E-Pluribus |August 21, 2025
Europe's censorship problem. UK jails citizens for mean cartoons. Nurse fined 94K over social media posts.
A round-up of the latest and best insight on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Conor Friedersdorf: Europe’s Free-Speech Problem
Critics say the US government can’t complain about censorship in Europe while suppressing speech it doesn’t like at home. At The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf argues this charge of hypocrisy misses the mark:
American officials are waging a multifront attack on Europe’s approach to free speech. This month, a congressional delegation traveled to Dublin, Brussels, and London to probe and decry European regulations on digital speech. A State Department human-rights assessment issued last week pointed to objectionable “restrictions on freedom of expression” in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. All of this follows Vice President J. D. Vance’s speech in February at the Munich Security Conference, where he accused European leaders of retreating from the continent’s “most fundamental values,” including free expression.
These assessments might seem untrustworthy, given the flagrant transgressions against free-speech principles from the Trump administration and its allies. But the fact is that European leaders are corroding the right to free expression, and show every sign of sliding further down a slippery slope into illiberalism.
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Europeans might retort that the American system, too, has failed to stop threats to freedom of expression. The Trump administration has sued news outlets, used anti-discrimination law to crack down on student protesters, and more, in some instances targeting European citizens. After Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish national studying at Tufts University, wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper that criticized campus administrators for their response to the war in Gaza, the administration suspended her visa and put her in immigration detention.
But a First Amendment lawsuit helped free Öztürk. And First Amendment protections constrain Donald Trump from detaining American citizens in the same fashion, while some citizens of Europe find themselves jailed in their own countries for political speech. Under the approach that many European leaders favor, Trump could indict half of Bluesky. And if internet companies all begin censoring speech globally by suppressing everything that could conceivably be illegal in Europe, Americans, including Trump critics, will be stifled.
Chadwick Moore: UK free speech crackdown sees up to 30 people a day arrested for petty offenses such as retweets and cartoons
An equally alarming trend continues in the UK, as the government puts more of its own citizens in jail — 30 people a day at this point — for offenses like sharing cartoons on Facebook. The US government has complained in this case too—but so have many “everyday Brits,” according to the New York Post:
[O]ver 30 people a day are arrested for speech crimes, about 12,000 a year, under laws written well before the age of social media that make crimes of sending “grossly offensive” messages or sharing content of an “indecent, obscene or menacing character.”
Social media continues to be flooded with videos of British cops banging on doors in the middle of the night and hauling parents off to jail—all over mean Facebook posts and agitated words on X.
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The stories are so shocking, it’s caught the attention of the White House, which is taking an increasingly aggressive stance against censorship in the Eurozone. In a fiery address to the Munich Security Conference in February, Vice President JD Vance blasted “a crisis of censorship” in Britain.
On Tuesday, the US State Department’s annual Human Rights Report slammed British authorities’ “serious restrictions on freedom of expression,” writing that the “human rights situation worsened” in Britian over the last year, and criticized laws like 2023’s Online Safety Act.
“We consider freedom of expression to be a foundational component of a functioning democracy,” State Department press secretary Tammy Bruce told reporters, calling Britain’s chilling government actions “intolerable in a free society.”
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All this police action devoted to mean words is occurring while actual criminals roam the streets of British cities. Of the 33,000 car thefts recorded in London alone last year, only 300 arrests were made; while just five percent of the over 40,000 shoplifting incidents reported in London in 2023 led to charges.
“In Britain there is increasingly a sense that whatever your problem is, someone else can sort it out for you,” Maxie Allen told the Post. “It’s like Amazon, you click a button, you get a product. And I think people are saying, right, I don’t like the situation, I’ll call the police, they can shut these people up.”
Michael Higgins: Fining nurse Amy Hamm $93,000 a grotesque attack on free speech
Meanwhile in Canada, the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives just suspended Amy Hamm and ordered her to pay nearly $94,000 in legal fees. What sort of malpractice did nurse Hamm, a single mother with an exemplary work record, commit? She posted wrongthink on social media. Michael Higgins calls shenanigans in The National Post:
Hamm, a nurse for 13 years with an unblemished record, was terminated by Vancouver Coastal Health without severance after the guilty decision. She has not found another nursing job, writes some opinion columns (including for National Post) and is a single mother who receives no child support.
Still, the disciplinary panel considered $93,000 in legal costs was not punitive.
Who are they kidding?
As noted by Hamm during the hearing, “a significant penalty would convey to professionals that they should not speak up on controversial matters based on conscience.”
Part of the costs included $38,197.80 to pay for one of the College’s experts, Dr. Greta Bauer, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Western University, and the Sex and Gender Science Chair for the Canadian Institute of Health Information.
It was this very expensive witness (whose fee was cut from $63,663 to $38K) who enlightened the college with profound insights that included: it was proper to call mothers “birthing people” because inclusivity was so important; who disagreed “that there are only two sexes” and that “humans cannot change their sex,” and who thought that Hamm was frivolous for saying, “I don’t think it’s possible for women to defend their legal rights, or even the definition of womanhood if anybody can say they’re a woman and it will be so.”
Yet Hamm was only saying years ago what others, including the United Nations, are saying now.
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A brief reminder that opposition to free speech is nothing new. G.K. Chesterton anticipated the West’s slide into illiberalism more than a century ago:
Maryland. Where the government forces you to tax your customers—and prohibits you from telling them:
Our translation: “If people can speak freely, they might say stuff I don’t like!”
