Europe's Free Speech Crackdown and the "Censorship Industrial Complex" with Sarah B. Rogers

Key Takeaway

Europe's censorship laws are reaching into America through massive fines on US tech platforms, arresting over 12,000 people yearly for speech—more than Russia or China. The UK's Online Safety Act and EU's Digital Services Act force American companies to comply with European speech restrictions or face penalties. US State Department is pushing back: if you want to fine American companies for upholding the First Amendment, expect consequences on trade, visas, and diplomatic relations.

Episode Overview

Under Secretary Sarah Rogers discusses the State Department's new approach to defending American free speech values abroad, particularly against UK and EU regulations that fine US tech platforms for not censoring content. The conversation covers the stark differences between American and European approaches to online speech, with over 12,000 arrests in the UK alone for speech acts—more than authoritarian regimes. Rogers explains how regulations like the UK's Online Safety Act and EU's Digital Services Act effectively function as 'censorship tariffs' on American companies, and how the Trump administration is using diplomatic and economic tools to push back.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Europe's Free Speech Crackdown and the "Censorship Industrial Complex" with Sarah B. Rogers from All-In Podcast. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

David and I are staying in a 300-year-old house and uh we've both smashed our head on the beams twice already. Uh but this is both our first Davos, David. It's our first Davos. We've been here for 24 hours and um uh any first impressions here. Um it's interesting. You know, we're we're staying very far away. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, they didn't apparently they didn't want you to be part of this. They didn't want me too close. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But we finally we got you finally got you an invitation.

your invitation to not get lost in the mail. My invitation didn't get lost in the mail this time. For those of you who watch the pod, you know what I'm talking about. Inside joke. Um, but it's great to be here and uh great to be here at USA House. Thanks to all the sponsors and um really delighted for our first guest for the pod. Sarah Rogers works for is the under secretary uh for public diplomacy at the State Department. for members here who don't know this position or what you've been charged with or what you've decided to work on.

I'm curious about that. Do they tell you what to do or do you come up with your own mandate? But yeah, tell us everything about what you're doing. you're doing. you're doing. Longtime listener, first time guest and thank you to both of us. Uh thank you from all of us at America House for joining us here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I am the under secretary for public diplomacy and when I got this nomination, my friends and family all congratulated me and then conferably said what is that?

Yeah. Uh so diplomacy traditionally concerns the relationship between the American government and foreign governments. Two ambassadors, shake hands, make a deal, um solve a war. But public diplomacy is different. Public diplomacy addresses the relationship between the American government and foreign publics. And this has become a very important under secretariat with the rise of the internet and then during the Biden administration especially uh these mushrooming concerns about so-called disinformation and what do we do when there are allegedly malign influences on the public view of America um the public's intersection with American interest how do we interact with the internet and the information ecosystem that is part of my portfolio I also oversee other soft power activities including our educational and cultural and sports diplomacy.

So I am privileged to play a role in the World Cup this summer and the LA Olympics coming up and uh the Fulbright program and others like it. So it. So it. So you seem particularly focused on freedom of speech and a little bit of tension between our standards and the companies in America which have made the move to being strongly freedom of speech. something that kind of got lost in our industry for a couple years in technology but has now made I think um some significant progress on does seem like some folks in Europe don't share our love of freedom of speech.

Maybe you could explain to us what the tension is today and what some of the regulations are that have been put in place in Europe. Europe. Europe. Sure. Absolutely. So the two main regulations that I've interfaced with since taking office and part of this is just a product of my first official trip was to Europe and while I was in Europe a large fine came down on an American platform X under the digital services act which I'll get into in a moment. So Europe um especially since since the second world war but I think really since the American founding and our codification of the first amendment you know America has taken a much stronger approach on free speech than even most of the west and with the rise of the internet and all communication or a lot of communication becoming transnational.

We see these new technocratic regulatory frameworks in Europe bumping up against the commitments to free speech in the United States. And Jason makes an important observation that for a while some of these large American technology platforms were more inclined to moderate or to censor kind of in conformity with some prevailing um some prevailing norms and concerns in the United States. But I think in the United States we've shifted back toward a less centurious approach and so have these platforms. And at the same time, you have uh regulatory efforts in Europe and the UK.

And I'll I'll name a couple that I think have been particularly relevant. So the UK has something called the online safety act. The online safety act imposes age gating obligations on a broad swath of content, almost any content that's upsetting, and then requires platforms to run risk assessments for and in some cases remove content that the UK would say is illegal. And in the UK, you know, major categories of content are banned, are rendered illegal. That would not be illegal in the United States, which is where these platforms are located, which is where their original user base is, which is where their executives live um and which is their primary regulator.

