I'm sorry to say, but this is the worst that you've come up with so far. I loved you earlier post on Corona, many of the geography analyses you posted were great reading material. The political analyses are heavily biased by US ideas of what is called free speech. The US free speech, which is often not checked and often fact free, has nothing to do with the European freedom of opinion. I'm very happy that it is illegal to insult people both offline and online. With the US based approach, any sensible discussion culture goes down the drain. Just look at what utter lies famous people in the US get away with. if this minimal research is enough for you to not lie Europe it is fine for me that you stay in a country that is not slowly but very quickly losing all of its democracy.
Comparing the UK with the USSR is completely useless as the data is decades. Also you can only have a lot of expressions the opinions prosecuted if they are already expressed in the first place and made public through social media.
Thank you for your thoughts, Stefan, and to the others who've shared similar concerns.
To be clear, I'm European by birth, spent my first 25 years in Europe, and I'm currently living in Europe. I spent 15 years in the US, enough for me to get to know its values well, and I think both sides have things to learn from each other.
I don't think your argument on UK vs USSR is very strong. Old data doesn't make it bad. It sounds like a way to avoid the inconvenient comparison. Your point on social media making speech policing easier is valid. The problem is the comparison though. Tens of thousands of people arrested per year is a LOT of people.
In any case, I'll think about this more and react, given the massive amount of reactions aligned with yours.
I think Europeans fail to understand the US's first amendment: Since they don't have one, they are not used to debating its value the way it's debated in the US. I feel like my role here will be to bridge the gap.
I do not think that Europe's (or UK's) various forms of censorship have meaningfully reduced misinformation. If the goal of censorship is to make sure citizens have "reliable" information, I think censorship fails to deliver. Sorting that might make an interesting future column.
"Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race." —Charles Beadlaugh
Give up your free speech at your peril. Once they are able to silence you, the game is over. The loss of all of your other freedoms will follow shortly after. Anyone that advocates to censor you, or to unmask your anonymity is your adversary. Treat them like one - no matter what else they say.
But why is it so vital and necessary for the combined monolithic apparatus of government, corporations, and NGOs, to brute force censor everyone while decimating the careers and reputations of the dissenters? Here is why:
The reason the First Amendment is prime directive order 1, is because it is the most important freedom we have for the same reason it is the first target an adversary subverts, disrupts, and destroys during a crime, a war, or a takeover—preventing a target from assembling, communicating, and organizing a response to an assault grants an enormous advantage to the aggressors.
"If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter." -Washington
Your trust in authority is the problem. I have yet to see a truly impartial government. Governments sensor opposition and permit propaganda that favors the government. Period. If you think English government is an exception you are dreaming.
Governments can be held accountable by the voters. Private corporations and employers can be very restrictive about freedom without any accountability. Europeans seem to be doing fine.
Shame the Rotherham grooming gangs didn't start today, imaging how much longer they could have gotten away with it. Better a thousand kids get diddled than the NPCs lose faith in their elected leaders.
"Freedom of opinion" - this sounds in this context like that, of course, you are free to have an opinion, but you should better keep it for yourself… Anyway, it's sad to see these trends coming from a country that gave us Scottish Enlightment and the huge crowd of such free speech and personal liberties champions as John Locke or John Stuart Mill were.
And I would like to remind the Mill's argument, why is the freedom of speech important:
- either you are telling truth - and it's good to remind everyone what is right, and silencing it obviously harms the society
- or you are telling lies - and it's good because you need to find arguments against them, which helps you to confirm, that your truth is still true. You may not convince the other side, but your arguments make the truth stronger and live. You are not saying "Earth is spherical because it is, dare you doubting it!", instead you say "Earth is sperical and we can prove it this way: …" - and this helps so many people to actually *understand* the truth. Suppresion then creates obvious dogmas
- or you are part right and part false - which helps to refine the truth - because hardly is any "official truth" 100% correct and anything "officially labeled as a lie" 100% false and the conflict of different stances can help to find the balance and actual truth.
Also - I would add - that life changes, our understanding changes, our knowledge changes, and what was true (no matter if in good faith or absolutely) yesterday may not be anymore true today, and I don't want have the goverment to be the ultimate arbiter of what is true and what is false, because goverments rarely revisit their previous acts or stances - we can see this more then often nowadays, that many governments, when confronted with new facts, rather bend the reality then bend their policies.
The thing with freedom of speech is that nobody thinks it's going to affect them, until it does. And almost by definition, you never know where the restriction is going to come from next. Free means hearing nasty things if it means you get to say your piece.
Somehow people seem to think hurty words are the worse thing that can happen to somebody - the symptom of pusillanimous individuals and a weak society.
It's borderline pointless to argue the point though, it's too ingrained in the lobotomized modern European psyche. I am a Spaniard, before anyone jumps to conclusions
I live in Germany and personally got multiple emails saying my innocuous reviews of restaurants "it took a long time for the waiter to come" were "defamatory" and that they were removed. Crazy.
Like was mentioned in the post - reviews posted on Google Maps about a restaurant not being great for mundane reasons and then Google removing them because they hit some filter calling them "defamatory".
This is a "And what about...." argument. These are normally used when a person is angry at an attack, but they don't know how to answer it, so instead of defending, they attack another group.
Yes, the US has plenty of problems.
That doesn't mean Europe doesn't have any.
Your appraisal of European censorship is inaccurate. It's not just racism.
It’s not whataboutism when you yourself write “Americans understand that free speech is uncomfortable, but that it’s necessary because otherwise the government will end up deciding what people should think via censorship”. So Gijs is right to ask you this. Let’s be real, the US is banning books in schools. Whoopdiedoo for their free speech and lack of censorship….
While I agree with your criticisms of the situation in Europe, it's not "whataboutism" when you have presented the US as an alternative.
In the US you don't get prosecuted for your speech, you get prosecuted for some minor technical law violation, it's purely a coincidence that you said something Trump doesn't like.
Or there's civil asset forfeiture, which while not an attack directly on speech does chill freedom. Or there's the instances of visitors being detained at the border cause they said something Trump doesn't like.
The suppression just takes a different shape over there.
First of all, you’re right: my comment was a “what about” argument.
