe as the European Commission’s “most aggressive censorship steps”, occurred during the 2024 Romanian presidential election, which, if readers will cast their minds back, saw Romania’s constitutional court annul the results of the first round of the country’s presidential election, won by Calin Georgescu, “after Romanian intelligence services alleged that Russia had covertly supported Georgescu through a coordinated TikTok campaign,” as the report puts it.
Well, the Committee claims that internal TikTok documents it procured “seem to undercut this narrative”:
“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.”
There is much more in the report, but those details alone are sufficient to illustrate that significant aspects of the European digital framework are politically motivated, to the benefit of the status quo and to the detriment of everyone else.
The report was followed up on yesterday by contributions before the judiciary committee of the US House of Representatives from Irish comedy writer and activist Graham Linehan and legal counsel with ADF International, Lorcán Price, both of whom lamented the state of debate and the growing plight of free expression across Europe.
Mr Linehan took aim at gender ideology in particular, saying that “gender ideology and free speech cannot coexist” and urging the Committee to exert diplomatic pressure on the British and Irish governments in particular to essentially see sense as far as this issue is concerned.
Meanwhile, Mr Price focused on the ill-effects of the European Digital Services Act and the decline in free expression more broadly which is seeing a Finnish parliamentarian prosecuted for years now for tweeting a Bible verse and people being arrested in the UK for praying silently in the vicinity of abortion providers.
The point is that these issues are now front and centre, and that’s solely because of the Trump administration’s willingness to make this a sticking point with their European counterparts.
Do not expect this issue to be smoothed over in the next few years without one of the transatlantic parties changing course on this issue significantly.
Do not expect the Trump administration to change its course on this, because as set out in its National Security Strategy late last year, it sees the plight of free expression in Europe as being symptomatic of its longstanding ally’s “civilisational erasure”:
“The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”
For America, and understandably so, the concern is that growing “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition” is stirring internal division within their closest economic and military partner, and as the following lines of the NSS make clear, “should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less…Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path”.
In the wake of the NSS’s release, I wrote an article saying that whatever one thinks of the Trump Administration, its criticisms there of Europe’s trajectory were unerring, and in this latest report from the Judiciary Committee, I am once again saying that as far as this issue is concerned, the United States is seeing things more clearly than the European Commission and its various regulatory minions.
It is the Trump administration at its best.