The site displays the motto “Information is power. Reclaim your human right to free expression. Get ready,” with a graphic of a galloping white horse above the Earth.
The United States has built a website that will allow people in Europe to see content banned by their governments, including hate speech and terrorist propaganda, Reuters has reported.
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The portal, freedom.gov, allows worldwide users to circumvent government controls on their content. It was reportedly developed by the US State Department.
The site displays the motto “Information is power. Reclaim your human right to free expression. Get ready,” with a graphic of a galloping white horse above the Earth.
The portal has not been officially deployed and was supposed to be launched last week at the Munich Security Conference, according to the three sources who spoke to Reuters.
However, the website could put Washington at risk of legal headwinds in other countries for not respecting their digital laws.
The European Commission does not block websites in the EU, a European Commission spokesperson told Euronews Next, adding that it had no specific comment on the portal.
Only Member States' authorities may block a website which is illegal under national or European law. This includes websites promoting hate speech or terrorist content.
"This has nothing to do with free speech, which is a fundamental right in the EU", the spokesperson added.
Pointing to the Digital Services Act, the spokesperson said users could challenge content moderation decisions through platforms.
"More generally speaking, if we have a look at public indexes on freedom online, there is no better place than Europe. All top countries on that list are European countries," they added.
A State Department spokesperson told Reuters the US government does not have a censorship-circumvention program specific to Europe but added, “Digital freedom is a priority for the State Department, however, and that includes the proliferation of privacy and censorship-circumvention technologies like VPNs."
Europe and the US have different approaches to free speech. In the US, the Constitution provides protections to almost all forms of expression, but the European Union sets limits, which are based on the bloc’s history and bans extremist propaganda, which includes the systematic vilification of Jews, foreigners, and minorities.
Such rules, dating back to 2008, restrict certain categories of content on social media and large platforms such as Facebook and X.
Under frameworks like the EU's Digital Services Act and Britain's Online Safety Act, platforms are required to limit the spread of illegal hate speech, terrorist propaganda, and harmful disinformation, and in some cases to remove such content quickly.
The approach has drawn sharp criticism from US officials, who argue that these policies are being used to suppress right-wing politicians in countries including Romania, Germany, and France, and that the rules amount to government-sanctioned censorship of legitimate political speech.
This story was updated with comment from the European Commission.