So, under the online safety act, we now have um active litigation by the relevant regulator against several American websites. These are websites that don't reach into the UK. They're not these aren't websites dedicated to discussing the queen. They're not websites that sell goods in the United Kingdom. These are websites that exist on American soil, host large quantities of American users, and in often in oftentimes discuss American political topics. But because users are permitted to discuss them in a way that offends UK law, there's the imposition of a UK fine.

The Digital Services Act in the EU is similar. So DSA contains but doesn't just contain uh contentbased regulations, hate speech regulations. So DSA requires all of the EU member states to adopt at minimum kind of a floor for hate speech prohibition. And those prohibitions in the statute, I think, are much vagger than American lawyers are accustomed to. And one of our jurist And one of our jurist credential principles under the American First Amendment is if you're going to enact any regulation that comes close to touching speech, it needs to be very clear what you are prohibiting because you have this chilling effect concept.

A vague prohibition will chill speech, especially when that prohibition is imposed on a large riskaverse corporation. So you impose vague prohibitions on large riskaverse corporations and that's how it becomes illegal to make jokes around the water cooler for example. You see the same effect here. Digital services act also regulates other aspects of um digital commerce and social media. So it regulates um things like transparency and competition. And I think you know we have we have a lot of Europeans in the audience today and I hope none of them will find it contentious if I suggest that in Europe there is more of a focus on uh technocratic regulation as an arbiter of what's acceptable than there might be in America where we have this tradition that um really emphasizes like rugged individualism and individual conscience.

And to be clear, no one is saying, certainly not the State Department or America, hey, you can't have your own platforms in Europe, right? right? right? Build your own. Build your own Facebook, build your own Instagram, build your own Twitter/X, Twitter/X, Twitter/X, uh, Tik Tok, whatever you'd like to build, and you can have whatever standards you like on your platforms. We're saying, "Hey, these are our platforms. This is our standard, and we don't want our users uh or our platforms to be receiving fines." That's that's our position.

our position. our position. I I think I think that's basically it. And look, when American companies operate abroad, they abide by the laws where they operate. But at a certain point, so so we recently issued some sanctions, which we'll get into. And one of the individuals we sanctioned uh was a former EU official who threatened Elon Musk with enforcement action because X within the United States had said that it was going to host on a live uh Twitter space an interview with Donald Trump, our president.

So it wasn't that Donald Trump had said anything violative. It wasn't there was a specific piece of content that the EU wanted to ban. It was just that the act of an American business hosting an interview with an American president might offend EU uh EU preferences about speech generated a regulatory threat. And when you reach across borders and make a threat like that, that offends American interests and American values. And so you can expect America to respond. And I think so I my history is as an American lawyer in American courts and we have you know we're a nation of 50 states and each state has its own regulations and we've had to think about you know when there's a website in California that operates in Texas how do you decide to what extent Texas gets to regulate and we have all these jurisdictional concepts like does the website purposefully avail itself of the forum is it is are you posting defamatory statements about a person in Texas but the mere existence of a website in California that Texas doesn't like is hardly ever, basically never, a basis for regulation.

And so when we talk about things like extr territoriality, you know, what we're really talking about is it's undisputed that Europeans get to have their own laws in Europe, but we also get to have our own laws in the United States. And we're celebrating 250 years of American independence. And so we want, you know, we want our markets to be able to interoperate online. Um, but we're not willing to give up American freedom of speech and the bargain. Hey, David, when we look at, and I'm asking you this one so I can give you a pass on it, but what what do you think people are so scared of in the UK when it comes to freedom of speech?

Uh, and and maybe the most freedom of the the most um rockus platform X specifically. Well, I don't think the people are afraid. I think the government is afraid of the people criticizing it and therefore they're engaged in what sensors always do which is protect the people in power. Um there's something Sarah you you should explain this to us but as I understand there have been over 12,000 people is it prosecuted or arrested arrested arrested arrested under the online safety act. Was that just in one year or is that since it since it since it that that was in 2023 alone?

Okay. Okay. Okay. But that isn't just under the online safety act. So I think what's particularly insidious and particularly relevant about statutes like the OSA and the DSA is that these are portals through which existing censorship laws get applied to the internet. So a lot of these Brits are arrested under um ex of under existing statutes like there's a communications act, there's a law against inciting quote unquote racial or religious hatred. And we, I think, have differences of opinion about, you know, what amounts to incitement in America versus the UK.

But so, for example, uh, you had a comedian called Graeme Lahan who tweeted that, um, if a woman sees a penis in a in a ladies room, you know, she should feel free to kick that guy in the balls. And that's that's something a lot of comedians say, and I think it channels an impulse that a lot of Americans and Europeans would frankly consider common sense. But he was dragged out of the airport like a terrorist, had his devices confiscated, was thrown in jail overnight and lost access, my understanding is to his heart medication if I recall correctly.