However, that argument came with a reason.
You take isolated examples and make it seem like Europe is a police state. It simply is not. I won’t bore you with the reasons, you know them as well as I do.
Several of your arguments are obvious click bait or false (Europe is worse than the USSR!!!) and they make me sincerely doubt your intentions.
A whataboutism is then a legit way of exposing your intentions. If you’re intentions are to make follow-up posts that show an overview of declining free speech in the world (undoubtedly USA will rank worst, as China was already bad), then my trust in you returns as swiftly as it disappeared.
However, I fear that you’ve read to many USA-nationalist Twitter bots or are misled by financial sponsors (both are speculative, I admit).
Sticking to the facts is insufficient. Selecting the facts is crucial.
To be sure: you're raising important concerns! Full stop.
But the piece also reads like it was commissioned by JD Vance. As did your recent fear mongering toward Muslim migrants.
If you don't see that, you're missing a vital element of the current ideological landscape.
These pieces, without broader geopolitical context and—crucially—without sensitivity to how much water they carry for society's *most illiberal* elements, do far more harm than good.
Thanks Tomas. I absolutely believe that these pieces are written in good faith.
My concern is not their *accuracy* but rather their *selection*. In other words: the problem isn't the data, but rather the narrative which their decontextualized presentation can promote.
In this case, for some reason you've selected some of America's closest liberal democratic allies, most of which have surging far-right movements and all of which have been criticized by American far-right figures along the lines that you're describing here.
I want to reiterate: these criticisms have merit! You (and they) are flagging real problems. Nothing that I'm saying here should suggest otherwise, and we shouldn't dismiss them simply because of their source. As an American living in Europe myself, I'm especially concerned with these matters.
The problem is that this piece lacks wider geopolitical context. Here, you've singled out a handful of countries. Why? Why *these* countries?
I'd have no worries if this piece were written as part of a series documenting retreats in free speech worldwide. That would help us understand the broader forces at play, and also how Europe and Canada compare with other countries.
If your aim *were* to give a fully accurate picture of free speech in Europe + Canada (which we'll need if we're to judge whether they are, in fact, "losing" it), you'd also mention things like the Reporters Without Borders index, which ranks these countries in the upper quartile for press freedoms. That doesn't tell the whole story about free speech, but it's an essential fact, and it's certainly essential for us to judge the presence of any trend.
(America, meanwhile, ranks 64th and is in steep decline. Surely that's at least as noteworthy as the cases that you've assembled here?)
The point is context.
Ask yourself, as ever: cui bono? Who stands to benefit most from this piece? Which X followers (who themselves form a narrow ideological set!) were most excited to share it?
Whatever your intention, this piece repeats the same selective narrative as Vance, and then supplies that narrative with ostensibly nonpartisan validation.
If the aim in your political writing is to consistently punch left, and to deploy your considerable talents in ways that tacitly advance right-leaning narratives, that's your choice.
But something in your writing tells me that that's *not* what you want to do. You want to tell important stories, and you don't want to be captured by any one audience. In fact, you like to use data to challenge received wisdom from *all* sides.
And that's why I'm writing this comment. If offering equal-opportunity scrutiny is, in fact, your aim, then pieces like this cut against it. I do hope that that's your aim. I think you're uniquely suited to it. But it'll take as much attention to ideological landscapes as you give to topographical ones.
Happy to discuss further over a virtual/real-life coffee sometime.
This is a really frustrating type of comment. When you imply the article is correct and say it raises important concerns but then go on to express concerns about how much it agrees with the bad people, you're only making their point. You're telling everyone that these people are right about the issue and that the issue should be suppressed because of it. They could hardly ask for more. If the claims are factual and important, that alone warrants reporting on them. It doesn't matter whose political agenda it flatters. And it seriously undermines yours when you surrender the ability to call your opponents out on hypocrisy and censoriousness by endorsing the exact same behavior. As a result, when you fearmonger (see what I did there) about the "society's most illiberal elements", it ends up sounding rather hollow. I agree that Vance and co. are utter scumbags, replete with bad faith, but this is not the way to fight them.
See my reply to Tomas above. It's quite possible to both 1) share true facts and 2) do so selectively in ways that advance specific ideological agendas.
You make some good points in that reply, but I still mostly disagree.
You mention a "Reporters Without Borders index", by which I take you to mean the World Press Freedom Index, published annually by Reporters Without Borders. The US has, as you say, declined abruptly in the last two years and was significantly below the UK, Germany and Canada even before that, so this seems like a relevant counterpoint. However, the index is intended to measure whether journalists and news outlets can investigate, report and publish without government censorship, physical threats, or economic interference. It does not measure how freely individual citizens can express themselves online. It can therefore give a misleading picture if most of the persecution for speech crimes is against one political faction and professional journalists largely belong to another. Tomas makes the case in the article that right-wingers are far more likely to be targeted, and European journalists working in established media are widely reported to hold more left-leaning political views than the general public. So, assuming this is correct, European journalists might very well feel free to say what they want because what they want to say is in line with government bias. So far, at least. If the trends you brought up continue, AfD could take power in Germany, Reform in the UK and the National Rally in France (Canada seems immune for now due to Trump's continual sabotaging of his allies there). What do you think they'll do with the power to go after people for mean words? I'm not terribly optimistic.
Perhaps it's helpful to look at how the right-wing government in the US behaves. In Trump's second term, his administration has, in addition to constant jawboning of TV networks for what their talk-show hosts say, sued at least the following: CBS for a supposedly misleading 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris in the run-up to the election, a San Francisco radio station for allegedly doxxing ICE agents, and The Des Moines Register along with pollster J. Ann Selzer for "election interference" because they published a poll that showed Harris ahead in Iowa. These efforts have not, however, been a major success. They managed to settle the CBS case for a $16 million payout to Trump’s future presidential library, but that's their only win. One reason for this is that Trump and his cronies are not the brightest of men and as a consequence choose their battles unwisely. But the First Amendment also makes things hard for them. I'm not too confident a legal system under which it's a crime to insult somebody online or in public is going to offer as much protection.
