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Notes -
My general impression is that Europe doesn’t respect free speech the way we do in the United States. For example, in England, one RooshV was banned from entering England (even for getting on a connecting flight) because he expressed views the leaders of England disagreed with.
I think a strong case that a lot of the online censorship (e.g. not allowing people to have frank discussions about Trans rights—and, yes it’s Reddit’s trans rights discussion censorship which drove The Motte to have their own website instead of remaining on Reddit) we saw in the late 2010s and early 2020s was partly a result of EU overreach. Indeed, Twitter/X doesn’t censor the way most other major social media platforms do, and they were hit with a huge fine from the EU late last year, and I feel the EU unfairly targeted Twitter/X because that platform allows people to express views which get people banned on other platforms.
For one, I’m glad this site is here to allow frank discussions. Yeah, it can be right-learning, but considering a lot of mainstream right-wing views are straight up suppressed and silenced on other platforms, it’s no surprise right wing people flock to the relatively few platforms which allow frank open discussion.
I’m saying all this as a classic liberal.
That the worst online censorship was around trans rights is strong evidence that it was not driven by pressure from the EU authorities - the offline push for censorship of sane views on trans issues was much stronger in the US than the EU. Given the weakness of free speech laws in Europe, the EU (and member states) could have openly censored unapproved views on trans issues the way they openly censored complaints about Muslim immigration, but they chose not to. The pattern of what got censored how hard on Reddit is most consistent with a bottom-up push for censorship by the powermods, and more consistent with top-down censorship directed by American lefties than European lefties.
A quote from the executive summary that I saved in my draft, but didn't get around to commenting on before posting:
Other than that, you have national laws like the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz or Ley Trans.
If you want to paint the EU as more sane than the US on the trans issue, you'd have to point to the medical establishment. The legal establishment might as well have been directly transferred from the libbiest gender-studies departament in the US.
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