I don't know how Europe and United States can be diverging. After all, both sides are outlawing any kind of speech that is against Israel's genocide and land-theft in Palestine... As a matter of fact, I don't think the U.S. has any kind of legitimacy to point the finger to European governments when they are doing probably the same or worse.

"Now Europe and the United States are diverging. Never mind enduring disagreements about how to treat Nazis and other would-be totalitarians. Europe today, in both its individual countries and its shared continental governance, is criminalizing more and more speech that doesn’t come close to American thresholds for incitement or harassment.

James Kirchick: What happens where free speech is unprotected

The shift has been gradual, emerging in landmark cases at the European Court of Human Rights, as well as in legislation at the national level. But the new reality is stark. Last year, Amnesty International (hardly a Trump-administration ally) published a report about what the organization’s secretary-general, Agnès Callamard, called a “Europe-wide onslaught against the right to protest”; the report documented examples of restrictive laws, use of excessive police force, and arbitrary arrest. It’s not just protests. European judges have signed off on the criminalization of the kinds of hate speech that, while easy to revile, pose nothing like Hitlerite peril. When a middle-aged mother lashes out at asylum seekers in a social-media post (later deleted), or a pro-Palestinian marcher chants a slogan that some but not all see as genocidal, or a flyer calls gays “deviants,” a tolerant society can exercise forbearance and respond with counterspeech. European states are often deploying handcuffs instead. And European leaders are pushing to expand the speech that can get a person thrown in prison."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/europe-free-speech-republicans/683915/

#Europe #EU #FreeSpeech #FreedomOfExpression #Censorship #USA