It's also worth noting that none of the laws and actions against hate speech and misinformation has stopped the far-right. If they were supposed to be justified because "prevention is better than a cure", then the conspicuous lack of prevention should really be a cause to rethink this approach. Taking the zealot's lesson of "we just haven't been harsh enough", while also sound in strictly logical terms, would not be my recommendation. To be clear, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with criticizing an article because it omits points you think are important – such as the World Press Freedom Index in this case. What I object to is the suggestion that one should refrain from publishing the article simply because it might be pleasing to some unsavory political faction. It's more than likely that these people for all their odiousness have a valid point or two upon a time, and refusing to ever recognize it will only mark you out as an untrustworthy source of information. Several institutions ruined their reputations this way over the last 10 years, and the repeated attempts to bully others into complying with this standard backfired spectacularly. We're living with the results now. Time to let it go and – dare I say it? – do better.
I think your comment is part of the problem in the US. Many of the changes pushed for by Vance, Trump, et al are necessary and required for progress. It's pretty obvious that Trump & pals are not good leaders and are not inspiring positive change. The problem is the opposition, rather than embracing improvement and progress, is opposing any change. "The way things were was great." In that way, they've abdicated leadership and given all the power to Trump & Vance. The culture opposing basic human freedom of expression in both the UK and Germany is startling and disappointing. The powerful approach would be to thank Vance for drawing our attention the problem, and then offer a much better path forward than Vance et al propose.
I see a lot of angry replies and although some of them are not very nuanced I do understand the core issue they are reacting to.
You are adressing a hugely important issue with manu complexities and valid points of discussion, yet the quality of data you are presenting to support your points is far below your usual standard.
Infact more then half of the references and images you added are simply showing content from well known propagandists with clear politicak motives. That is not to say they are wrong by default but posting these people directly without providing and adressing that context is not providing data but just passing on propaganda in its raw form.
For example if you read your passage on the english flag you would feel eightly outraged. But if you click the link you can pretty quickly come to understand that what is going on there is police having to deal with the problem of keeping order in a public space where different activist groups are active. The video posters are clearly there to farm video content. You can still argue they should be allowed to do that there but it is a far cry from the idea that you can't wave the english flag in England. (A full article on the problems with the power and influence of organized activist groups and their conduct in public spaces would be far more interesting)
So while I feel your article doesn't provide data of high quality that support your conclusions I also have some conceptual issue with it.
You are holding Europe to a rather radical american standard of free speech to then conclude europe is "losing" this. It is totally unclear why you think Europe ever had this in the first place. Infact this is an extremely minority view that I think has never actually been upheld in any place in history. Certainly never in europe.
I do agree the american constitution is probably the legal document that comes closest to this ideal. But taking that into account and witnessing the shift in attitude that is happening both in spirit and in practice in the US I would say it makes more sense to say the US is losing this ideal.
You bring up someone like Elon Musk which I feel actually weakens your point tremendously. You seem to take his ramblings about free speech at face value, but if you look at his actions you can clearly see he is not a free speech absolutist in the slightest. He merely abuses the ideal for his own side (It's unclear if it is deliberate or he is merelt delusional)
Worth noting the “30 arrests a day” and 12,000 arrests figure is from a Times report about 2023. Notably, Rishi Sunak was prime minister in 2023, not Keir Starmer!
You claim you could barely find any arrests for left-wing speech. There are about 3,000 of them happening right now and you missed all of them.
The proscription of Palestine Action has produced roughly 3,000 arrests in the UK since July 2025, mostly for the crime of holding a piece of cardboard reading "I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action."
The people getting cuffed include a priest, health workers and pensioners in their 70s. You really need to read Private Eye. Terror-related arrests jumped 660% year on year almost entirely because of this one policy. The UN has called the ban overreach.
This is not a fringe footnote. It is the single biggest speech prosecution story in the very country your whole piece focuses on and it is overwhelmingly left wing, pro Palestinian speech being criminalized. You asked four LLMs to find arrests for "left-wing speech" and came back with a handful of scattered anti-monarchy comments and attacks on politicians.
Meanwhile the actual biggest bucket of left coded arrests in Britain was sitting there the whole time, untouched by your biased framing.
That's not evidence the left doesn't get arrested. That's evidence your query was badly built.
Ask "arrests for pro Palestine speech" instead of "arrests for left wing speech" as an abstraction and you'd have had thousands of hits inside a minute.
For someone who otherwise builds careful, patient, quantitative arguments, missing the biggest speech prosecution story in the country he's dissecting, while specifically trying to measure political bias in speech prosecution, is an embarrassing blind spot. You are out of your depth.
Most of your individual facts check out. Starmer's DPP history is real. The 99.97% German business share of EU Google Review takedowns is a genuine, sourced number. The von der Leyen "prevention is preferable to cure" line is a real quote, though it's from a 2024 speech about media literacy "prebunking," and reading it as her quietly endorsing censorship is your own interpretive flourish, not something she actually said. The Canada Combatting Hate Act timeline is accurate down to the day.
Where things go a bit "scientist can't do social science":
The "UK prosecutes 17x more than the USSR" line is a real number stapled to a fake comparison. It skips over the fact that the USSR had no internet to police at all and that its actual penalties, labour camps, internal exile, were vastly harsher per case even with fewer of them. That's not a statistic. It's two unrelated numbers wearing a bow tie.
The "21x more than Russia" figure is sourced, hilariously, "according to Grok." That's a chatbot's improvised guess faking it as a citation.
You wouldn't accept "according to my nephew" as a data point and a language model confidently making shit up isn't meaningfully different.
The "banned from waving an English flag" claim takes a handful of specific, contested policing calls at individual protests and inflates them into a law that doesn't exist.
The France case is where you show your weakest hand. You present a woman convicted for saying "the main danger to women in France is Black African and Arab immigrant men" purely as a free speech martyr, punished for daring to mention her own harassment. But French prosecutors didn't convict her for describing an assault.
They convicted her for the specific legal category of aggravated public insult on grounds of race and origin, a real, long-standing distinction in most European legal systems:
You can describe a crime against you in detail, name an attacker's actual actions and seek justice without needing to generalize it into a claim about an entire ethnic group.
You collapse "person prosecuted for describing her own experience" and "person prosecuted for making a racialized generalization" into the same category, which is exactly the sleight of hand for which a freshman law student gets an F.
