Europe Doesn’t Have Free Speech—And We Should Stop Pretending It Does
Americans often hear comparisons between the United States and Europe—on healthcare, education, and criminal justice. But one area where the contrast is particularly stark, and too rarely acknowledged outside the American right, is the issue of free speech. For all its self-congratulatory rhetoric about tolerance and liberal values, Europe fundamentally does not protect freedom of expression in any meaningful way. And we should stop pretending otherwise.
Take a recent and disturbing example circulating on social media: a video in which British police officers arrest a man for allegedly causing “anxiety” with an online post. Not for inciting violence, not for issuing a threat, not for any recognizable crime—just for writing something someone found upsetting. This isn’t a one-off. In the United Kingdom, dozens of people have been arrested in recent years for social media content that violates vague “malicious communications” laws. And across the continent, the trend is similar: speech that veers from progressive orthodoxy increasingly finds itself under legal scrutiny.
Germany is another clear case study. In 2024, 60 Minutes aired a segment highlighting Germany’s crackdown on online speech. The report detailed how German authorities routinely track down and arrest citizens—sometimes in early morning raids—for posting views deemed offensive or hateful. In one scene, police arrive at a man’s home over a comment he posted on Facebook. No violence was threatened. No crime was committed in the American sense of the word. But in Germany, expressing the wrong opinion on immigration, gender, or the government can land you in handcuffs.
This is not what free speech looks like.
The entire point of freedom of speech is to protect unpopular speech. Speech that challenges dominant narratives. Speech that offends. Speech that shocks or provokes or even upsets the sensibilities of the majority. If we only protect speech that everyone agrees with, then we’re not protecting anything at all, because popular speech doesn’t need protection. The First Amendment in the United States is not a decorative flourish. It is a robust shield, often controversial and sometimes inconvenient, but vital for preserving a free and open society.
Europe’s speech regime, by contrast, is built around a fundamentally different principle: the maintenance of social harmony and protection of feelings. This sounds nice in theory. In practice, it empowers bureaucrats and police to become the arbiters of acceptable discourse. It turns the state into a speech police, where subjective interpretations of “hate,” “harm,” or “offense” can result in real legal penalties. It chills open debate. And it creates a culture of fear, not freedom.
Some Americans, particularly in elite and academic circles, look to Europe as a model for how we might “balance” free expression with social responsibility. But this is a dangerous impulse. The moment the government is allowed to determine which kinds of speech are acceptable and which are not, the game is over. Today, it might be so-called “hate speech.” Tomorrow, it could be dissent from official policy. And the next day, it could be your opinion.
This is why the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the American tradition of free speech remain not only exceptional but essential. Yes, it means we have to tolerate speech we find offensive or even repugnant. But the alternative—allowing government to control speech in the name of civility or safety—is far worse.
Europe has many admirable qualities. A genuine commitment to free speech is not one of them.