Yesterday, vice president of the European Commission for Values and Transparency Věra Jourová addressed the E.U.–U.S. Defense and Future Forum in Washington, D.C. “Do not throw away your shot, and help us protect democracy from the risk coming from both the online and offline world,” she urged attendees. She implored Americans to take actions similar to those of the E.U. against “information manipulation.”
Anyone who heard what Jourová had to say should be dubious. Most countries in the European Union do not share the same commitment to free speech, whether online or offline, and we in the United States should not be taking advice from people who do not hold the right as highly as we do.
Jourová’s comments come in the wake of the E.U.’s adoption of a Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation, which will “be a more efficient instrument in fighting disinformation” online. What is “disinformation,” according to the code? The E.U. uses it as a catch-all term for “false or misleading information” spread either knowingly or unknowingly. Like other measures of this type, the definition is dangerously vague. Most of our social-media elites view the belief that “men can not become women” as false or misleading.
The code does include the caveat that regulatory efforts “should strictly respect freedom of expression and include safeguards that prevent their misuse.” One such misuse would be “the censoring of critical, satirical, dissenting, or shocking speech.” Still, it makes a sharp distinction between legitimate political speech and impermissible speech, and Europe and America disagree on where to draw that line.
We can see an example in the speech laws of Jourová’s home country, the Czech Republic. Like many countries in Europe, Czech law guarantees a right to freedom of expression but then waters it down with exceptions. Czechs may not instigate “hatred towards any nation, race, ethnic group, religion, class or another group of people.” Notice the language; it does not prohibit specifically violence, but all hatred.
This standard is expectedly un-American. Hating anyone, especially for immutable characteristics is immoral and unadvisable, but it is a person’s right. This is the moral imperative for protecting hateful speech, but there is also a practical one. Allowing explicitly racist speech – “black and white people are not equal to each other ”– buffers legitimate speech on race issues – “America is not systemically racist – that some may falsely consider to be hateful.
If we move a few miles to the West, we see similarly poor standards. “Freedom of expression has its limits,” said German then-chancellor Angela Merkel in a 2019 speech. “Those limits begin where hatred is spread. They begin where the dignity of other people is violated.” During her term as chancellor, Merkel had enormous influence over the rest of the E.U., and America should look at the confederacy’s speech recommendations with skepticism when its former de facto leader holds these standards of speech.
The new person to hold that much influence over the E.U. will likely be newly reelected French president Emmanuel Macron, who is no defender of free speech, either. Like other countries, France says that it guarantees its citizens rights to free speech. Unlike the other countries, however, instead of limiting or qualifying the right, it just unapologetically infringes on it. Most conspicuous is its ban on religious symbols in public buildings such as schools and courtrooms, which often affects Muslim women who wear hijabs. One of America’s great virtues is its defense of the rights of both political and religious minorities, something sorely lacking across the Atlantic.
America is exceptional in many ways, not least among them in its commitment to the protection of First-Amendment rights. For that reason, we should be incredibly skeptical when bureaucrats who do not share our values want to preach to us about controlling them.