OSA, DSA in the crosshairs as US hearing continues assault on foreign laws

Republicans in Washington are very unhappy about online safety legislation in the UK and EU. Today, they threw a formal public fit, in the form of a hearing held by the House Judiciary Committee, dedicated to interrogating “European threats to American free speech and innovation.” The bit of political theater featured, as witnesses, UK Reform leader and Brexit cheerleader Nigel Farage, as well a lawyer representing the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a “faith-based legal advocacy group” that lobbies against same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights. As suggested by the title, it marked a deliberate escalation in the U.S. administration’s attack on the foreign laws it doesn’t like.

Republicans frame online safety laws as anti-American

The Trump administration’s snipes at the EU’s Digital Safety Act (DSA) and the UK Online Safety Act (OSA) have been ongoing since February, when U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance took to the podium at the Munich Security Conference to excoriate his allies for what the president deems to be censorious laws that target American companies.

The hearing picked up the theme with vigor, with Congressman Jim Jordan opening his remarks with doomy pronouncements about a “censorship industrial complex” and a would-be “shakedown of American tech companies under the DSA and the OSA and the digital markets act in the EU.”

The hearing quickly deteriorated into a back-and-forth of accusations that hit all the current notes of American discord: the Chinese threat to the U.S. economy, Donald Trump’s apparent one-sided view of free speech, Islamophobia, trans activism, sharia law and Jeffrey Epstein.

Farage took the opportunity to thank Vance for the scolding in Munich, and also offered an impromptu opinion on how online safety should work, suggesting that hardware such as laptops and handsets could be pre-programmed to block kids.

But its overarching importance is the indication that the U.S. Republican party has no plans to let up on its attacks against overseas laws it sees as stepping on its First Amendment rights, and the growth potential of its big tech companies. Indeed, they continue to position it as a grave threat to the American way of life, and, as Jim Jordan refers to them, the “core values of Western culture.”

Various members of congress accused EU laws of being “backward,” “un-American” and “globalist,” the creation of ignorant bureaucrats in Brussels that hate American freedom because U.S. companies are so much bigger and better than theirs. (Farage accuses Brussels of being “fundamentally anti-American.”) One member inquired about “enforcement tools Trump can take to hold the EU accountable.”

Silicon Valley, Christian right both stand to benefit if laws canned

The party has summoned Farage as a kind of oracle from a UK that has supposedly descended into an authoritarian police state bent on muffling free speech at all costs. The UK gadfly conjured martyrs in the form of former comedian Graham Linehan, recently arrested by UK police over posts on X urging his followers to commit physical assault against transgender people, and Lucy Connolly, the wife of a conservative politician put in jail for suggesting on social media that hotels housing Muslim immigrants should be set on fire.

But for all its avowed virtue, the Trump administration’s attacks on EU and UK law are rooted firmly in the interests of the Silicon Valley billionaires that have pledged allegiance to Trump, and in the Christian right that wants to use free speech arguments as a Trojan Horse for crackdowns on what it deems to be a threat to the American way of life.

As was amply pointed out by witness David Kaye – a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression – gross violations of fundamental rights to freedom of expression are happening at present: social media screening, deportations based on op-eds, requiring loyalty oaths of federal workers. Per Congressman Jamie Raskin, “when Trump doesn’t like the news, he sues the broadcaster.”

If the Republican party in the U.S. is accusing the EU and UK of being “engines of global censorship for regimes looking to regulate by whim,” there is surely a degree of projection at play. While the U.S. stews about foreign laws interfering with American freedoms, they happily invite a divisive UK politician to offer snide advice. Arguments for freedom of opinion are made by bureaucrats who have been summoned to toe the party line.

Once again referencing Linehan’s arrest, Farage asked the hearing, “when do we become North Korea?” Both sides had many opinions to sling, and the current baseline for truth is in radical flux. But perhaps the statement most evocative of North Korea’s Juche cult came from Chairman Jim Jordan, who – objecting to a department created by the Biden administration to address misinformation – declared that “today’s misinformation is tomorrow’s truth.” Kim Jong-Un would be proud.

Article Topics

age verification  |  children  |  Digital Services Act  |  EU age verification  |  legislation  |  Online Safety Act  |  social media  |  U.S. Government  |  UK age verification  |  United States