America’s relationship with its European allies is under mounting stress over increasingly divergent views of online censorship, tech innovation and the best way to regulate artificial intelligence. In the wake of recent anti-immigrant riots, British police are locking people up over social media posts, with a British police commissioner threatening internet users beyond the U.K.
’s borders who post what officials consider disinformation. France has just arrested one of the world’s best-known tech entrepreneurs in connection with whether his messaging platform was being used for child pornography and other criminal activity. And the European Union is pushing for mandatory restrictions on AI development while the American government has pursued voluntary commitments from major tech companies.
Amb. Nathaniel C. Fick, the first-ever head of the State Department’s cyberspace bureau, finds himself in the middle of the effort to prevent such philosophical and legal fissures in tech freedom from fracturing the U.
S. government’s relationship with its closest allies. Asked whether Europeans share the broad American support for free speech onlilne, Mr.
Fick told The Washington Times not every European nation supports the U.S. view, but that that the continent was not a monolith.
“I think that there are EU countries that, generally, broadly, have the same free speech views that the United States has and there are some that don’t,” he said in a wide-ranging interview in hi.