from the the-evidence-optional-presidency dept
The Washington Post just published a deeply reported story about the Trump administration’s campaign to “expand free speech” in Europe. That headline alone should tell you something about how the story is framed — it takes the administration’s self-description at face value, as though we’re watching some noble effort to export the First Amendment across the Atlantic.
But if you get past the incredibly misleading headline, the actual reporting reveals quite an admission from within the administration, and it fundamentally undercuts everything they’ve been doing supposedly regarding “EU internet censorship.” The story reveals that the Trump administration ran its own investigation into EU censorship, found nothing, and then barreled ahead with the entire crusade anyway.
Worth repeating, because it’s the whole story (even if WaPo buried it with their headline): the Trump admin investigated “EU censorship.” The Trump admin came up empty. And then the administration just kept going as if it were undeniable that what their own investigators couldn’t find must have happened anyway.
The Post’s opening gets to it relatively quickly, but treats it as mere scene-setting rather than the incredible revelation it actually is:
In early 2025, aides to Vice President JD Vance ordered a small office at the State Department to document how European regulators were censoring online speech.
Staffers launched an investigation focusing on the European Union’s Digital Services Act, a sweeping 2022 social media law requiring large tech companies to limit the spread of harmful or illegal speech on the continent.
The weeks-long investigation, details of which have not previously been reported, uncovered no records indicating censorship, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
“There is no evidence that Member States of the European Union are overreaching the DSA to censor and criminalize online content,” they wrote in conclusion.
“There is no evidence.” That’s the conclusion of the Trump administration’s own investigators, put in writing. And then, an even more remarkable quote from someone involved:
“We did not find anything,” said one of the people. “It was not politically convenient that we could not find anything.”
“It was not politically convenient that we could not find anything.”
That is quite an admission. A government official is telling you directly that the conclusions were inconvenient, and therefore irrelevant. The investigation was entirely about manufacturing justification for a policy that was already decided. When the justification didn’t materialize, they just ignored it and moved forward anyway.
This is the hallucination presidency in action: when the facts don’t match the narrative, just assert the narrative anyway and hope no one checks.
The Washington Post, to its credit, did the hard reporting here and obtained those quotes. But the headline (“Inside the Trump administration’s campaign to expand ‘free speech’ in Europe”) and subhed (“The United States has banned some European researchers from entering the country and dismantled federal programs intended to fight foreign disinformation campaigns”) describe the administration’s actions without conveying the most explosive finding of the piece: that the evidentiary foundation for all of these actions does not exist. The actual story here is far bigger than the Post’s framing lets on.
Because here’s what the administration did after its own investigators told them there was no evidence of EU censorship: pretty much everything you could imagine a government would do if it had found evidence.
Despite the finding, the Trump administration has pressed ahead with a wide-ranging State Department effort to crack down on what it alleges is widespread censorship in the E.U., according to documents reviewed by The Post and nine people involved or aware of the campaign, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their livelihoods.
It has banned some European researchers from entering the United States and dismantled federal programs intended to fight foreign disinformation campaigns. Behind the scenes, the administration has crafted a plan to allow American tech companies to skirt European rules, using the federal government’s powers to control exports, according to two of the people and documents.
The department is preparing to launch a website to host banned content. A teaser for the site, freedom.gov, includes a mounted Paul Revere-type figure galloping over the words “Freedom is coming.”
Yes, there is literally going to be a government website with a Paul Revere figure galloping over the words “Freedom is coming.” Your tax dollars at work. There is a certain kind of person in government who genuinely confuses propaganda aesthetics with policy substance, and this is a pristine example.
The State Department’s official response to the Post is also worth noting for its brazenness:
The State Department said in a statement that it has been consistent in raising concerns about the Digital Services Act and a similar British law and had “never ‘concluded’ anything to the contrary.”
They’re claiming they “never concluded” that the DSA wasn’t censorship — even though their own staffers put it in writing that they found no evidence of censorship. The scare quotes around “concluded” are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. They’re trying to gaslight their own investigation.
