FREE SPEECH UNDER SIEGE
The Highwire with Del Bigtree
The Highwire with Del Bigtree
4.9 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 27 August 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Transcript
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| 0:01.0 | Freedom is ringing here, but throughout the rest of the world, it's closing in. |
| 0:05.2 | It's getting dark. |
| 0:06.2 | The Digital Service Act in the United Kingdom, I'm sorry, across all of the European Union, |
| 0:12.0 | was kind of the first shot across the bow. |
| 0:14.2 | And that was basically to hold digital platforms accountable for user safety. |
| 0:19.4 | Safety from what you ask? |
| 0:20.7 | Disinformation, harm, these nebulous |
| 0:24.3 | terms that no one really can define clearly, but there are, there's, there's censorship by any |
| 0:31.0 | other means. And now in the UK, that's coming to a finer point. We have this test case. |
| 0:37.4 | And we saw headlines like this just as just February. |
| 0:40.3 | So just beginning of this year, hundreds charged with online speech crimes under Orwellian crackdown. |
| 0:45.3 | So we're seeing people now in the UK and actual police task forces that are that are tasked with going after people for what they post and the words they post or memes they post online. |
| 0:56.0 | And people are getting arrested by the week for this in the UK. |
| 1:00.0 | So when we sit here in the United States and we think, this is fine, like on to the next thing. |
| 1:05.0 | No, this is a pause. This is a brief pause. This is a window that we have. |
| 1:09.0 | This is a gift that the rest of the world is looking to and saying, |
| 1:45.0 | we need to help here because our governments are not paying attention. It's still, it's still COVID. It's still 2021 here. We're being censored. It's going further. Luckily in the U.S., we have our top leaders that are pushing back against the U.K. and what's going on. Take a look. All right. In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat. What we're seeing with legislation like the Online Safety Act, the Digital Services Act in the EU, is something very different. We are seeing a rising tide of censorship in the West. We see it in the EU, we've seen it, we're seeing it in the UK. I know they don't have a First Amendment, but freedom of expression, right? And if that is eroded, if suddenly these become places where people are targeted |
| 1:51.0 | because of what they said or what their opinion is, then one of the pillars of our shared interest is under attack. |
| 1:57.0 | We're concerned about free expression here in the United Kingdom and Europe, but we're primarily |
| 2:02.6 | concerned about the impacts your laws can have on American citizens under the First Amendment. |
| 2:07.6 | And when the government infringes on that, like we're seeing with the Online Safety Act, that is a concern. |
| 2:13.6 | We do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends in the UK and also with some |
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