- Politico reports that the Trump administration is circulating a draft declaration on “freedom of expression” ahead of a proposed signing at the UN General Assembly side event in September.
- As reported, it asks governments not to require platforms to proactively moderate broad categories of content.
- This is a transparent attempt to shield American platforms from European regulation.
21 July 2026 – The United States government is circulating a draft joint declaration on “freedom of expression” that it hopes heads of government will sign at an event on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September. The draft obtained by POLITICO denounces “new laws” and “regulatory frameworks” that it says endanger free speech in “historically democratic countries”. European lawmakers have described the draft as a not-so-subtle dig at the EU’s digital rules, according to the report.
The EFCSN is not against an international commitment to freedom of expression. We are against this one: it is an attempt to shield the most powerful gatekeepers of our information spaces from accountability.
Who pays for the exemptions
The draft asks governments to agree that they will not require platforms to “proactively moderate content” falling within a list of categories. As reported, that list includes political discourse and religious speech. It also includes “discourse about elections processes”, concerns “about ballot counting systems”, “opinions and novel theories on public health”, and claims presented as empirically supported “even where such facts are contested by official bodies or are politically inconvenient”.
Elections and public health are among the subjects European fact-checkers verify most often. To allow platforms to turn a blind eye to these issues would risk the safety of all users. These harms impact the public – not the companies distributing the claims.
The law regulates systems, not speech
Obligations imposed on platforms by European regulations such as the DSA do not violate the right to free speech.
A platform is not a pipe. What appears in a feed, what ranks first in a search, and what reaches ten million people rather than ten thousand follow from design and content moderation choices a company makes and sells to advertisers.
As we set out in our submission on the second annual DSA risk report, revenue models built on engagement “favour emotionally charged and divisive narratives, which are systematically amplified through algorithmic recommendation systems”.
That is what the Digital Services Act addresses: the largest platforms must identify the risks stemming from the design of their own systems and take measures to reduce them. One such named risk is negative effects on “civic discourse and electoral processes”. Nothing in the DSA decides which claims are accurate. Content is illegal in Europe only where it is already unlawful under Union or national law, and the Act created no new category of prohibited speech.
In fact, it strengthens the speech rights of Europeans by, for example, requiring platforms to explain their content removals and to give users a way to challenge them and have wrongly removed posts reinstated.
None of that infringes on free speech. Instead, the law concerns the systems companies build to distribute and profit from the content they choose to make visible. Requiring them to account for harm caused by these choices is not censorship.
We call on EU Member States and the European Commission to decline to sign any text that treats platform accountability as censorship. If negotiations go ahead, European governments should defend the full standard, including the freedom to seek and receive information, and keep the distinction between regulating systems and restricting speech.
