Michael McGrath, Ireland’s Commissioner in Brussels, is in San Francisco to push the European Union’s online censorship drive, multiple sources have confirmed.
The former Minister for Finance — who now serves as the European Commission’s Rule of Law and Consumer Protection czar — landed in Silicon Valley on April 14 for meetings with senior tech bosses, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
According to a report by favoured EU outlet Politico, these meetings have focused on the upcoming Digital Fairness Act — a piece of sister legislation to the bloc’s censorious Digital Services Act — as well as efforts to remove children from social media using a system of government-issued digital IDs.
McGrath is also scheduled to meet senior Anthropic official Jeff Bleich to discuss AI safety later today, with the company responsible for the increasingly strategic Claude family of language models.
“Children must be protected by design, not as an afterthought,” the Commissioner told insiders at Politico.
The development is in line with previous Irish and European lobbying efforts in the Bay area, with both Dublin and Brussels having long pushed for pro-European censorship within US tech.
Both offices operate full-time offices in San Francisco that are responsible with liasing with senior figures in the digital sector, with the European liaison office in the city having initially operated directly out of the Irish consulate before moving to a dedicated facility.
The operations of European officials in the US have not gone unnoticed, with Republican Senator Ted Cruz raising the alarm shortly before the reelection of Donald Trump that Europeans were pressuring tech giants to censor speech with the help of the Biden administration.
Writing to the then-Biden-controlled FCC, Cruz warned that both the European Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act posed a threat to US speech, as well as a serious security threat, with evidence mounting that China was taking advantage of Europe’s digital crackdown.
“Taken together, the DMA and DSA objectively discriminate against U.S. companies by imposing enormous regulatory compliance costs and penalties on them, while handing companies from other countries—especially China—a competitive edge,” he warned.
“It is one thing for the EU to target U.S. businesses, however misguided such efforts may be. But it is altogether unthinkable that an agency of the U.S. government would actively help the EU do so.”
The US House of Congress has since confirmed that EU tech regulations pose an active danger to US businesses, as well as the speech of American citizens.
“The European Commission, in a comprehensive decade-long effort, has successfully pressured social media platforms to change their global content moderation rules, thereby directly infringing on Americans’ online speech in the United States,” a report from the House Committee on the Judiciary reads.
Though often framed as combating so-called ‘hate speech’ or ‘disinformation,’ the European Commission worked to censor true information and political speech about some of the most important policy debates in recent history—including the COVID-19 pandemic, mass migration, and transgender issues.”
“After ten years, the European Commission has established sufficient control of global online speech to comprehensively suppress narratives that threaten the European Commission’s power.”