This fits the pattern in the piece more broadly. You're sharp on state overreach and vague, almost allergic, on why hate speech law and organized online abuse of women exist as their own category of harm in the first place, separate from "government doesn't like an opinion."
Coordinated pile-ons, doxxing and racialized harassment campaigns are not hypothetical censorship risks.
They are documented harms with real victims and European lawmakers you're otherwise happy to call authoritarian have built entire statutes around them for reasons that have nothing to do with silencing dissent.
You can think those laws are badly calibrated - and I do - without needing to treat every prosecution under them as evidence of Soviet repression.
Right now you don't distinguish "government banning an opinion" from "legal system drawing a line around targeted racial abuse" at all and that's not a subtle omission. It's the load bearing wall of your whole argument missing.
And the whole “poll four LLMs on who gets arrested more” method doesn’t measure charging patterns. It measures what’s easy for a chatbot to retrieve and how you phrased the question. Palestine Action proves this rather neatly: invisible to your method, despite being the biggest counterexample available against the entire slant of your argument and its supposed data-based rigour. That’s because you seem to have already classified Starmer’s prosecutions as left-on-right repression before you ran the query, so the method was never going to find anything that didn’t fit.
None of this means the free speech worries across the UK, EU and Canada are made up. The Online Safety Act, Chat Control and the Combatting Hate Act are all real, all serious and all worth being angry about.
But you can't claim the left barely gets arrested for speech while ignoring the largest counterexample in the country you're writing about and you can't build a case against hate speech law without engaging with what it's actually for.
As an American, I’m shocked by what’s going on in European countries and by the comments I’m reading here. I know those countries have never had constitutional free speech like the US but anyone should look at where it currently is and be outraged.
P.S. to the other commenters, Yes, I’m outraged by whats happening in the US too, but that’s a different issue (corruption imo). It doesn’t excuse the EU’s issues.
When I've been someplace where people openly denigrated me because of my appearance and how I talked, and would literally exclude me from certain places because of that, it definitely felt really bad. (And then some would say, "Oh, we don't mean you, you're different. It's the other people that look like you who are barbaric and inferior.") Some might call that hate speech. But the time I was physically attacked because I was an outsider it was a very different, far more terrifying, experience. Don't anti-hate speech laws try to collapse those two things into one, and hence diminish the true terror and harm of physical attacks? As awful as it is, isn't humanity better if a person can say "I hate all politicians with physical traits XYZ. They are awful, inhuman beings and don't belong in our society." without being punished by the government?
Robert, it is truly awful that you were attacked verbally and physically, and I am truly sorry to hear that happened to you. I do think that hate speech when left unchecked not only reduces our overall humanity, it foments and tacitly supports aggression and physical oppression. Words matter.
Tomas, while you are parroting LLMs on the alleged trend– do you have any perspective on the way that censorship and first amendment violations have been growing in the US?
For example: law enforcement harassment at people’s homes for statements made on social media, harassment for recording in public spaces, and the extrajudicial killing of a man exercising his speech and assembly rights in Minnesota? Or, the president attempting to subpoena and intimidate news reporters? Including by threatening to revoke broadcast licenses. How does the US fit in your narrative?
I will use my right to free speech to express that it is very sad to see you Tomas being infected with maga virus and losing your critical thinking. America has a violence problem (among others), EU, UK, Canada are a few of the remaining free world countries, where the rule of law still means something.
Using USSR as a benchmark for trustworthy reporting is completely laughable. I can only interpret this as malicious intent, sorry.
Everybody knows that critical comments on USSR guaranteed a 1-way ticket to the gulag. The suggestion that Europe is even remotely similar is either ignorance or money driven (looking for tech bro sponsors these days?)
I think it'swhat it's trying, and failing, to not say. The motivation is as clear as trump and vance’ stochastic terrorism in the US. The only thing in the US that needs to be “ changed” are the things they are doubling down on. Sure, its great to know our constitution does not protect us from a rogue political party, but at what cost? We will be lucky to survive this upcoming election. Some things need not be allowed in the public sphere. The damage that lies create last much, much longer than a day, ( some idiotic quote at the top of this thread) and cut much deeper than hurt feelings.
In the US a real threat to a person, or inciting violence, have already been removed from 1st Amendment protection. Are you hoping that some kinds of lying would also not be protected?
You dont seem to be arguing in good faith. I know you know exactly what stochastic terrorism is and the harm ( including “ real violence “ ) that it can bring about. Lies about people/parties/countries/elections are all forms of stochastic terrorism. People should be punished for lying don't you think?
I've never heard the term "stochastic terrorism". No, I do not think people should be punished (by the government) for lying. (Results of lying may warrant punishment for the liar, of course.) I have never heard a good, universal, definition of lying. I'm a scientist so I know I am not privy to any truth. I just know accepted explanations, which can change at any moment. Since I know when I describe some physical phenomena I am not telling the truth, does that mean I am lying? Frequently, politicians or people with government power do whatever they can to stop change and progress, so they accuse people who want to change society of lying. Since there is no truth (outside of religion) how do you choose what is a lie and which lies should be punished by the government?
I'm sorry to say, but this is the worst that you've come up with so far. I loved you earlier post on Corona, many of the geography analyses you posted were great reading material. The political analyses are heavily biased by US ideas of what is called free speech. The US free speech, which is often not checked and often fact free, has nothing to do with the European freedom of opinion. I'm very happy that it is illegal to insult people both offline and online. With the US based approach, any sensible discussion culture goes down the drain. Just look at what utter lies famous people in the US get away with. if this minimal research is enough for you to not lie Europe it is fine for me that you stay in a country that is not slowly but very quickly losing all of its democracy.
Comparing the UK with the USSR is completely useless as the data is decades. Also you can only have a lot of expressions the opinions prosecuted if they are already expressed in the first place and made public through social media.
Thank you for your thoughts, Stefan, and to the others who've shared similar concerns.
To be clear, I'm European by birth, spent my first 25 years in Europe, and I'm currently living in Europe. I spent 15 years in the US, enough for me to get to know its values well, and I think both sides have things to learn from each other.
