The Trump administration is framing its new forthcoming online portal, freedom.gov, as a bold defense of free expression. According to Reuters, the goal is to help users bypass European content restrictions and “counter censorship” in Europe and “elsewhere.”
But the European rules freedom.gov wants to help people circumvent are not about censorship at all.
Europe’s regulatory framework is not an authoritarian speech regime. Rather, it is an attempt to impose responsibilities on internet platforms to address illegal content within the bounds of European law and to identify and mitigate systemic risks to free expression and other human rights. While there are legitimate rights-based critiques to Europe’s approach and reasons to question their commitment to regulating tech companies, characterizing their regulations wholesale as censorship is wrong.
Ironically, as Trump protects US tech companies from European regulation out of supposed concern for free speech, his administration has taken actions at home to punish free expression. What’s more, when US foreign aid was abruptly cut last year, the US government put in peril many of the organizations that document internet shutdowns, develop the tools necessary to circumvent censorship and access the internet securely in repressive environments, and provide support to journalists and dissidents experiencing online attacks.
These organizations include many Human Rights Watch partners. For example, we spoke to Maria Xynou of the Open Observatory of Network Interference, which measures internet censorship. She said that with less monitoring, network-level censorship becomes invisible, and that there is a correlation between such censorship and rising authoritarianism.
A digital rights organization in South Asia told us that it lost 45 percent of its budget because of US funding cuts. It managed to keep its rapid response helpline that supports at-risk users running, but only for now. In a country where draconian cybercrime laws are threatening human rights defenders, journalists, and dissidents, a helpline like this is critical.
On top of this, the State Department is threatening to deny visas to researchers and fact checkers because of their supposed involvement in “censorship.” It has already imposed visa bans on five Europeans, accusing them of pressuring tech firms to censor and suppress “American viewpoints they oppose.”
With digital repression on the rise, it is crucial to redouble efforts to support secure digital communications and the independent groups documenting and pushing back against repressive laws and online censorship. And for governments and tech companies to resist the criminalization of dissent, internet shutdowns, and the jailing of critics.
Free expression is a fundamental right, not a prop for political theater.
