THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION has dismissed US claims that the EU has censored social media content ahead of recent elections, including in Ireland, as “pure nonsense”. 

A report by the Republican-dominated judiciary committee of the House of Representatives entitled “The Foreign Censorship Threat Part II”, published yesterday, claimed that Coimisiún na Meán “censored” online content ahead of the 2024 general election and last year’s presidential election. 

The report’s release comes ahead of a hearing by the committee chaired by President Donald Trump ally Jim Jordan, entitled “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation, Part II”.

“On the latest censorship allegations. Pure nonsense. Completely unfounded,” EU digital affairs spokesman Thomas Regnier said.

The report itself does not cite any specific examples of censorship ahead of Irish elections, but instead describes meetings held between the media regulator and social media companies to conduct a “risk assessment” in relation to misinformation. 

The meetings also focused on ensuring the social media platforms were operating in line with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which is the wider focus of the US report. 

The report said the regulator sent the companies a list of questions compiled with the assistance of “left-wing NGOs and biased fact-checkers”.

“Each of these interactions created additional censorship pressure on platforms,” the US report claimed. 

Under the administration of President Donald Trump, the US has frequently accused the EU of censoring the speech of Americans and taken particular aim at the DSA.

The US has also barred fact-checkers or anyone who has worked on misinformation from entering the country.

A first report by the House committee last year took aim at the DSA ,which Trump’s administration accuses of discriminating against US firms.

The new report described the DSA as “the culmination of a decade-long European effort to silence political opposition and suppress online narratives that criticize the political establishment”.

It claimed that during the Covid pandemic, EU Commission “officials pressed platforms to change their content moderation rules to globally censor content questioning established narratives about the virus and the vaccine”, citing emails as evidence.

And it accused Brussels of pressuring platforms to “censor content” in a string of EU elections other than those held in Ireland since the DSA’s adoption.

The Trump-allied tech tycoon Elon Musk cheered the release of the report in an X post entitled “Tyrants love censorship”. Since buying Twitter and renaming it X, Musk himself has complied with demands from a number of governments to censor their political opponents, including in Turkey and India. 

But the EU’s Regnier pushed back against the claims of censorchip, pointing to online platforms’ ability to “algorithmically influence elections” and Europe’s efforts to ensure “free and fair elections”.

“Freedom of expression is a fundamental right in Europe,” Regnier said, adding that the DSA “is protecting that right against big tech”.

With reporting from AFP