I don't think your argument on UK vs USSR is very strong. Old data doesn't make it bad. It sounds like a way to avoid the inconvenient comparison. Your point on social media making speech policing easier is valid. The problem is the comparison though. Tens of thousands of people arrested per year is a LOT of people.
In any case, I'll think about this more and react, given the massive amount of reactions aligned with yours.
"I'm very happy that it is illegal to insult people both offline and online."
Yikes.
I think Europeans fail to understand the US's first amendment: Since they don't have one, they are not used to debating its value the way it's debated in the US. I feel like my role here will be to bridge the gap.
I do not think that Europe's (or UK's) various forms of censorship have meaningfully reduced misinformation. If the goal of censorship is to make sure citizens have "reliable" information, I think censorship fails to deliver. Sorting that might make an interesting future column.
"Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race." —Charles Beadlaugh
Give up your free speech at your peril. Once they are able to silence you, the game is over. The loss of all of your other freedoms will follow shortly after. Anyone that advocates to censor you, or to unmask your anonymity is your adversary. Treat them like one - no matter what else they say.
But why is it so vital and necessary for the combined monolithic apparatus of government, corporations, and NGOs, to brute force censor everyone while decimating the careers and reputations of the dissenters? Here is why:
The reason the First Amendment is prime directive order 1, is because it is the most important freedom we have for the same reason it is the first target an adversary subverts, disrupts, and destroys during a crime, a war, or a takeover—preventing a target from assembling, communicating, and organizing a response to an assault grants an enormous advantage to the aggressors.
"If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter." -Washington
Your trust in authority is the problem. I have yet to see a truly impartial government. Governments sensor opposition and permit propaganda that favors the government. Period. If you think English government is an exception you are dreaming.
Governments can be held accountable by the voters. Private corporations and employers can be very restrictive about freedom without any accountability. Europeans seem to be doing fine.
Governments can't be held accountable by the voters if it's illegal to discuss ways in which incumbents have been disappointing.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defining-defending-democracy-contra
Shame the Rotherham grooming gangs didn't start today, imaging how much longer they could have gotten away with it. Better a thousand kids get diddled than the NPCs lose faith in their elected leaders.
Yeah, neh, Rotherham has been pretty much debunked
A widely repeated statistic is shaping Britain’s grooming-gangs debate
https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/07/28/a-widely-repeated-statistic-is-shaping-britains-grooming-gangs-debate
"Freedom of opinion" - this sounds in this context like that, of course, you are free to have an opinion, but you should better keep it for yourself… Anyway, it's sad to see these trends coming from a country that gave us Scottish Enlightment and the huge crowd of such free speech and personal liberties champions as John Locke or John Stuart Mill were.
And I would like to remind the Mill's argument, why is the freedom of speech important:
- either you are telling truth - and it's good to remind everyone what is right, and silencing it obviously harms the society
- or you are telling lies - and it's good because you need to find arguments against them, which helps you to confirm, that your truth is still true. You may not convince the other side, but your arguments make the truth stronger and live. You are not saying "Earth is spherical because it is, dare you doubting it!", instead you say "Earth is sperical and we can prove it this way: …" - and this helps so many people to actually *understand* the truth. Suppresion then creates obvious dogmas
- or you are part right and part false - which helps to refine the truth - because hardly is any "official truth" 100% correct and anything "officially labeled as a lie" 100% false and the conflict of different stances can help to find the balance and actual truth.
Also - I would add - that life changes, our understanding changes, our knowledge changes, and what was true (no matter if in good faith or absolutely) yesterday may not be anymore true today, and I don't want have the goverment to be the ultimate arbiter of what is true and what is false, because goverments rarely revisit their previous acts or stances - we can see this more then often nowadays, that many governments, when confronted with new facts, rather bend the reality then bend their policies.
The thing with freedom of speech is that nobody thinks it's going to affect them, until it does. And almost by definition, you never know where the restriction is going to come from next. Free means hearing nasty things if it means you get to say your piece.
Somehow people seem to think hurty words are the worse thing that can happen to somebody - the symptom of pusillanimous individuals and a weak society.
It's borderline pointless to argue the point though, it's too ingrained in the lobotomized modern European psyche. I am a Spaniard, before anyone jumps to conclusions
I live in Germany and personally got multiple emails saying my innocuous reviews of restaurants "it took a long time for the waiter to come" were "defamatory" and that they were removed. Crazy.
removed by whom? where did you post them and who owned that service?
Like was mentioned in the post - reviews posted on Google Maps about a restaurant not being great for mundane reasons and then Google removing them because they hit some filter calling them "defamatory".
When will you share a similar post on the USA?
CNN’s new owners. A president extorting bribes from the media. Government searching phones upon entry. The list is endless.
If you refrain from blatantly racist remarks everything is fine in Europe (there are always exceptions)
Being “normal” is by no means a guarantee to stay out of trouble in the USA.
This is a "And what about...." argument. These are normally used when a person is angry at an attack, but they don't know how to answer it, so instead of defending, they attack another group.
Yes, the US has plenty of problems.
That doesn't mean Europe doesn't have any.
Your appraisal of European censorship is inaccurate. It's not just racism.
Also, this article might be relevant:
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/islamismophobia
It’s not whataboutism when you yourself write “Americans understand that free speech is uncomfortable, but that it’s necessary because otherwise the government will end up deciding what people should think via censorship”. So Gijs is right to ask you this. Let’s be real, the US is banning books in schools. Whoopdiedoo for their free speech and lack of censorship….
While I agree with your criticisms of the situation in Europe, it's not "whataboutism" when you have presented the US as an alternative.
In the US you don't get prosecuted for your speech, you get prosecuted for some minor technical law violation, it's purely a coincidence that you said something Trump doesn't like.
Or there's civil asset forfeiture, which while not an attack directly on speech does chill freedom. Or there's the instances of visitors being detained at the border cause they said something Trump doesn't like.
The suppression just takes a different shape over there.
Unfortunately I missed your reply.
First of all, you’re right: my comment was a “what about” argument.
However, that argument came with a reason.
You take isolated examples and make it seem like Europe is a police state. It simply is not. I won’t bore you with the reasons, you know them as well as I do.