And because this was an incitement to violence violence violence because this offended some existing law against uh provocative speech in the UK and the the online safety act is a device through which all of those existing laws get applied to the internet. You had another case in the UK where Joey Breton, a footballer, um, called somebody a bike nonce, which nonce is not an American term, but I imagine you're insinuating someone is affeminate for riding a bike so much or in the manner that he rides the bike.

And that resulted in a suspended prison sentence, but still a prison sentence because he called somebody desty. Yeah. Basically, Yeah. Basically, Yeah. Basically, that's what we call in United States. And there were there was there were some other tweets, too, but none none that would meet the bar for American incitement. So, David, you're absolutely right. So that was in a single year of slightly over 12,000 Brits arrested for speech acts and that is more than more than we're arrested that year in Russia, more than in China, more than in Turkey.

And when you talk to Brits about this, you know, you're absolutely right. Most of the British people that you talk to say this is totally unacceptable. And if you look at the polls in the UK, you see public sentiment against this kind of thing. But I've I've had, you know, both public and private engagements with regulators in these countries. And the defense you hear is well, you know, we have a less chilling, less totalitarian environment than China. So maybe more people are willing to break the rules, more people are willing to offend.

But if you arrest 12,000 people a year for speech and you're raising children in an ecosystem where you can be dragged out of the airport for offending the dogmas of transgender activism, then you might not have a different culture than China for long. And and why should the United States be paying to defend your country and support it in fighting say a proxy war against Russia if that's basically the values that are being enforced. Right. Exactly. When we interact with our NATO allies in the NATO context, we hear a lot about our shared history and shared values.

And it's time to ask, you know, what values do we still share? We together with our allies comprised the free world after World War II and the free world that was assembled against communism. But the cornerstone of a free world of any free society has to be freedom of speech and criticizing and the uncomfortable speech is where this actual defense is necessary. necessary. necessary. Yes. Yes. Yes. And we have a very special, you know, bent in the United States to really go after our leaders. I do it every week with David um since he's now a public servant.

I mean, we go at it and they're knocking on people's doors strictly for saying like, "Hey, you know, I I might have disagreements with the Catholic Church. I'm a Catholic." Well, a lot of it's about immigration, right? I mean, so I've seen a bunch of these examples, you know, on X. I saw um one clip on X where a judge was handing down a 2-year sentence against somebody. I don't know if if this rings a bell, but supposedly for speech that I think was criticizing the UK's open immigration policies.

That's where I sense a lot of the the prosecutions are. Right. Right. Right. Right. And this is another place where, you know, free speech and freedom of expression are American values and interests in and of themselves. But another priority for the administration is common sense on mass migration. And a lot of the speech that offends those in power has to do with migration policy. So, there was a 31-month sentence handed down to a suburban mother named Lucy Connelly in the UK uh because after a man called Axel Rudabanka stabbed I think it was a seven-year-old girl, an 8-year-old girl, and a nine-year-old girl at a birthday party.

There was ensuing unrest and she she tweeted uh something anti-migration and it was pretty inflammatory, but it would have been unambiguously legal in the United States. Um, she said, 'If this is what migration is going to do to our country, and I'm paraphrasing slightly, but I remember it pretty well. If this is what migration means, then burn down the migrant hotels for all I care. Uh, this was a berieved mother who' lost a child. She saw three little girls murdered for no reason. And she reacted and then she felt bad and she deleted the tweet.

That was a 30 31-month sentence. 31 month 31 month 31 month 31month sentence in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, you have actual pedophiles, actual child sex offenders who get minimal prison or none in the United Kingdom. And that that's led to this um epithet that you hear among UK activists, this quote unquote two-tier policing, this activist cause that they've assembled around because they sense that if you oppose mass migration, if you make that kind of critique, you are subject to a different justice system than the kind of person who merely agitates for Sharia law in Britain or merely downloads child pornography in Britain.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So, I emphasized that for Yeah. So I mean so I think um that was the gong of righteousness. We appreciate it. And then just to add one more dimension to this uh so US companies have been getting fined like crazy right in the UK and then the EU. Um and I think it's related to this issue but can you just describe that like Yeah. Um because that that's where this crosses over into you know an ally doing something that we [snorts] think is mad into directly hurting American interests I guess right or or or right so I don't believe there have been any big fines under the UK online safety act yet but um its provisions take effect over time and some of those provisions are just coming online now including the ones relating to AI okay and we have active litigation in American courts right now.

