Have you ever stopped mid-sentence while typing a post and wondered, “Wait, is someone going to come after me for this?”
If you haven’t yet, you probably will soon. Because right now, quietly but relentlessly, the rules of what we’re allowed to say online are being rewritten—not by our neighbors, not even by our own governments in many cases, but by regulators on the other side of the Atlantic who have never met us and don’t share our traditions of open debate.
It sounds like dystopian fiction. It isn’t.
The Quiet Coup Against Free Expression
A few years ago, most of us took it for granted that the internet was the freest place humans had ever built for sharing ideas. Messy, chaotic, sometimes ugly—yes. But free. Today that assumption is under the most serious attack it has ever faced, and the weapon of choice is a piece of legislation that few people outside policy circles have even heard of.
It’s a law that gives a supranational body the power to decide what counts as “illegal content” across vast swaths of the internet, then force every major platform to remove it or face penalties that could sink even the biggest tech companies. And because those companies operate globally, the chilling effect doesn’t stop at any border.
In practice, this means the strictest speech rules of any single country in the bloc can become the de facto standard for the entire world.
A Real Person, a Real Bible Verse, Three Trials
Let me tell you about a grandmother from Northern Europe who never wanted to be a test case for anything.
She’s a medical doctor, a longtime member of parliament, and a devout Christian. In 2019 she tweeted a photo of a Bible verse questioning her church leadership’s decision to sponsor a pride event. That’s it. No threats, no slurs—just a scripture passage and her personal conviction about marriage.
She has now been dragged through court three separate times. Acquitted twice, yet prosecutors appealed again. The state has spent years and untold resources trying to prove that quoting scripture and holding traditional views amounts to “hate speech.”
If this can happen to a soft-spoken parliamentarian in a liberal democracy, what chance do the rest of us have when the rules get even tighter?
How One Law Can Rule the Whole Internet
The mechanism is brutally simple. Large platforms—think any site or app with tens of millions of users—must obey the strictest interpretation of “illegal content” that exists anywhere in the covered territory. Fail to do so quickly enough, and the fines start at billions of dollars.
Companies hate uncertainty more than almost anything else. Faced with existential financial threats, their rational response is to over-censor. Why risk a fine when you can just take the post down and move on?
And since most platforms use one global content-moderation policy rather than dozens of local ones, the most restrictive standard tends to spread everywhere. A rule designed for one context becomes the ceiling for human expression worldwide.
“If those platforms deem something ‘illegal’ under regional rules, that content may be banned everywhere—even in countries with strong free speech protections.”
This isn’t speculation. American diplomats have warned publicly that the new framework threatens protected speech inside the United States. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have started ringing alarm bells. Even some European politicians admit privately that the law’s reach was never meant to be this sweeping—but now that it exists, few want to be the one to dial it back.
The Financial Hammer That Guarantees Compliance
Let’s talk numbers, because nothing focuses corporate minds like the prospect of losing six percent of global revenue. For the largest companies that’s tens of billions of dollars—enough to wipe out years of profit in a single penalty.
- A single misstep can trigger investigations that last years
- Regulators can demand internal documents, algorithms, everything
- Appealing fines is expensive and slow
- Stock prices crater on headlines alone
When the downside is that catastrophic, the safest business decision is to err on the side of removal. Platforms aren’t stupid. They’ll build systems that automatically suppress anything that might draw official attention, long before any human ever reviews it.
We’ve already seen this movie before, just in slower motion. Remember when payment processors and cloud services started dropping controversial clients under pressure? This is the same dynamic, only now it’s codified into law and backed by government power instead of vague “reputation risk.”
The Architecture of the New Censorship Machine
What makes the system especially insidious is how many layers it has.
There are official “trusted flaggers” who get priority treatment when they report content. There are national regulators who interpret vague terms like “hate speech” or “disinformation” however they see fit on any given day. There are consultants and NGOs whose entire business model depends on finding more things to flag.
At the very top sits a commission that can issue continent-wide takedown orders and levy those astronomical fines. It’s a perfect closed loop: the more content gets removed, the more funding flows to the organizations doing the removing, which incentivizes them to find even more.
Due process? Good luck. Most users never know why their post disappeared, let alone get a meaningful chance to appeal.
Why This Should Worry Even People Who “Have Nothing to Hide”
I keep hearing the same refrain: “I don’t post anything controversial, so this won’t affect me.” That’s what everyone thinks—right up until the moment the line moves and suddenly they’re on the wrong side of it.
Today it might be traditional religious views. Tomorrow it could be questioning public health mandates, or criticizing certain foreign policies, or making jokes that someone, somewhere finds “harmful.” The categories are elastic by design.
And once speech is chilled in one area, the precedent exists to expand into others. History is remarkably consistent on this point: give authorities the power to silence the things you hate, and eventually they’ll use it on the things you love.
The Extraterritorial Reach Nobody Voted For
Perhaps the most galling part is that citizens in countries with strong constitutional protections are having their speech restricted by regulators they never elected and cannot remove.
A post that is completely lawful where it was written can vanish because it might violate a rule somewhere else. The internet was supposed to make geography irrelevant for ideas. Instead, geography is becoming the decisive factor in what we’re allowed to think out loud.
“Even an American citizen posting from a small town could potentially have their content taken down if some regulator decides it breaks their local rules.”
What Actual Resistance Looks Like
The good news—there is some—is that people are starting to fight back.
More than a hundred experts from dozens of countries recently signed an open letter demanding changes before the law’s next review. Former tech executives, lawmakers, academics, journalists—they’re all saying the same thing: this goes too far.
Courts are beginning to push back too. Judges in multiple countries have ruled that prosecutors overreached when they tried to criminalize unpopular opinions. Public opinion is shifting once people realize what’s at stake.
In my view, the most effective pressure will come from users themselves. When enough people start asking hard questions—Why was this post removed? Who decided? Under what exact rule?—platforms will have to become more transparent or risk losing trust entirely.
Where We Go From Here
We’re at a fork in the road for the open internet.
One path leads to a world where what you can say online depends on the most restrictive government that can claim jurisdiction over your platform. The other preserves the chaotic, vibrant, sometimes uncomfortable global conversation that has defined the internet age.
The technology isn’t the problem. The desire to silence disagreement isn’t new. What’s new is the scale and coordination now possible when governments and tech giants align against open debate.
We still have time to choose which future we want. But not unlimited time.
The grandmother I mentioned earlier? She was acquitted again. For now. But the fact that she had to defend herself in court at all—three separate times—should terrify anyone who believes ideas should win or lose in the open, not in the docket.
The fight for free expression has never been easy. It’s about to get harder. But it’s also never been more important.
Because once we let someone else—anyone else—become the arbiter of what opinions are acceptable, we haven’t just lost an argument. We’ve lost the right to have arguments at all.
And that’s a loss none of us can afford.
