Authored by Kimberley Hayek via The Epoch Times,
The Trump administration announced plans to direct funding toward promoting free speech in Western allied democracies,a senior State Department official said on Monday. The initiative bolsters efforts to counter European online regulations categorized by Washington as censorship.
Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers discussed the initiative during a trip to Europe. It includes grants to support free expression, a result of concerns about rules such as the European Union’s Digital Services Act and Britain’s Online Safety Act.
These laws, which E.U. officials say aim to deter hate speech and misinformation, have been scrutinized by U.S. officials as restricting the free speech of American tech firms and suppressing immigration policy critiques.
“One way my office is going to operate differently is we’re going to be very forthright and transparent about everything we do,” Rogers said during a panel discussion in Budapest on Monday. She added that her role allows directing U.S. funding through grants, stating, “I want to promote free speech in Western allied democracies, and ... that’s what my grantmaking is going to be doing.”
Rogers, appearing alongside a top aide to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, underscored the importance of free speech for democracy.
“The United States government, via me, but not only me, has been engaging aggressively on the issue of free speech, because you don’t have self-governance without freedom of speech, you can’t have a democratic deliberation if viewpoints are proscribed from the public square,” she said.
Rogers is scheduled to stop in Dublin, Budapest, Warsaw, and Munich to discuss digital freedoms with officials and others.
The administration’s December National Security Strategy said that European leaders were censoring speech and suppressing opposition to immigration policies, warning of the continent’s “civilizational erasure.”
Rogers said European polls showing European views on migration are similar to those in the United States.
Source: ZeroHedge News
