Hate speech laws in European countries were put into effect after WWII to limit anti-democratic and racist rhetoric that promotes violence, discriminatory behavior, and support for historical fascist regimes. The global far right is taking on these European countries’ and the European Union’s (EU) laws, engaging in recent months in attacks on the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) that broadly regulates certain online content in the EU, requires social media platforms to remove content that infringes the laws of EU member states, and makes social media algorithms more transparent to reduce the potential for spreading disinformation. For the far right, content moderation of hate speech is seen as an assault on free speech and “religious freedom,” which really means their right to disparage certain populations, particularly the LGBTQ+ community and immigrants.
Now back in power, the Trump administration and its far-right American and European allies are taking steps to thwart the DSA’s provisions addressing hate content from applying to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter/X and other entities that the DSA defines as “very large online platforms” (VLOPs), most of which are American.
On May 28, American Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that the U.S. would start refusing visas for foreign officials who are responsible for “censuring” individuals on social media. The day before, a State Department official posted on the agency’s substack that, “Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.” In a broad attack that alleged European countries were engaged in “an aggressive campaign against Western civilization,” the post took aim at the DSA, “The European Union’s Digital Services Act, billed to protect children from harmful online content, is instead used to silence dissident voices through Orwellian content moderation. Independent regulators now police social media companies, including prominent American platforms like X, and threaten immense fines for non-compliance with their strict speech regulations.” The week prior, Trump suggested that he was planning sanctions against Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes for his actions during a long-running court case with Elon Musk over regulation of Twitter/X.
A recent meeting at the EU Parliament showed that American far-right groups, associated with Project 2025 and that push a Christian nationalist agenda, are aligned with these attacks being made by the Trump administration, with the anti-LGBTQ+ legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) having teamed up with European far-right politicians to lobby European officials against DSA provisions (see Global Project Against Hate and Extremism’s (GPAHE) previous reporting on ADF here).
On May 21, the global branch of ADF, the Alliance Defending Freedom International (ADFI), organized an event at the EU Parliament called “The Digital Services Act and Threats to Freedom of Expression” that included a panel of “experts” discussing the “EU online censorship law.” The event was promoted as a “first-of-its-kind” “cross-party event,” although the cross-party participation consisted of only a single member from each of the two largest far-right groupings in the EU Parliament, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), dominated by the Polish party Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice, PiS) and Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy, FdI), and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Patriots for Europe (PfE).
Paul B. Coleman, the executive director of ADFI, was a main organizer of the event. During his speech, he spread fear and distrust about the intentions and scope of the DSA’s activities by comparing its implementation to censorship in authoritarian regimes, claiming that “free speech is again under threat on this continent in a way it hasn’t been since the nightmare of Europe’s authoritarian regimes just a few decades ago.”
Far-right groups, such as the ADF are particularly upset with the DSA’s regulatory framework which, among many other provisions, would require VLOPs to be pro-active in their attempts to limit such illegal content on their platforms, which the far right refers to as “censorship” of legally-permissible “free speech.” As an organization, the ADF is known for its legal advocacy in favor of Christian nationalist and anti-LGBTQ+ causes, and the overturning of legal precedents and legislation, to allow for the actions and speech based on the “religious freedoms” of the individual, which ultimately trumps civil rights of various communities. In practice, this has led to court rulings in the United States that permit discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, and the erosion of the separation of church and state. This conflict over the DSA has intensified over the past year as Musk has come under fire from European authorities for his unwillingness to regulate the platform to prevent content from white supremacists and disinformation from proliferating across the platform.
Representing the ECR, Croatian MEP Stjepo Bartulica from the far-right Dom i Nacionalno Okupljanje (Home and National Rally, DOMiNO) party, and a member of Opus Dei, took a similar approach. Bartulica referred to the act as a part of a “totalitarian impulse” from the functionaries in Brussels to impose “mass censorship,” akin to what existed “under communism and other totalitarian regimes.” Bartulica stated that because “hate speech” was supposedly “impossible to define,” this led him to conclude that even “quoting Christian Scripture” could lead to legal consequences.
During his speech, Coleman elaborated on this point by discussing one of ADFI’s more prominent European cases, that of Finnish parliamentarian Päivi Räsänen. She was charged in April 2021 with three counts of incitement against a minority group for anti-LGBTQ+ comments made after her church decided to partner with the organizers of a local Pride event, including one instance where she tweeted a Bible verse about the decision, calling it “shameful” and “sinful.” The case drew significant attention from international observers including the ADF, who provided her legal defense, and the U.S. Republican Party, which sent five senators to Finland, including now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to voice their support for Räsänen.