Now, I want to be clear about something. I have been critical of aspects of the DSA for years. There are real concerns about how expansive content regulation can be abused — by governments on either side of the Atlantic. When former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton tried to use the DSA to pressure Elon Musk into not platforming Donald Trump, I called it out as a clear overreach and a genuine threat to free speech principles.
But the Trump administration’s campaign has almost nothing to do with those legitimate concerns. Instead, it’s built on vibes and political convenience, disconnected from anything their own investigators could actually find.
And we know this because we’ve already watched this play out in real time. The single biggest piece of “evidence” the administration and its allies keep pointing to is the EU’s $140 million fine against X (formerly Twitter) from December 2025. The House Judiciary Committee’s Jim Jordan called it “the Commission’s most aggressive censorship step to date,” describing it as “obvious retaliation for its protection of free speech around the globe” in a recently released report.
Sounds terrifying. Except that fine had literally nothing to do with censorship. The violations were about three specific transparency failures: misleading users when Elon changed verification from actual verification to “pay $8 for a checkmark,” maintaining a broken ad repository, and refusing to share required data with researchers. As Stanford’s expert on platform regulation, Daphne Keller, explained at the time:
Don’t let anyone — not even the United States Secretary of State — tell you that the European Commission’s €120 million enforcement against Elon Musk’s X under the Digital Service Act (DSA) is about censorship or about what speech users can post on the platform. That would, indeed, be interesting. But this fine is just the EU enforcing some normal, boring requirements of its law. Many of these requirements resemble existing US laws or proposals that have garnered bipartisan support.
Zero of the charges were about what content X allowed or didn’t allow on its platform.
Meanwhile, the real-world consequences of this evidence-free campaign are landing on actual people. We discussed how absolutely backwards it is for the US to be banning critics under the banner of free speech, and The Post reports on how that’s playing out with the German group, HateAid, that supports victims of online abuse, and whose CEO had her US entry banned:
Josephine Ballon, the group’s chief executive, learned just before Christmas that she had been banned from entering the United States. The State Department issued the ban on the grounds that Ballon and others “led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose,” which she denies.
She compared Trump’s tactics to those used by the online bullies that her organization teaches victims about.
“This is intended to intimidate us and silence us,” she said in an interview. “We are not silenced by the German far right and we will not be by the U.S.”
The US is banning people from entering the country due to their speech — to “protect free speech” — based on claims its own investigators couldn’t substantiate.
I think we found the censorship. And it’s coming from inside the US.
And the hypocrisy runs even deeper than the empty evidentiary cupboard, as we’ve documented before. While the Trump administration screams about EU censorship, FCC Chair Brendan Carr — the same person who traveled to Barcelona to give a speech declaring that “free speech” was “in retreat” because of the DSA — has been actively using his government position to threaten American media companies into silence. When he pressured Disney into temporarily pulling Jimmy Kimmel off the air, he faced zero consequences. He’s still in the job, still making threats.
Meanwhile, the EU actually pushed out Thierry Breton when he overstepped and tried to abuse the DSA to pressure platforms on content. The system the Trump administration claims is an engine of censorship responded to actual overreach by removing the overreacher. The system the Trump administration runs rewarded its overreacher with continued power and more threats.
I keep coming back to that quote: “It was not politically convenient that we could not find anything.” That may be the most honest sentence anyone in this administration has uttered about this entire campaign. The conclusion was written before the investigation started. The policy was set before the evidence was gathered. When reality failed to cooperate with the narrative, reality was simply discarded.
Policy by vibes. Governance by meme. With real consequences for real people and real institutions — imposed by the very people who cannot stop telling you how much they care about free expression. The same people whose own investigators found nothing — and whose response to finding nothing was to start banning foreigners from entering the country for their speech.
Filed Under: censorship, digital services act, dsa, eu, free speech, jd vance, trump admininstration