Several of your arguments are obvious click bait or false (Europe is worse than the USSR!!!) and they make me sincerely doubt your intentions.
A whataboutism is then a legit way of exposing your intentions. If you’re intentions are to make follow-up posts that show an overview of declining free speech in the world (undoubtedly USA will rank worst, as China was already bad), then my trust in you returns as swiftly as it disappeared.
However, I fear that you’ve read to many USA-nationalist Twitter bots or are misled by financial sponsors (both are speculative, I admit).
Sticking to the facts is insufficient. Selecting the facts is crucial.
I'm worried about this direction in your writing.
To be sure: you're raising important concerns! Full stop.
But the piece also reads like it was commissioned by JD Vance. As did your recent fear mongering toward Muslim migrants.
If you don't see that, you're missing a vital element of the current ideological landscape.
These pieces, without broader geopolitical context and—crucially—without sensitivity to how much water they carry for society's *most illiberal* elements, do far more harm than good.
Thanks Jason.
I might get things wrong, but they will always be in good faith. I'm open to hearing what I got wrong. What specifically did I get wrong?
You are concerned about my choice of topics it seems. What are topics that you think are equally important to raise, but I'm not raising?
For my politics, this article might be relevant:
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/what-are-my-politics
Thanks Tomas. I absolutely believe that these pieces are written in good faith.
My concern is not their *accuracy* but rather their *selection*. In other words: the problem isn't the data, but rather the narrative which their decontextualized presentation can promote.
In this case, for some reason you've selected some of America's closest liberal democratic allies, most of which have surging far-right movements and all of which have been criticized by American far-right figures along the lines that you're describing here.
I want to reiterate: these criticisms have merit! You (and they) are flagging real problems. Nothing that I'm saying here should suggest otherwise, and we shouldn't dismiss them simply because of their source. As an American living in Europe myself, I'm especially concerned with these matters.
The problem is that this piece lacks wider geopolitical context. Here, you've singled out a handful of countries. Why? Why *these* countries?
I'd have no worries if this piece were written as part of a series documenting retreats in free speech worldwide. That would help us understand the broader forces at play, and also how Europe and Canada compare with other countries.
If your aim *were* to give a fully accurate picture of free speech in Europe + Canada (which we'll need if we're to judge whether they are, in fact, "losing" it), you'd also mention things like the Reporters Without Borders index, which ranks these countries in the upper quartile for press freedoms. That doesn't tell the whole story about free speech, but it's an essential fact, and it's certainly essential for us to judge the presence of any trend.
(America, meanwhile, ranks 64th and is in steep decline. Surely that's at least as noteworthy as the cases that you've assembled here?)
The point is context.
Ask yourself, as ever: cui bono? Who stands to benefit most from this piece? Which X followers (who themselves form a narrow ideological set!) were most excited to share it?
Whatever your intention, this piece repeats the same selective narrative as Vance, and then supplies that narrative with ostensibly nonpartisan validation.
If the aim in your political writing is to consistently punch left, and to deploy your considerable talents in ways that tacitly advance right-leaning narratives, that's your choice.
But something in your writing tells me that that's *not* what you want to do. You want to tell important stories, and you don't want to be captured by any one audience. In fact, you like to use data to challenge received wisdom from *all* sides.
And that's why I'm writing this comment. If offering equal-opportunity scrutiny is, in fact, your aim, then pieces like this cut against it. I do hope that that's your aim. I think you're uniquely suited to it. But it'll take as much attention to ideological landscapes as you give to topographical ones.
Happy to discuss further over a virtual/real-life coffee sometime.
This is a really frustrating type of comment. When you imply the article is correct and say it raises important concerns but then go on to express concerns about how much it agrees with the bad people, you're only making their point. You're telling everyone that these people are right about the issue and that the issue should be suppressed because of it. They could hardly ask for more. If the claims are factual and important, that alone warrants reporting on them. It doesn't matter whose political agenda it flatters. And it seriously undermines yours when you surrender the ability to call your opponents out on hypocrisy and censoriousness by endorsing the exact same behavior. As a result, when you fearmonger (see what I did there) about the "society's most illiberal elements", it ends up sounding rather hollow. I agree that Vance and co. are utter scumbags, replete with bad faith, but this is not the way to fight them.
See my reply to Tomas above. It's quite possible to both 1) share true facts and 2) do so selectively in ways that advance specific ideological agendas.
You make some good points in that reply, but I still mostly disagree.
You mention a "Reporters Without Borders index", by which I take you to mean the World Press Freedom Index, published annually by Reporters Without Borders. The US has, as you say, declined abruptly in the last two years and was significantly below the UK, Germany and Canada even before that, so this seems like a relevant counterpoint. However, the index is intended to measure whether journalists and news outlets can investigate, report and publish without government censorship, physical threats, or economic interference. It does not measure how freely individual citizens can express themselves online. It can therefore give a misleading picture if most of the persecution for speech crimes is against one political faction and professional journalists largely belong to another. Tomas makes the case in the article that right-wingers are far more likely to be targeted, and European journalists working in established media are widely reported to hold more left-leaning political views than the general public. So, assuming this is correct, European journalists might very well feel free to say what they want because what they want to say is in line with government bias. So far, at least. If the trends you brought up continue, AfD could take power in Germany, Reform in the UK and the National Rally in France (Canada seems immune for now due to Trump's continual sabotaging of his allies there). What do you think they'll do with the power to go after people for mean words? I'm not terribly optimistic.
Perhaps it's helpful to look at how the right-wing government in the US behaves. In Trump's second term, his administration has, in addition to constant jawboning of TV networks for what their talk-show hosts say, sued at least the following: CBS for a supposedly misleading 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris in the run-up to the election, a San Francisco radio station for allegedly doxxing ICE agents, and The Des Moines Register along with pollster J. Ann Selzer for "election interference" because they published a poll that showed Harris ahead in Iowa. These efforts have not, however, been a major success. They managed to settle the CBS case for a $16 million payout to Trump’s future presidential library, but that's their only win. One reason for this is that Trump and his cronies are not the brightest of men and as a consequence choose their battles unwisely. But the First Amendment also makes things hard for them. I'm not too confident a legal system under which it's a crime to insult somebody online or in public is going to offer as much protection.