Um, one of the leading lawsuits involves the website 4chan, which people who are very online in America may be familiar with. 4chan is kind of a no holdsbred uh promodial soup for memes and the like. The cat memes come out of there. A lot of activism Occupy Wall Street came out of 4chan, but 4chan has essentially no censorship rules. It bans child pornography. That's pretty much it. And so the UK has decided that 4chan is not allowed to exist unless it pays a bunch of money to the United Kingdom for not policing its speech in accord with uh UK laws, the numerous UK speech statutes that led to prison sentences like the one I just discussed.

But there was a large fine handed down during my recent European tour against X and I believe it wasund€140 wasund€140 wasund€140 million euros, but that might be dollars. I'm dollars. I'm dollars. I'm Elon because they disagree with his influence uh in uh the UK. Look, I can't speak for the UK regulators, but I can make inferences. What's What's What's your ex X has a particular political veillance. Um we saw Joe Biden after Elon acquired Twitter saying, you know, we we've got to find ways to go after him.

And I think that that sentiment might be shared. But as an under secretary of state, I'm not an advocate for one American company or even one American viewpoint on the free speech issue. If any American company were fined, let's say $140 million even by a foreign power for upholding the American first amendment, um if General Motors were treated that way, you know, the US government would have something to say about it. I also think that X is not the first company to be fined under EU digital regulations.

So there's an infographic that circulated recently comparing, you know, revenues raised within the EU through other metrics and then revenues raised just by finding American tech companies. And there's a suspicion that this is really kind of a de facto tax tax and pretexts are contrived for finding large American tech companies in order to raise revenue. revenue. revenue. Yeah. I I so that was the thing I think I was referring to is that um and I think actually the president may have um truth that out um that I think the the maybe this is more the EU but the the DSA has become almost like a digital speed trap to try and find American companies and it does massly disproportionately disproportionately disproportionately affect them to the point where you could argue that it's effectively like a tariff on American tech companies operating in Europe.

And if that's the case, well, I mean, I guess Europe is allowed to have tariffs, but then that's going to change the tariffs that we set. So, it's all part of a larger trade negotiation, negotiation, negotiation, right? Exactly. I've referred to the DSA before as a censorship tariff because the cost of maintaining the censorship apparatus under the DSA is intentionally levied on specific companies, mostly American ones, that are that are subject to higher and more intricate regulatory standards than other companies are. And EU regulators say, "Well, that's not because they're American, that's because they're large." But the fact that they're American and not European surely makes them easier as a political proposition to tax.

And so a lot of Americans see this as a tax. Really bizarre. David, we're seeing we're living in a time where we're seeing freedom of speech expression go down in Europe and go up in the Middle East. East. East. You know, they just had the Riad comedy festival. There were some rules. Hey, you can't criticize the kingdom. Let's leave religion off the table. But you can go after your own. But uh we we might not uh we might have some uh sensitivities there and um you know and then there's everything in between.

South Korea does require you have a social security number essentially to post online. Um but David, I'm I'm wondering what you think about this overall trend in the world of what we're seeing with censorship. I mean it's not a good trend. Um, I think that the the purpose of censorship, like I mentioned before, is always to protect the people in power and and and specifically it it insulates them from criticism, but it'd be a lot better for them to hear that criticism and adjust their policies than it would be to try and switch off the, you know, the feedback altogether.

And it's very clear, I think, in Europe and the UK that these policies of open migration, mass migration are very unpopular. Why not listen to the people and adjust your policies instead of trying to silence them? Uh, say what you will about President Trump. Uh, and people have varying opinions, but South Park has been deranged this season. I mean, they have gone full boore in attacking him like to a level that I wouldn't feel comfortable explaining the details of it. Uh, here. Uh, here. Uh, here.

Not in a family podcast. But but even President Trump has a thick skin on these things. We did have one weird thing that occurred. I think it was before your time, the Jimmy Kimmel, Charlie Kirk Kurfluffle, but even that it seemed David um President Trump and the administration and Brendan Carr friend of the pod who's been on a couple times um kind of rethought that one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Jimmy Kimmel was back in the air within was it like two or three nights. So yeah, I mean there's no real censorship there.

In that case, it was the network affiliates who were upset because [clears throat] he because Jimmy Kimmel said something untrue and malicious and outrageous. So in any event, this is the heat of the moment with after kind of worked itself out. There was no like government censorship. government censorship. government censorship. Brendan probably shouldn't have said what he said in my estimation. Anyway, in any event, there was no government censorship. That's the bottom line. Um yeah, I think it is disturbing that uh countries that we see as our closest allies that share similar values that are part of the same western culture and history are moving in this direction of more and more censorship is disturbing and I'm glad to see that um under President Trump the Department of State is pushing back on this.

