OSA, DSA in the crosshairs as U.S. hearing continues assault on foreign laws
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# OSA, DSA in the crosshairs as U.S. hearing continues assault on foreign laws
Trump administration appears bent on framing allies as threats to U.S. freedom
Sep 3, 2025, 2:16 pm EDT | Joel R. McConvey
Categories Age Assurance | Biometrics News
Republicans in Washington are very unhappy about online safety legislation in the UK and EU. Today, they threw a formal public fit, in the form of a hearing held by the House Judiciary Committee, dedicated to interrogating “European threats to American free speech and innovation.” The bit of political theater featured, as witnesses, UK Reform leader and Brexit cheerleader Nigel Farage, as well a lawyer representing the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a “faith-based legal advocacy group” that lobbies against same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights. As suggested by the title, it marked a deliberate escalation in the U.S. administration’s attack on the foreign laws it doesn’t like.
## Republicans frame online safety laws as anti-American
The Trump administration’s snipes at the EU’s Digital Safety Act (DSA) and the UK Online Safety Act (OSA) have been ongoing since February, when U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance took to the podium at the Munich Security Conference to excoriate his allies for what the president deems to be censorious laws that target American companies.
The hearing picked up the theme with vigor, with Congressman Jim Jordan opening his remarks with doomy pronouncements about a “censorship industrial complex” and a would-be “shakedown of American tech companies under the DSA and the OSA and the digital markets act in the EU.”
The hearing quickly deteriorated into a back-and-forth of accusations that hit all the current notes of American discord: the Chinese threat to the U.S. economy, Donald Trump’s apparent one-sided view of free speech, Islamophobia, trans activism, sharia law and Jeffrey Epstein.
Farage took the opportunity to thank Vance for the scolding in Munich, and also offered an impromptu opinion on