It's also worth noting that none of the laws and actions against hate speech and misinformation has stopped the far-right. If they were supposed to be justified because "prevention is better than a cure", then the conspicuous lack of prevention should really be a cause to rethink this approach. Taking the zealot's lesson of "we just haven't been harsh enough", while also sound in strictly logical terms, would not be my recommendation. To be clear, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with criticizing an article because it omits points you think are important – such as the World Press Freedom Index in this case. What I object to is the suggestion that one should refrain from publishing the article simply because it might be pleasing to some unsavory political faction. It's more than likely that these people for all their odiousness have a valid point or two upon a time, and refusing to ever recognize it will only mark you out as an untrustworthy source of information. Several institutions ruined their reputations this way over the last 10 years, and the repeated attempts to bully others into complying with this standard backfired spectacularly. We're living with the results now. Time to let it go and – dare I say it? – do better.
I think your comment is part of the problem in the US. Many of the changes pushed for by Vance, Trump, et al are necessary and required for progress. It's pretty obvious that Trump & pals are not good leaders and are not inspiring positive change. The problem is the opposition, rather than embracing improvement and progress, is opposing any change. "The way things were was great." In that way, they've abdicated leadership and given all the power to Trump & Vance. The culture opposing basic human freedom of expression in both the UK and Germany is startling and disappointing. The powerful approach would be to thank Vance for drawing our attention the problem, and then offer a much better path forward than Vance et al propose.
I see a lot of angry replies and although some of them are not very nuanced I do understand the core issue they are reacting to.
You are adressing a hugely important issue with manu complexities and valid points of discussion, yet the quality of data you are presenting to support your points is far below your usual standard.
Infact more then half of the references and images you added are simply showing content from well known propagandists with clear politicak motives. That is not to say they are wrong by default but posting these people directly without providing and adressing that context is not providing data but just passing on propaganda in its raw form.
For example if you read your passage on the english flag you would feel eightly outraged. But if you click the link you can pretty quickly come to understand that what is going on there is police having to deal with the problem of keeping order in a public space where different activist groups are active. The video posters are clearly there to farm video content. You can still argue they should be allowed to do that there but it is a far cry from the idea that you can't wave the english flag in England. (A full article on the problems with the power and influence of organized activist groups and their conduct in public spaces would be far more interesting)
So while I feel your article doesn't provide data of high quality that support your conclusions I also have some conceptual issue with it.
You are holding Europe to a rather radical american standard of free speech to then conclude europe is "losing" this. It is totally unclear why you think Europe ever had this in the first place. Infact this is an extremely minority view that I think has never actually been upheld in any place in history. Certainly never in europe.
I do agree the american constitution is probably the legal document that comes closest to this ideal. But taking that into account and witnessing the shift in attitude that is happening both in spirit and in practice in the US I would say it makes more sense to say the US is losing this ideal.
You bring up someone like Elon Musk which I feel actually weakens your point tremendously. You seem to take his ramblings about free speech at face value, but if you look at his actions you can clearly see he is not a free speech absolutist in the slightest. He merely abuses the ideal for his own side (It's unclear if it is deliberate or he is merelt delusional)
Worth noting the “30 arrests a day” and 12,000 arrests figure is from a Times report about 2023. Notably, Rishi Sunak was prime minister in 2023, not Keir Starmer!
You claim you could barely find any arrests for left-wing speech. There are about 3,000 of them happening right now and you missed all of them.
The proscription of Palestine Action has produced roughly 3,000 arrests in the UK since July 2025, mostly for the crime of holding a piece of cardboard reading "I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action."
The people getting cuffed include a priest, health workers and pensioners in their 70s. You really need to read Private Eye. Terror-related arrests jumped 660% year on year almost entirely because of this one policy. The UN has called the ban overreach.
This is not a fringe footnote. It is the single biggest speech prosecution story in the very country your whole piece focuses on and it is overwhelmingly left wing, pro Palestinian speech being criminalized. You asked four LLMs to find arrests for "left-wing speech" and came back with a handful of scattered anti-monarchy comments and attacks on politicians.
Meanwhile the actual biggest bucket of left coded arrests in Britain was sitting there the whole time, untouched by your biased framing.
That's not evidence the left doesn't get arrested. That's evidence your query was badly built.
Ask "arrests for pro Palestine speech" instead of "arrests for left wing speech" as an abstraction and you'd have had thousands of hits inside a minute.
For someone who otherwise builds careful, patient, quantitative arguments, missing the biggest speech prosecution story in the country he's dissecting, while specifically trying to measure political bias in speech prosecution, is an embarrassing blind spot. You are out of your depth.
Most of your individual facts check out. Starmer's DPP history is real. The 99.97% German business share of EU Google Review takedowns is a genuine, sourced number. The von der Leyen "prevention is preferable to cure" line is a real quote, though it's from a 2024 speech about media literacy "prebunking," and reading it as her quietly endorsing censorship is your own interpretive flourish, not something she actually said. The Canada Combatting Hate Act timeline is accurate down to the day.
Where things go a bit "scientist can't do social science":
The "UK prosecutes 17x more than the USSR" line is a real number stapled to a fake comparison. It skips over the fact that the USSR had no internet to police at all and that its actual penalties, labour camps, internal exile, were vastly harsher per case even with fewer of them. That's not a statistic. It's two unrelated numbers wearing a bow tie.
The "21x more than Russia" figure is sourced, hilariously, "according to Grok." That's a chatbot's improvised guess faking it as a citation.
You wouldn't accept "according to my nephew" as a data point and a language model confidently making shit up isn't meaningfully different.
The "banned from waving an English flag" claim takes a handful of specific, contested policing calls at individual protests and inflates them into a law that doesn't exist.
The France case is where you show your weakest hand. You present a woman convicted for saying "the main danger to women in France is Black African and Arab immigrant men" purely as a free speech martyr, punished for daring to mention her own harassment. But French prosecutors didn't convict her for describing an assault.
They convicted her for the specific legal category of aggravated public insult on grounds of race and origin, a real, long-standing distinction in most European legal systems:
You can describe a crime against you in detail, name an attacker's actual actions and seek justice without needing to generalize it into a claim about an entire ethnic group.