I think Sarah the work that you're doing and Secretary Rubio extremely important. So I think you're making a huge difference. I think we have to use the tools that we have whether they're tools on trade or the denial of visas or um expressing condemnation to push back on this as we you know as we will as we can. Let's talk about some of the new issues. Uh AI uh it was pretty obvious but 18 months ago when you saw a deep fake it just didn't pass the uncanny valley.

uh Grock images uh Nano Banana from our friends at Google. I mean these things now if you're if you're flipping by very quickly you could make a mistake. This also uh in terms of censorship we have significant protections in the United States for say cartoonists as do the French and French and French and they're mocking public figures. How is it different when you're mocking public figures, uh, presidents, prime ministers, cabinet members, but the public can't tell? Cuz this is new, new, new, right? I think I think this is a really interesting question and it's our privilege to be at this new technological frontier where these new questions arise.

U, I'm glad you mentioned cartoonists. So, after Charlie Kirk was murdered and I knew him, I represented him on some First Amendment issues in the United States. I saw Americans walking around in an old t-shirt from 10 years ago and that t-shirt said just sweet Charlie. Uh because that was a t-shirt we bought when free speech in France was under threat and French people stood up for it. The Charlie Hepto cartoonists were bombed. They were murdered. Yeah. Um for saying things that offended religious zealots. And I think you know it's a different kind of religious zealatry to not want to allow any descent online.

And thinking back on that episode and how European consensus on free speech might have shifted since then is really sobering. But I think America we take pride in being the kind of civilization where Charlie Kirk and Charlie Hebdo can both speak. I think making fun of public officials. You know pointing out when the emperor has no clothes is one of the most essential things you can do in a democracy. If you believe in self-governance, you have to believe in that. And what's interesting about a deep fake is that the point of parody is that you can tell that it's parody.

But if you're depicting a public official falsely in a way that people can't tell as a satirical or um non-authentic depiction, then the parody tension really isn't there. And what I would say though is whenever whenever we reach a new technological frontier, there's a temptation to just enact a flurry of new regulations. And if we look back over history at other frontiers that have caused similar instability, like the invention of the printing press, people thought that was the end of the world. The invention of the telegraph, there were worries about disinformation and attention span.

The invention of the film strip, people thought the train was coming at them through the screen. The the the impulse to restrain that deal, to regulate, and to allow people to adapt and to give freedom the benefit of the doubt, that impulse tends to be vindicated over time. When it comes to deep fakes, I think we have in in America and in Europe strong legal remedies against defamation. So if someone creates an image of a public figure that is false and people are believing that image and a reasonable viewer would believe that that person engaged in that action, you can already sue for defamation, right?

right? right? And that that doesn't mean that and we have child protection and underage laws. Those are very strong. Yes. The thing is just because you don't have AI specific laws doesn't mean that you can do whatever you want with AI, you could still use AI as a tool to then break the law and be prosecuted. I mean, if you engage in cyber hacking, for example, for example, for example, and you use AI to do it, you're guilty of of a cyber crime. Yeah. So there's a lot of things like that where uh there are plenty of existing laws that apply to AI and we should just think about using all of those before you start then creating a bunch of AI specific.

Yeah. those didn't cover it then there would be hey maybe we need to have a thoughtful discussion because you know I'm trying to think of an edge case here but um for cyber security it's even hard to do like using voice clones it's just fraud you know it's wire fraud you know and it might be that it you use the existing fraud statute but there are little regulatory tweaks you can make the make the fraud easier to detect so one approach which I don't think is always correct but it it exemplifies one direction of thinking is maybe there's water marking or something on some AI images that would mitigate tort liability for some of the providers.

Um or when we got when we when we invented capital markets on a mass scale, right? We had our old laws against fraud, but we kind of made some more fine grain securities regulations like now you have to uh file a certain disclosure annually with your earnings and whatnot. And we didn't fundamentally change how we treated false information. we just developed some slightly more fine-tuned devices. But when I say fine-tuned, I think I think that's an important piece of guidance. You don't just go crazy and try to put the technological innovation back in the bottle, especially when, you know, we have foreign policy rivals like China that are developing AI at um an aggressive pace.

And if we if we cocoon ourselves in safety, we hurt our standing in that race. So where sir, where do you think this relationship between the US and EU is now headed on this topic of free speech? I mean there does seem to be a fundamental divergence. Um do you I I don't know the conversations that you're having, but do you think this gets worked out or do you think the divide gets greater? What like where's this headed? So before uh President Trump and Secretary Rubio did me the honor of this appointment, I was a litigator and it was my job to fight.

