A Finnish grandmother posted a Bible verse and European prosecutors spent seven years trying to put her in prison for it.
Now the EU just handed itself a new weapon to bring that same war to every platform Americans use.
What they've already labeled illegal will make your blood boil.
Brussels Just Used a Gender Strategy to Expand Its Censorship Powers
The European Union (EU) had a simple pitch for the Digital Services Act – a regulation forcing the world's largest platforms to remove content or face billions in fines: the internet needed to be safer.
On March 5, they showed what safer means to them.
The new Gender Equality Strategy quietly expanded "online violence" to cover any content that causes "psychological" harm or "suffering" to women – no threat required, no actual violence necessary.
Here's how that works in practice.
An activist NGO, one of the groups Brussels has deputized to patrol online content, objects to a post about biology or marriage and decides it might cause a woman distress.
They flag it as violence, the platform pulls it, and nobody tells you why your post is gone.
Under this framework, if an activist NGO – one of the groups Brussels has deputized to police online speech – objects to a post about basic biology or marriage, they can flag it as "violence" and demand X or Meta remove it.
The platforms don't fight back. They can't afford to.
Non-compliance with the DSA carries fines up to 6% of global annual revenue. For Meta and Google, that's billions of dollars. X already got hit with €120 million in December 2025 for what Brussels called "transparency violations" – a fine calculated, per the Commission's own admission, with no "simple economic formula." In plain English: they made up the number.
Platforms comply or die.
The EU is using this to enforce radical gender ideology online.
Jim Jordan Caught the EU Censoring American Speech and Big Tech Already Complied
The House Judiciary Committee issued a damning report in July 2025 after obtaining documents from the EU Commission under subpoena.
In a May 2025 internal workshop, Commission regulators labeled the phrase "we need to take back our country" – a political statement used by millions of Americans – as illegal hate speech requiring removal.
A February 2026 follow-up report obtained thousands of additional internal documents proving the EU had already won.
Over a decade-long campaign, Brussels successfully pressured social media platforms to change their global content moderation rules – directly suppressing American speech on American soil.
TikTok rewrote significant portions of its content moderation systems to comply with EU demands.
French authorities ordered the removal of commentary about immigration policy after a terrorist attack carried out by a Syrian refugee.
German officials classified calls for deporting criminal aliens as "incitement to hatred."
The committee found DSA censorship is "largely one-sided, almost uniformly targeting political conservatives."
U.S. Ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder put it plainly in September 2025: no president of either party, "and I can tell you President Trump in particular, is going to tolerate a foreign government restricting the First Amendment fundamental free speech, free expression rights of American citizens."
Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed U.S. diplomats in Europe to make challenging the DSA a top priority.
Brussels shrugged. They're not stopping.
The EU Has Been Running a Global Censorship Campaign Since 2016
The EU's war on conservative speech didn't start with the DSA.
After Brexit and Trump's 2016 victory rattled the European establishment, Brussels launched a systematic campaign to ensure voters could never again be influenced by speech its bureaucrats disapproved of.
In 2016, the EU announced a "Code of Conduct against illegal online hate speech" – with zero public debate.
In 2017, Germany passed the Network Enforcement Act, forcing platforms to remove flagged content within 24 hours or face massive fines.
In 2018, the EU launched its Code of Practice on Disinformation, pressuring platforms to suppress viewpoints deemed problematic.
The DSA, which took full effect in February 2024, is the culmination of that eight-year campaign – a single regulation powerful enough to set global censorship standards, because major platforms maintain one set of content moderation policies worldwide.
What's banned in Brussels gets banned in Baltimore.
The Bible Hate Speech Case Shows Exactly Where EU Censorship Goes Next
Päivi Räsänen has served in Finland's parliament since 1995, spent four years as the country's Interior Minister, and spent her career practicing medicine.
In June 2019, she posted a Bible verse on X questioning why her church was sponsoring a Helsinki Pride event.
Finnish prosecutors charged her under a law covering war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Helsinki District Court acquitted her unanimously in 2022.
Prosecutors appealed. The Court of Appeal acquitted her unanimously in 2023.
Prosecutors appealed again. Finland's Supreme Court heard the case on October 30, 2025 – the third court, the seventh year, after thirteen hours of police interrogation about her theological beliefs.
All for posting Scripture.
Paul Coleman of ADF International – the same organization supporting X's legal challenge against the EU – warned that prosecutions like this one don't just punish the defendant. They tell everyone watching that faith-based speech about marriage and sexuality is unwelcome in public life.
The new EU Gender Equality Strategy makes that warning official policy.
It explicitly identifies opposition to radical gender ideology as a threat to "EU democratic space" – and arms the DSA to act on that designation through activist NGOs empowered to flag and remove offending content from every major platform on earth.
The next Päivi Räsänen doesn't have to be in Finland.
She can be in Florida. On Facebook. And Brussels will be calling the shots.
Sources:
- Adina Portaru, "The EU's Censorship Regime Has A New Gender Strategy And It Threatens Free Speech Everywhere," The Daily Wire, March 17, 2026.
- House Judiciary Committee Republicans, "The Foreign Censorship Threat: How the European Union's Digital Services Act Compels Global Censorship and Infringes on American Free Speech," July 25, 2025.
- House Judiciary Committee Republicans, "The Foreign Censorship Threat, Part II," February 3, 2026.
- ADF International, "EU Ignores Free Speech Concerns in Review of Censorial Digital Services Act," December 2, 2025.
- ADF International, "Live from Court: Finland's 'Bible Tweet' Case Reaches Supreme Court in Landmark Free Speech Battle," October 30, 2025.
- European Commission, Gender Equality Strategy 2026–2030, COM(2026) 113 final, March 5, 2026.