You collapse "person prosecuted for describing her own experience" and "person prosecuted for making a racialized generalization" into the same category, which is exactly the sleight of hand for which a freshman law student gets an F.
This fits the pattern in the piece more broadly. You're sharp on state overreach and vague, almost allergic, on why hate speech law and organized online abuse of women exist as their own category of harm in the first place, separate from "government doesn't like an opinion."
Coordinated pile-ons, doxxing and racialized harassment campaigns are not hypothetical censorship risks.
They are documented harms with real victims and European lawmakers you're otherwise happy to call authoritarian have built entire statutes around them for reasons that have nothing to do with silencing dissent.
You can think those laws are badly calibrated - and I do - without needing to treat every prosecution under them as evidence of Soviet repression.
Right now you don't distinguish "government banning an opinion" from "legal system drawing a line around targeted racial abuse" at all and that's not a subtle omission. It's the load bearing wall of your whole argument missing.
And the whole “poll four LLMs on who gets arrested more” method doesn’t measure charging patterns. It measures what’s easy for a chatbot to retrieve and how you phrased the question. Palestine Action proves this rather neatly: invisible to your method, despite being the biggest counterexample available against the entire slant of your argument and its supposed data-based rigour. That’s because you seem to have already classified Starmer’s prosecutions as left-on-right repression before you ran the query, so the method was never going to find anything that didn’t fit.
None of this means the free speech worries across the UK, EU and Canada are made up. The Online Safety Act, Chat Control and the Combatting Hate Act are all real, all serious and all worth being angry about.
But you can't claim the left barely gets arrested for speech while ignoring the largest counterexample in the country you're writing about and you can't build a case against hate speech law without engaging with what it's actually for.
Yes to all that.
"I've asked 4 LLMs" has to be absolute peak citizen journalism and is an insult to any cause.
As an American, I’m shocked by what’s going on in European countries and by the comments I’m reading here. I know those countries have never had constitutional free speech like the US but anyone should look at where it currently is and be outraged.
P.S. to the other commenters, Yes, I’m outraged by whats happening in the US too, but that’s a different issue (corruption imo). It doesn’t excuse the EU’s issues.
If you are not for freedom of speech that you disagree with, then you are not for freedom of speech.
Whatever. I think you're confusing censorship with curbing hate speech.
"curbing hate speech" is how oppressive politicians say "censorship" without offending their supporters.
Hate speech is oppressive, unless of course one is not among those being oppressed by the hateful speech.
When I've been someplace where people openly denigrated me because of my appearance and how I talked, and would literally exclude me from certain places because of that, it definitely felt really bad. (And then some would say, "Oh, we don't mean you, you're different. It's the other people that look like you who are barbaric and inferior.") Some might call that hate speech. But the time I was physically attacked because I was an outsider it was a very different, far more terrifying, experience. Don't anti-hate speech laws try to collapse those two things into one, and hence diminish the true terror and harm of physical attacks? As awful as it is, isn't humanity better if a person can say "I hate all politicians with physical traits XYZ. They are awful, inhuman beings and don't belong in our society." without being punished by the government?
Robert, it is truly awful that you were attacked verbally and physically, and I am truly sorry to hear that happened to you. I do think that hate speech when left unchecked not only reduces our overall humanity, it foments and tacitly supports aggression and physical oppression. Words matter.
I am never in favor of hate speech, from anyone at any time. I am clear, though, that making it illegal makes the situation even worse.
What is the difference?
Tomas, while you are parroting LLMs on the alleged trend– do you have any perspective on the way that censorship and first amendment violations have been growing in the US?
For example: law enforcement harassment at people’s homes for statements made on social media, harassment for recording in public spaces, and the extrajudicial killing of a man exercising his speech and assembly rights in Minnesota? Or, the president attempting to subpoena and intimidate news reporters? Including by threatening to revoke broadcast licenses. How does the US fit in your narrative?
Of course he doesn't. What a shock.
I will use my right to free speech to express that it is very sad to see you Tomas being infected with maga virus and losing your critical thinking. America has a violence problem (among others), EU, UK, Canada are a few of the remaining free world countries, where the rule of law still means something.
Extremely ill-informed and simplistic.
Moronic indeed. All the LLMs are greatly biased and that is a problem if they are the major source of your writeup.
Using USSR as a benchmark for trustworthy reporting is completely laughable. I can only interpret this as malicious intent, sorry.
Everybody knows that critical comments on USSR guaranteed a 1-way ticket to the gulag. The suggestion that Europe is even remotely similar is either ignorance or money driven (looking for tech bro sponsors these days?)
Or it's maga virus, it's delusional set of ideas that develop when you spend too much time on xitter
“ waaah …I can't threaten someone or call for violence against a race like I used too”.
Do you think that's what this column is saying?
I think it'swhat it's trying, and failing, to not say. The motivation is as clear as trump and vance’ stochastic terrorism in the US. The only thing in the US that needs to be “ changed” are the things they are doubling down on. Sure, its great to know our constitution does not protect us from a rogue political party, but at what cost? We will be lucky to survive this upcoming election. Some things need not be allowed in the public sphere. The damage that lies create last much, much longer than a day, ( some idiotic quote at the top of this thread) and cut much deeper than hurt feelings.
In the US a real threat to a person, or inciting violence, have already been removed from 1st Amendment protection. Are you hoping that some kinds of lying would also not be protected?
You dont seem to be arguing in good faith. I know you know exactly what stochastic terrorism is and the harm ( including “ real violence “ ) that it can bring about. Lies about people/parties/countries/elections are all forms of stochastic terrorism. People should be punished for lying don't you think?
I've never heard the term "stochastic terrorism". No, I do not think people should be punished (by the government) for lying. (Results of lying may warrant punishment for the liar, of course.) I have never heard a good, universal, definition of lying. I'm a scientist so I know I am not privy to any truth. I just know accepted explanations, which can change at any moment. Since I know when I describe some physical phenomena I am not telling the truth, does that mean I am lying? Frequently, politicians or people with government power do whatever they can to stop change and progress, so they accuse people who want to change society of lying. Since there is no truth (outside of religion) how do you choose what is a lie and which lies should be punished by the government?
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