And now I'm a diplomat. So it is my job to be diplomatic. And in that spirit, I would like to sound a uh gong of optimism. optimism. optimism. Yeah. I think that a lot of ordinary Europeans are not comfortable with comedians getting dragged out of the airport, just like Europeans weren't comfortable with comedians getting murdered who are publishing offensive cartoons. And if you look at polls in Europe, I think you see some of the sentiment. So, I don't know where things are going. I can't promise in a panacea, but I will say that I've had productive conversations and hope that I'll have more.

I mean, if it does become more acute, is Europe prepared for all the American social networks to be turned off and blocked by IP address because we really don't need the money like these platforms. It's nice to make money in Europe, but maybe it's time or would the European or would various European countries demand their own version? You know, would there be a UK specific version of X? Is that where this would be headed to an extent? because you know one way to resolve the transnational issue is geoencing.

Now I think I I understand that some of the UK enforcement actions geofencing has not been enough which is pretty ridiculous but you're essentially saying that's not enough for them. Yeah. Like there's there's a there's a there's a small American website and I can't recall the name of it that offcom has sued and that website responded well we've geoenced we've blocked UK IPs so you should have nothing to say about the content on our website but offcom is still going. still going. still going. Yeah, they should be good.

But those people then chose their citizens chose to get a VPN. Yes, that's well that's which cost 30 bucks a year and then you can make your own decision which is what the people of Iran are doing too. So um but I think I think you know you mention um like fire like blocking by IP address. I think some countries that just where the people where they don't have that Charlie Hubo tradition like countries like Russia or China they just admit that they are censurious societies and they just block these websites when you have you have you have Yeah.

I mean the great in China we have the great firewall which we're not trying to take down. If you want to but could that happen? Could the UK put up a great firewall and just say that you know we're black outside world. We call your bluff. I think it's technologically it's technologically feasible to a point. There are circumventions but it is not politically feasible because British people want to be free. And I think if Kier Starmer said we're putting up a great firewall and you're not allowed to access any American social media anymore, he'd be out of office.

Right? So that is their right, but they don't want to do that because it would be too obvious what they're doing. And so therefore, so therefore, so therefore, they want to do the fines. They want to be fines and just have it be more subtle. And we're pushing back saying, "No, you can't do that." Yeah. Good luck doing that against Elon. He's pretty principal disc. I think he can pay for the speeding ticket. I don't think it's going to be a problem. And I would say President Trump because I I do think that that President Trump's election definitely changed the direction of free speech in the United States, never mind the rest of the world, because I think under the Biden administration, we now know from cases like Biden v.

Missouri and then also uh you know what was released in the Twitter files and then since then even more disclosure that's come out that the Biden administration was pressuring social networks to engage in censorship. David, we did discuss this. You could bring up Biden for all of 2025, but when 2026 came around, you had to I'm recounting I'm recounting what was happening for several years and President Trump changed that direction. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so if it weren't for that, I think we'd still be on a censorship.

If it was up to Zuckerberg, he would have continued to do it under Kamla. He did it with no problem under Biden. He's a weather vein. His entire position is based on what makes the system grow. Look, I think when it comes to these I don't have any personal feelings on it. I think I think when it comes to the the tech companies, there's let's say a range of courage. Yes. Yes. Yes. And so I'd say Elon is an outlier in terms of willing to stand up Yeah.

to the government in terms of protecting free speech and there's others who sort of just kind of more blow with the wind and do whatever the government is sort of um suggesting. But demanding, but it was wrong. It was wrong for the government to be doing that particularly in the US where you have a first amendment. But let me and to catch people up, we literally had our FBI putting pressure on our own tech companies to say we don't like the the tone of these tweets, the tone of these posts we think are damaging, but we would have never gotten to the bottom of CO and if it actually we should all be taking mysterious, you know, experimental vaccines.

I took it. I'm okay. But like the folks who were saying, "Hey, maybe we don't need this. Maybe we don't need to give it to kids. They don't see that whole discussion was shut down by the Biden administration. Now you got me doing it irrefutably and the the pretext for some of this was disinformation a term that was really distended to encompass and if you read the white papers put out by these disinformation NGOs they will admit yeah the information can be true but if it promotes an adverse narrative we don't like it and that's such an Orwellian adverse narative misinformation.

No, not misinformation. There's there's misinformation and disinformation. And the way some people defined these was misinformation is false and disinformation is bad. And if disinformation pollutes your democracy, the wrong candidate right might win. I think is really the impulse. But we had information suppressed under opaces of combating disinformation. That turned out to be true. So things that were suppressed included the assertion that the vaccine did not completely prevent transmission. That turned out to be true. It it mitigated transmission significantly, but it was not a sterilizing vaccine.

