Excerpt from a new must-read report issued by the Foundation for Freedom Online: "23 US-Funded Organizations Drive The EU’s War on Tech Companies."

The American taxpayer is bankrolling online censorship in Europe. Multiple organizations involved in enforcing the EU’s draconian Digital Services Act (DSA), which imposes massive fines on American tech platforms found guilty of carrying “misinformation” or “hate speech,” are American entities backed by American government funding.

Supporters of these efforts, many of whom are deeply tied to the legacy US foreign policy establishment, admit that the goal of these efforts is to shut down free speech for Americans. The pressure is about to mount, as the previously-voluntary EU code of practice on disinformation becomes a mandatory regulation governing tech companies operating in the region.

The Foundation for Freedom Online has analyzed organizations that signed the EU’s code of practice, or are involved in enforcing it, finding eight organizations that receive funding from US government sources.

Additionally, two of the organizations on the list, NewsGuard and Bellingcat, are drectly involved in enforcing the EU’s censorship regime, as active participants in Europe’s network of EU-backed “digital observatories” aimed at detecting disfavored online narratives that can be analysed and targeted for censorship.

Who are these U.S. funded entities that are working overtime to deny Americans their right to free speech?  The above report names the names. And it is all looking incredibly ominous. The bottom line is that the U.S. right to free speech is being attacked by "foreign" entities that are financed by U.S. taxpayers. Americans are afflicted with the free speech version of an auto-immune dysfunction. Here is more from the report:

As the Foundation for Freedom Online highlighted in its 2024 Censorship Index, the U.S. government also pushed censorship in Europe through the State Department’s office of public diplomacy:

Gave the Atlantic Council a $300,000 grant to build a “transatlantic response to disinformation.” This grant was seemingly used to fund a conference involving conversations about cooperating on the EU Digital Services Ac (DSA)t. A grant transaction description mentions a June 2022 conference.

The Delegation of the EU to the United States and the Atlantic Council hosted a June 2022 EU-US Defense and Future Forum. During the conference, members of an audience, which included officials from the U.S. State Department, asked questions to and attended a talk by Gerard De Graaf on the EU-US Digital Policy Agenda, largely centered around the DSA.

Gerard De Graff was the Director of Digital Transformation at the European Commission. He is responsible largely for the creation of the DSA. De Graff was named Special Envoy for Digital to the US and head of the newly created EU San Francisco Office in September 2022, seemingly fitted near Silicon Valley to push American tech platforms into compliance with Orwellian European regulations.