And let’s not forget that free speech does not exist as a practical right in the EU—a site like Facebook would have to spend inordinate amounts of money on moderation not to get closed.
Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees the freedom of expression.
“The jurisdictions that took the top 10 places, in order, were New Zealand, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, Denmark and Luxembourg (tied in 6th place), Finland and Germany (tied in 8th place), and Ireland”
6 out of the top 10 most free countries are in Europe according to this one index.
"2020 World Press Freedom Index" https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table
1 Norway 0 7.84 7.84 0.02 0
2 Finland 0 7.93 7.93 0.03 0
3 Denmark 0 8.13 8.13 -1.74 2
4 Sweden 0 9.25 9.25 0.94 -1
5 Netherlands 0 9.96 9.96 1.33 -1
6 Jamaica 0 10.51 10.51 -0.62 2
7 Costa Rica 0 10.53 10.53 -1.71 3
8 Switzerland 0 10.62 10.62 0.10 -2
9 New Zealand 0 10.69 10.69 -0.06 -2
10 Portugal 0 11.83 11.83 -0.80 2
edit: for those downvoting me for speaking the truth, why are you doing it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#E...
The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), signed on 4 November 1950, guarantees a broad range of human rights to inhabitants of member countries of the Council of Europe, which includes almost all European nations. These rights include Article 10, which entitles all citizens to free expression. Echoing the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights this provides that:
> Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include
> freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without
> interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall
> not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or
> cinema enterprises.
Google "freedom of speech in us vs europe" to see some of the differences.
These differences aren't common enough in day-to-day life to affect quality of life, but in certain controversial situations it leads to different laws being passed. I think that's what OP is getting at.
The fact that you're making such a statement about "the EU" shows how misleading or ignorant you're being, since this is not governed by EU law for the most part.
I'd argue that most EU countries have stronger de facto rights, since peaceful protests in the capital don't tend to get beaten into submission like what happened in the Washington last june.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/police-tear-gas-yello...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-03-19/free-s...
>On free speech, the U.S. and Europe have also gone different ways. The German minister of justice threatened Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet Inc.’s Google search back in December, telling them they needed to move faster and better to remove hateful posts that violate German law. Now the minister is proposing a new law in fulfillment of the threat.
>To Americans, the idea of the government forcing social media to censor posts may seem to resemble China’s internet censorship. Such legislation wouldn’t just be unconstitutional; it would be almost unthinkable. Facebook and Twitter are private actors who could censor voluntarily under the Constitution -- indeed, their voluntary censorship would itself be protected speech.
>But the government can’t order private censorship any more than it can censor directly. That’s because U.S. constitutional tradition treats hate speech as the advocacy of racist or sexist ideas. They may be repellent, but because they count as ideas, they get full First Amendment protection.
Europe and the EU are much more heterogeneous than the US. Making comparison on national laws for the EU with US is not even falsifiable, you can usually find countries on both sides. This does not apply to EU law like GDPR of course.