Another thing that was suppressed, was suppressed, was suppressed, which by the way is why a lot of people took it. They didn't want they wanted to be a blocker in the system, so like it's my social obligation to do it. And if had given the choice, they might not have. not have. not have. And another thing that was suppressed was the assessment that the virus might have leaked from a lab. And we now know that was that was the same assessment of a House committee and the CIA.

So the government thinks the virus, they're not sure, but it might have leaked from a lab more likely than not. and you're you're reaching out to Twitter, to Facebook, to Instagram saying, "Hey, you know, we can't force you to take these posts down under the First Amendment, but we'd really appreciate if you did. And if you want to stay in our good graces, you should." Which is a long way of saying we all need to be vigilant about it in the United States, internationally. If you're not vigilant about free speech, there are people who will take it away.

Yes. And let me let me ask a question about that. So, you mentioned um organizations or NOS's who are kind of instigating. They're like j you know, jinning up these regulators. They're showing them cases. What about this? What about that? I'm curious, and I think you've called this a censorship industrial complex. Could you just explain what this thing is? And do you think that I know that some of these groups are in the US, not just Europe? In fact, they mostly might be in the US.

And what I'm wondering is, are they going to the European regulators as an end run around the First Amendment in the US because they can get European regulators to censor material that otherwise could not be censored in the US? I mean, it's a great question, but um it's a question we don't even need to ask because we know the answer, and the answer is yes. So, we have emails that have leaked from some of these NOS's. So, um one of them, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which is a British NGO whose leader was the target of um some of our visa sanctions.

There are emails exchanged with with Democratic politicians in the United States, and with politicians now very close to Kier Stormer saying um our number one priority should be to kill Musk's Twitter. So, kill an American company, right? um in order to suppress American political speech and our second priority is to instigate UK and EU regulatory action. So this is an entity taking government money to get foreign governments to come after American businesses and this whole fact pattern where these where these American NOS's were working with the American government to send kind of forceful they allege not technically coercive emails to to Twitter and Meta.

um that was an attempt by these activists to replicate sort of the EU DSA in a way that would kind of dodge the American first amendment. So the EUDSA requires that member states designate NOS's as so-called trusted flaggers. Meaning this this organization its job is to sit on Twitter, look for offending tweets that might be hateful or whatever and report them to Twitter. and they get a privileged reporting channel and the company's required to give th give those reports first trunch priority. If you look at what was happening under Biden, it was a very similar system.

These government agencies would arrange first trunch priority for these reports and some of what was put into those channels. The reports were technically made by NOS's. You also had you know the the upside one of the small upsides of co if you care about government transparency is everyone was holding their meetings on video. And so you have these videos of these Zoom meetings with government operatives saying, you know, we couldn't do this under the First Amendment. But fortunately, this NGO on this call with us is going to do it instead.

instead. instead. Yeah. And they have ways of pressuring people, which leads to my final questions for you, which is there are firms that would, it actually started in the conservative space and moved to the liberal. Let's try to get advertisers to cancel on this program. They went after Howard Stern and they went after the liberals first. Then they went after the conservatives. let's get uh you know Rush Limbaugh's advertisers to cancel. Oh my god, he said these incendiary things yada yada. Um but we had a even more pernitious one which is people started to say well hey you're Cloudflare.

Hey you're Amazon. Uh hey you're PayPal. Hey you're Stripe. We're going to go after you and make sure that we shame slash pressure you sometimes behind the scenes to debank and to demonetize. YouTube got pulled into this as well, like we're going to shadowban your videos. They started labeling all-in videos because we had conversations with scientists about co okay uh labeling also suppressed I think. So what are your thoughts on that which seems even more pernitious because if you take away a person's ability to monetize it, how do they scale right that?

So there's been one successful Supreme Court case in US history on viewpointbased debanking and that was my case um which we won and that was called NRA versus VUO and the way we got that into court was you had you had the New York financial regulator um per the you know per the pleadings literally reaching out to financial institutions saying you know it would really be better for your enterprise risk management framework if you didn't do if you didn't do business with any proun group group group enterprise riskmanagement framework.

So you have all these professionals and you guys have you know been in finance and you know this um like these this these bureaucracies hired within financial institutions to ensure compliance with all these regulations and so they have these elaborate risk management protocols and this gets a bit into the weeds but there's this thing in finance called reputational risk and that's supposed to be the reputation of a bank for safety solveny and soundness. You don't want to run on the bank if everyone thinks the bank might fail.

That's bad for the system. But there's this ESG movement to expand the concept of reputational risk to include things like do you have a reputation for letting naughty disfavored speakers have bank accounts and that came up in the NRA case. Supreme Court says government is not allowed to do that. Even though the government, you know, our first amendment says Congress shall make no law, you know, restricting the freedom of speech. This wasn't Congress making a law restricting their freedom of speech, but it was a government entity uh adversely applying regulations to choke off certain viewpoints.

