Remember when Facebook suspended President Trump? Guess which laws they used to do that.

When Facebook’s Oversight Board issued its verdict on Trump, it did not cite a single item of United States law, including the First Amendment, but cited the Rabat Plan of Action, and articles of the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), OHCHR, a UN Special Rapporteur to the Human Rights Council, and the UN’s International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).

American law does not apply on Facebook. UN law does.

The UK’s ruthless crackdown on the political opposition has gotten the EU excited about its censorship possibilities.

The European Union’s digital enforcer wrote an open letter to tech mogul Elon Musk on Monday ahead of a planned interview with former United States President Donald Trump to remind him of the EU’s rules on promoting hate speech.

Europe’s Digital Commissioner Thierry Breton reminded the world’s richest man of his legal obligation to stop the “amplification of harmful content.”

“As the relevant content is accessible to EU users and being amplified also in our jurisdiction, we cannot exclude potential spillovers in the EU,” Breton said in a statement posted on X.

Breton added that “any negative effect of illegal content” could lead the EU to take further action against X, using “our full toolbox, including by adopting interim measures, should it be warranted to protect EU citizens from harm.”

Do EU speech codes now get to decide on what terms American presidential interviews take place?

Musk told the EU to go to hell and the European Commission claimed that Breton’s actions were unilateral, but he was just following the obvious implications of the original Facebook ban on Trump.

If social media platforms in this country have to censor their speech to meet international guidelines, then the choice is between censoring American presidential candidates or blocking European audiences from having access to those interviews. And even that may not prove to be enough.

With UK’s police boss, who gently patted Hamas rioters on their little heads, announcing that he wants to extradite and imprison Americans who say things he doesn’t like, where is the red line exactly?

The United States government has made no clear statement defending the free speech of Americans. And that means this is a crisis.