A Finnish appellate court eventually dropped all charges in 2022, deciding that the comments were offensive, but not incitement against the LGBTQ+ community. Despite this non-guilty verdict, ADFI continues to push the claim that laws against hate speech, such as the one used against Räsänen, are discriminatory against Christians. In his speech, Coleman referred to the case as a “harrowing example of what censorship under the DSA could look like in practice.”
Coleman said that there were “serious questions” that “should be raised” about whether the DSA was compatible with “binding obligations to protect freedom of expression,” and recommended that member states “initiate an action for annulment before the Court of Justice of the European Union” which could lead “the whole or parts of the DSA” to be “declared inapplicable, if they are deemed to infringe on the EU Charter or Treaties.”
A second point of attack mentioned by Coleman was the review of the DSA in mid-November 2025 by the European Commission, when there would be opportunities to “raise concerns about the censorial impact of the DSA.” He advocated for directly lobbying the Executive Vice-President of the European Commission for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen in the EU Parliament, and encouraged MEPs to bring attention to the issue in Brussels and in their member states.
French MEP from Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) Virginie Joron, and a PfE appointee to the EU’s “Democracy Shield” special committee, was also present as a speaker. This special committee, where Joron serves as a substitute, was set up to prevent attempts by authoritarian governments abroad, and “non-state agents” of disinformation, from undermining democratic processes in the European Union. Aside from the clear position with regards to Russian disinformation campaigns, the committee has specifically pointed out the threat from “non-state agents” such as Musk, who they claim has been “meddling in European election campaigns,” “taking sides,” and using his “social network to champion his own interests.”
Joron’s activities do not align with these sentiments. She has aided a disinformation campaign targeting Indian EU residents from Narendra Modi’s BJP by contributing to the EU Chronicle. She also participated in an “election observation” trip to occupied Crimea in 2020, for which she and eight other MEPs were placed on a “black list” by the EU Parliament’s Democracy Support Delegation. Joron also has a history of supporting anti-vaccine propaganda in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and has spread anti-immigrant posts online from Clément Martin, the spokesperson for now dissolved racist French organization Génération Identitaire (Generation identity, GI). During the panel, Joron referred to the DSA as the “Digital Surveillance Act,” which the European Commission used as “a political tool to control speech,” and “a Trojan horse for surveillance and control.” She posted on X after the event: “I remind you that the DSA text must not be used for political purposes or to control national elections!”
Another speaker at the event was Rod Dreher, a visiting fellow at the pro-Orbán think tank Danube Institute, where he has served as the director of the Network Project since 2021 (see GPAHE’s previous reporting on the Danube Institute here). Dreher is known to be an early friend and advisor to U.S. Vice President JD Vance, and mentioned in an April 2025 “Danube Lecture” podcast that his advice likely helped Vance to gain his position. Like Dreher, Vance has been very public in voicing his opposition to the DSA. At the Paris AI Summit in February he called for dismantling its regulatory framework. At the Munich Security Conference also in February, he chastised EU member states for their prosecution of individuals for hate speech, and repeatedly compared them to 20th century Soviet authoritarianism.
During the event, Dreher claimed that hate speech prosecutions were thinly-veiled attempts by European politicians to “suppress discussion of discontent and its sources.” Following the appearance, on X, Dreher was gleeful that he was able to make “a complimentary reference to Renaud Camus in the European Parliament,” the far-right theorist known for popularizing the white nationalist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which alleges that European elites are secretly perpetuating a “replacement” of the white native population with a non-white immigrants. Notably, the Great Replacement theory has been tied to many instances of white nationalist-inspired terrorist attacks and other violence.
During the event, Coleman and the other panelists noted the recent interest that the U.S. State Department and House Judiciary Committee had taken in the DSA. On May 1, the department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, & Labour published a statement on X about their “deep concern” for attempts by foreign governments to “coerce American tech companies into targeting individuals for censorship,” chastising EU Commissioner Thierry Breton for “threatening X for hosting political speech.”
This pressure from all sides continued on May 16, when Virkkunen met with Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who was one of the five senators who went to Finland in 2022 to support Räsänen, Trump’s FCC Chair Brendan Carr, and FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson in Washington to discuss the DSA’s applications for U.S. tech companies. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March 2025, Carr called the Digital Services Act (DSA) incompatible with the “American free speech tradition” and claimed that he had reached out to American tech companies to ask them how they could work together to find a path forward so that they are not “excessively fined for doing business in Europe” and so they stay true to “American free speech.” Virkkunen, who was also on the panel, did not issue a comment on Carr’s speech.
