--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- John Bickley: Welcome to this Encore edition of Money Wire. I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley, and I'm joined by Georgia Howe.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks for having me, John.
--:-- John Bickley: It's Sunday, August 3rd. You know that nagging feeling about the doctor's appointment you've been putting off forever? Maybe it's that dentist cleaning you're now six months overdue for. Whatever it is, today might actually be the day to stop procrastinating.
--:-- Announcer (Voiceover): With ZocDoc, you can find and book the right doctor entirely online, and honestly, you'll probably have an appointment booked before the end of this ad. ZocDoc is a free app and website where you can search and compare high-quality in-network doctors and click to instantly book an appointment. They've got over 100,000 doctors across every specialty you can think of. Mental health, dental, primary care, urgent care, you name it.
--:-- Announcer (Voiceover): The best part is you can filter for exactly what matters. Doctors who take your insurance are nearby and have great ratings from actual patients. Most appointments happen within 24 to 72 hours, but you can often get same-day slots when you need them. So stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to ZocDoc.com slash wire to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com slash wire.
--:-- John Bickley: A version of this episode aired earlier this summer. Joining us now to discuss the EU's new online censorship policies is Jeremy Tedesco, Senior Vice President of Corporate Engagement at Alliance Defending Freedom. Jeremy, thank you for coming on.
--:-- Jeremy Tedesco: Yeah, it's my pleasure, John.
--:-- John Bickley: So most of our audience will not have heard about Europe's Digital Services Act before. So let's start there. What exactly is that in these new code of conduct policies?
--:-- Jeremy Tedesco: Yeah, the Digital Services Act has actually been around for a while. It just now becoming truly mandatory. But what it is is essentially a blueprint for total narrative control in the digital age. What it does is it takes the EU's draconian speech standards and imposes it on Americans and everybody in the world, really, by threatening big American platforms and search engines with literally billions in fines if they fail to censor speech that the EU deems to be hate speech or disinformation.
--:-- John Bickley: And trust me, the EU's definitions of those words, which can't be defined really at all because they're so vague, it's really in the eye of the beholder, completely inconsistent with the free speech standards of the First Amendment in the United States.
--:-- Jeremy Tedesco: Now, your organization is really sounding the alarm over the DSA and particularly how it will affect Americans. Can you unpack that for us? Why is this such a serious censorship threat?
--:-- Jeremy Tedesco: Well, these regulations apply almost exclusively to United States companies. And the companies can't geofence so that the EU standards only apply in EU member states. The companies have to, their technology doesn't allow them to geofence algorithms and how they train AI and all these other things. And so these standards are absolutely going to apply to the kind of speech we can engage in online in the United States.
--:-- John Bickley: And we know this is true already. Look, back in the COVID timeframe, the EU was mandating disinformation on vaccines, on the lab leak theory, all things that turned out to be true. A lot of those views turned out to be true and still valid, even if they weren't true, to be spoken when it comes to American free speech law, those things were taken down, you know, because of the Digital Services Act.
--:-- Jeremy Tedesco: So we know it has impact on American speech rights right now and in the past. And so it's only going to get worse. One other example I think your listeners should know about was back during the presidential election cycle last presidential election cycle. Thierry Breton the EU commissioner who was the final enforcer of the DSA sent a letter to Elon Musk and X when he was hosting President Trump on X Live and said look, we're really concerned that your interview of President Trump is going to violate the DSA's hateful conduct and incitement standards.
--:-- John Bickley: And we're throwing this lob across the ocean to tell you, you better be careful what you say. So they're trying to regulate how we speak and how or even our presidential candidates speak during an election cycle.
--:-- Jeremy Tedesco: So they have really no boundaries to what they want to censor. And again, it's really a blueprint for censorship in the digital age, and we need to stop it.
--:-- John Bickley: How are social media companies responding to these new policies? Have they pushed back against them at all?
--:-- Jeremy Tedesco: Well, the companies themselves are going to be required to mitigate the risk of harmful content being online. And that's harmful content as defined by EU law. And so the companies have to start deleting, restricting, shadow banning any speech that could possibly come into conflict with EU laws on hate speech and disinformation.
--:-- John Bickley: I think about this at a time when the DSA was voluntary for these companies to comply with. We know that 11,000 accounts on Twitter were suspended because of the EU's definition of COVID disinformation. So now that this is going to become mandatory, that's only going to get worse. The censorship isn't going to get better in a mandatory world where the companies truly are facing these crippling fines if they don't censor consistent with the EU's view of what's right and wrong?
--:-- Jeremy Tedesco: Essentially, is the EU setting themselves up as the arbiters of truth online?
--:-- Jeremy Tedesco: How has this administration been different than the Biden administration in terms of, obviously, this is a long time coming. We've seen these actions really ramping up, like you said, in 2020. How different is the administration responding to this as opposed to the previous one?
--:-- Jeremy Tedesco: Yeah, it's 180 degrees difference with the Trump administration. The Biden administration was a full participant in the censorship aims not just of the EU but this entire censorship complex that President Trump talked about during his campaign trail where private companies, academic institutions, media outlets, nonprofit organizations, Daily Wire?
--:-- John Bickley: Yeah.
--:-- Jeremy Tedesco: Yeah, but the Daily Wire was, of course, one of the targets of all that, of course. And we're battling that out as you are in court. We are in the public square and with a lot of the companies that did that to you. So the Trump administration has turned that all around. They've stopped a lot of the funding that even our own federal government was funding a lot of the nonprofit organizations that were a key part of this censorship complex, those ones who flagged content in outlets like yours for censorship.
--:-- Jeremy Tedesco: But he's also stopped a lot of the coordination efforts. He shut down entire departments like the Global Engagement Center that were kind of the tip of the spear when it came to that under the Biden administration. But what we've learned as we've dug more and more into this issue is it doesn't solve the censorship problem online just to stop the federal government from everything it was doing.
--:-- Jeremy Tedesco: This international aim and goal, the censor through the DSA and other international efforts to censor, is on our doorstep. It's already affecting American speech, it's only going to get worse. And so we certainly have been encouraged by how much J.D. Vance has talked about this issue. President Trump has certainly prioritized free speech and diplomatic conversations and negotiations with European countries.
--:-- John Bickley: And we hope that starts to ramp up really with the EU as well as Ambassador Anthony Puzder, who's the ambassador to the European Union, hits the ground sometime soon. Well, we've just seen how effective Trump can be in strong arming Europe at the NATO summit. So we'll see if he can force Europe's hand here as well.
--:-- Jeremy Tedesco: Jeremy, thank you so much for joining us.
--:-- Jeremy Tedesco: Yep, thank you.
--:-- John Bickley: That was Alliance Defending Freedom's Jeremy Tedesco. And this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.
