President Trump and Europe clash over rates, the war in Ukraine and the purpose of the existence of the European Union. But they are also divided between free speech with possibly far-reaching implications for how the digital world is regulated.
The EU has investigated American companies under the Digital Services Act, a new law that is intended to prevent illegal content and disinformation from spreading online. In the first important case for a conclusion, it is expected that supervisors will impose significant fines this summer – including a fine and requirements for product changes – on the social media platform of Elon Musk, X, that the law was violated.
But Mr. Trump's government sees the law as a strike against his version of freedom of expression: one that releases his allies to say what they want online, but limited types of expression with which he does not agree in the real world, such as protests at universities.
The president has argued that Europe is at risk “to lose their wonderful right to freedom of expression.” Vice-president JD Vance has accused European countries of 'digital censorship' because of his laws, which, according to him, limit extreme right-wing voices on the internet.
And both administrative officials and their allies at Big Technology Companies have suggested that the rules of Europe for curbing disinformation and stake speech on the internet are an attack on American companies – one that the United States could fight against.
Since Mr Trump's inauguration, Europe and the United States have repeatedly clashed. On Ukraine, Mr Trump called back the support and threatened not to defend European countries that do not invest enough in their own safety. Mr Trump announced a broad rates in Europe this week. And as European supervisors begin to enforce their new rules for social media, the freedom of expression becomes a flash point again.
“We are now with this impasse: the debate about free speech has an influence on every aspect of the transatlantic relationship,” said David Salvo, a researcher at the German Marshall Fund who is an expert in building democracy. “It's a mess.”
Even before the 2024 elections, Mr. Vance argued in a podcast that could consider America to support NATO to “respect” for American values and freedom of expression. In February, Mr. Vance spoke at the Security Conference in Munich and warned that “Free Speech, I fear, withdraws.”
Such comments come even when the American administration itself has argued with universities about speech on their campuses, arrested pro-Palestinian activists, driven journalists from the White House Press Pool, canceled identity-related holidays at federal institutions and policy that policy has led to forbidden books in certain schools.
And in Europe, civil servants have objected to criticism of their laws, with the argument that they help protect free speech, for example by ensuring that some ideas are not secretly promoted by platforms, even if others are suppressed.
“We are not a ministry of truth,” said Thomas Regnier, a spokesperson for the executive power of the European Union, the European Commission, referring to the dystopian forces responsible for the state propaganda in “1984” by George Orwell.
Yet some are afraid that the newest policy in Europe on digital services could be attacked. In February the White House published a memo warning that EU technical laws were investigated as unfairly focused on American companies.
“Of course our feeling is that they will use rates to force us to return to technical regulation,” said Anna Cavazzini, a German representative of the Green Party who was part of a trip to Washington for European legislators to meet their American counterparts about the issues of digital policy and speech.
The tension goes back for decades. Europe has long been preferred to more guardrails for speech, while America prioritizes personal rights over almost everything, but immediate public safety. Germany has prohibited certain speech with regard to Nazism, while other countries limit certain forms of hate -speech speech to religious groups. In Denmark it is illegal to burn the Quran.
But although those nuanced differences have long existed, the internet and social media have now made the problem a geopolitics pressure point. And that is sharply exacerbated by the new administration.
The Digital Services ACT does not allow specific content, but requires companies to guarantee to remove content that is illegal on the basis of national or international laws, and focuses on whether decisions about content -mindedness are made in a transparent manner.
“This is a question about how you can ensure that your services are safe to use and respect the law of the country where you do your company,” said Margrethe Vestager, a former Vice president of the European Commission from Denmark who supervised antitrust and digital policy from 2014 to 2024.
Christel Schaaldemosis, who led the law through negotiations on the European Parliament, said that the law protects the freedom of expression. She added: “You have no right to be strengthened.”
The case against X will be the first important test of the law. In the first part of the investigation that regulators are now taking out, the authorities concluded that X has violated the law due to the lack of supervision of its verified account system, the weak advertisement transparency and the failure to provide data to external researchers.
In another part of the case, the EU authorities or X's hands-off approach to checking of users-generated content has made a center of illegal hateful language, disinformation and other material that could undermine democracy.
This week, X said that the EU's actions amounted to “an unprecedented act of political censorship and an attack on freedom of expression.”
EU officials must weigh the geopolitical consequences of focusing on a company of one of Mr Trump's best advisers.
“Are they going to pay the man who is Buddy-Buddy with the president?” said William Echikson, a non -hazing Senior Fellow at the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
X is not the only major technology company in the conversation.
Meta, which is also under EU research, scraped its use of facts controls for Facebook, Instagram and Threads in the United States shortly after the elections and can eventually withdraw worldwide. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of the company, has called the EU instructions 'censorship' and argued that the United States should defend its technology companies against the attack.
This is not the first time that America and Europe have had different speech standards on the internet. European courts have confirmed the idea that data about a person can be deleted from the internet, the so -called 'right to be forgotten'. American legal experts and policy makers have seen that as an infringement of free speech.
But the alliance between Mr Trump and major technology companies – which were encouraged by his election – broaden the gap.
European officials have sworn that the Trump government will not prevent them from standing in their values and enforce their new legislation. In the coming months, a crucial test will be of how much they can keep to those plans.
When she visited Washington earlier this year to talk to legislators, Mrs. Schaaldemose said, she found little hunger because she tried to understand the regulation she helped exist.
“It does not fit in the agenda of the administration: it does not help them to understand,” she said. “We don't focus on, but that's how it is observed.”
