The US State Department’s latest proposals reported by the Financial Times on Sunday to finance “free speech” initiatives across Europe with tens of millions of dollars reveal a contradiction that extends far beyond ideology: Washington spending public money to influence political debates in Europe while insisting that foreign governments must never do the same in the United States.

If Brussels were to establish a multimillion-euro program supporting organizations campaigning against Republican or Democratic policies inside the US, the reaction on Capitol Hill would be immediate and furious. The same principle somehow becomes more flexible when the direction of influence runs across the Atlantic.

Behind the lofty language lies the true objective: protecting US economic interests by weakening European regulation from within. The ostensible target of this largesse is the European Union’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act — regulations that were debated, amended and passed through the full legal machinery of the European Parliament and member states. They are laws designed to protect European users from disinformation, hate speech and the monopolistic abuse of a handful of tech giants, particularly those from the US that dominate the EU market. Yet Washington has decided that these EU enactments constitute “censorship” and must........

© The Frontier Post (Editorial)