And they were applying it instead of going directly to the guy saying the thing you don't like, they're putting pressure on this risk averse middleman, this bank. And the [clears throat] the the debanking and deplatforming is insidious for exactly that reason. When you have a risk averse middleman like a financial institution, it's almost like they designed it that way. way. way. Yeah. they they they they don't have skin in the game with respect. They don't believe in your speech the way you do. They have their in-house counsel telling them that this is going to piss off the financial regulator.

So, it's easier to take it down. And my office is very very very So, that's a common theme is that when the government can't do it directly because it' be a violation of the first amendment, they use an intermediary to do it. do it. do it. So, you get the bank to debank someone or you get an NGO, Dark NGO, Dark NGO, Dark NGO, which is really a government organization because it's funded by the government, but they call themselves non-government. So they they do the quote unquote factchecking.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, or um you know, you get one of these other cases where um you know, the the this was a little bit more overt, but where the FBI through the Biden administration is then putting pressure on the social networks. In any event, you get, like you said, a middleman to do the dirty work because the government can't do it directly and to do it in a really nefarious Yes. Yes. Yes. way that's hard to detect. Yes. It's like it'd be a shame if we blocked a merger.

Like they were very Zuckerberg's a pragmatist. I'm going to go at him again. Like he likes to buy things. And if the FBI is calling you and you've got to get something through the FTC next, you're going to try to make nice, right? And that is the risk of giving any regulator kind of a capricious cudgel over the internet is even if the even if the regulation isn't explicitly speechbased is just you can only do your merger if this guy likes likes the look of the merger then companies are going to vi to impress that regulator that I think a bit of that was going on frankly with the Jimmy Kimmel thing.

um because you had this this this merger in the works, this Techno merger that they tried to complete under the Biden administration and my friends in telecom tell me that when Techno was trying to sell itself during the Biden administration, it went out of its way to show the regulator how woke it was. And so now it has an incentive to show the administration that it's magal lined and that's what happens when you give a regulator a large cudgel. Now I want to say something about labeling.

So labeling videos sounds oh it's just transparency. What could be wrong with that? people people should know if fact checkers think that something is wrong and I think my office's approach on that is it depends on who's putting the label on there and for what purpose so a lot of these disinformation NOS's it was almost like mart it was almost like the red scare they would make a list of outlets that were spreading disinformation but they wouldn't just publish that list they would send it around to the credit card companies the payment processors and suggest with with kind of an implicit government impromater because they're all government funded as David very very relevantly points out like you know you guys really shouldn't be funding these websites and the websites would never know why and the viewer would never know why.

I think a type of labeling that's really good is the type exemplified by community notes on X where I can read the tweet and then I can see what the community notes say about it and you can see a ranking of the community total it's been a total game changer. I remember when they were doing factchecking and the facteing was so bad cuz the fact checkers were biased or sometimes it just wasn't good quality control but the community note thing has like really worked and you'll see that when someone posts something that's truly misinformation like it's a fake image or a fake article or something it always gets caught amount of time and then you get notified you get a if you like have you noticed this if you like it'll come circle back and then it gets community noted I get a notification then I feel like an idiot that oh I got that.

But you know what? People will drag social media for, you know, the fakes or whatever. But I never get notified when the New York Times makes a mistake and post a correction on page 43. They never notify anybody about that. They bury that on the last page. So I still think social media is by far the best. the best. the best. Were you in the meeting for accuracy? Were you in the meeting when they were deciding community notes or not? And Elon was like, "Tell me about it." And I was like, "Elon, I think this is really interesting.

You should Yeah. double click on it because it's actually working. Um, and he looked at it, he immediately understood the algorithm and he said, "Keep the group." Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, that group stays. And you know what's the genius of that algorithm is the community only gets promoted if users who usually disagree agree that that notice they look for consensus amongst rivals. Yes. Yes. Yes. Which is a fascinating uh the I'll tell you the other game changer um on X has been Grock cuz you can just go at Grock what's the truth?

Yeah. And you won't necessarily always agree with Guac. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's pretty darn good. It's trending in the right direction. It's I mean, it's really good on the whole. And yeah, I mean, it does a really good job facteing, too. So, we don't really need these bureaucrats and politicians and regulators telling us what's true or not. We have community notes. We have AI now. You've got other users users users and you can file a lawsuit if you feel you've been defamed. Like, this exists in the United States.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. As a concept. Uh, listen Sarah, we feel I think I can speak for everybody uh here in the USA House that we're really glad that you're so vigilant and dogged in protecting the First Amendment. Give it up for Sarah Rogers.