What the US media (and Elon Musk) call EU censorship is actually a request to follow EU rules if they want to operate in the EU market. What, exactly, is controversial about that?
Yes? It’s not exactly a surprise that you are expected to follow the laws where you do business. This doesn’t mean those laws are inherently good or bad, that’s a judgement which requires analysis to make and businesses quite reasonably might choose not to stay in a market based on that decision as Google did with China.
It's not that controversial, every single country has limits on speech, including the US. So European countries control a little bit more than the US, largely when it comes to racial abuse and other hate speech. So? The American model when combined with social media and the internet appears to have disastrous outcomes, judging by who has been elected there. It clearly worked in the past, but not any more.
Americans supposedly being outraged at other free, democratic countries (often in reality both more free and democratic than the US) having different laws regarding speech is really just a smoke screen for what they really want: for their social media companies and billionaires to completely control our media, so that we end up just as fucked up and insane as they are. In the end if we allow Americans to poison our countries, we will lose our freedoms and democracies. Why would we allow that? What do you expect?
P.S. it's cringe to cry about lack of free speech in Europe as if we've changed. We never, ever had 100% free speech in Europe. Stop trying to hark back to some free speech utopia that literally never existed. This is the continent that up until 110 years ago was overwhelmingly ruled by kings and queens and indeed we are in many ways far more conservative than you are. Get over it and stop trying to turn us into you.
I would just like the early American project of liberal democracy and Constitutional rights to outlive American capitalism and American militarism, even if it means it survives it in some other country. Because it's looking pretty bleak over here.
We ought to avoid repeating your mistakes, no? Maybe unlimited campaign donations and so on, all this wonderful "American free speech (money = speech)" is a fundamentally bad idea. Worked exceedingly well for ~225 years, now it has lead to the implosion of the empire by electing a sociopathic retard to the presidency. Yes to free speech, no to whatever fucked up shit the US, its billionaire "libertarians" and Christian nationalists are pushing for us to adopt here in Europe.
If the likes of JD Vance are pushing for us to adopt his idea of free speech, you can be sure it's a bad idea.
The American political system didn't implode until its system of capitalism had the conditions necessary to escape its popular control. That wasn't necessarily an eventuality. We had a semi-functional campaign finance system in living memory.
Without the protections the Americans tried to shove into the First Amendment (which did not include anything about corporations at the time, as they did not exist) being enshrined into law, I worry that your issues with capital-government overreach will arise even faster than ours.
Ask Alex Jones about his free speech on Sandy Hook to understand how bad (EU) censorship really is!
Jokes aside. Restriction of freedoms, including speech, is not bad by definition, it's the scale and intention behind it that matters but this aspect is always missing, kind of censored, in public debate. You may downvote me now :-)
Edit: In the same sense, Alon does not cry about specific and obviously unjustified cases of EU censorship on X.
Of course not. It's only censorship if the rules are censoring rules. Just because a billionaire right wing extremist cries "cEnSoRsHiP" everytime people who criticise him aren't imprisoned doesn't mean it is.