> Freedom of speech is as protected in the EU as it is in the US, possibly more... Most importantly, European courts in most member states uphold the protection of the individuals' freedom of speech.

This is a really strong statement, and one that seems incredibly difficult to defend.

It is a good point that free speech is a matter not only of what is legally permitted but what is possible to carry out; online privacy and varied, independent media are major factors in speech actually being heard. Both regulatory and economic factors have done real harm to the US media landscape, although the claim that online speech is less surveilled in Europe is depends on exactly what one checks - and is largely a matter of US companies rejecting foreign subpoenas, not a lack of effort on Europe's part.

Beyond that, though... a strong context for speech isn't enough either, if speech isn't actually legal. Europe falls far behind the US on legal speech protections of all kinds. In the general case, libel and defamation rules are extremely narrow in the US, and far broader in most of Europe. In terms of specific speech, I pretty often see people suggest that EU countries haven't banned anything except hate speech, and more specifically that Germany banned Nazi iconography without restricting speech in general. Let's ignore those cases, and ignore the usual debates around when criticism of religion crosses into hate speech.

Even so, the First Amendment is genuinely unique:

- France can assess high fines and years in prison for the "positive presentation of drugs", and regularly uses this law against drug reform advocates, including politicians. Meanwhile, the US refused to implement Article 3 of the UN Narcotic Drugs Convention (banning promotion of drugs) on Constitutional grounds.

- At least four countries (and until recently Germany) have general lese majeste laws protecting all heads of state from insult, which is about the clearest restriction of legitimate and valuable speech I can think of. Several other countries ban insult to their own heads of state. The Netherlands in particular actually enforce their law regularly, in excess of the protections accorded to any non-royalty. Meanwhile, heads of state are not only not specially protected in the US, but receive less libel protection than nonpublic figures.

- Poland past a law against making factually-accurate statements about the history of the Holocaust in Poland, and only after international outcry did they remove criminal penalties for those statements. Enough said.

- Germany convicts more than 20,000 people per year under its ban on 'insult' alone. §86a, its widely praised law against Nazi iconography, also bans not just Communist iconography but Kurdish military symbols. It was repeatedly used against anti-Nazi content containing broken or crossed-out symbols, a practice that ended only in 2007, after a lawmaker reported herself to the police for the offense as a protest.

- German internet law is uniquely restrictive. It includes a list of several thousand banned websites, judged by an unelected agency to be harmful to minors, many of them mislabeled or improperly banned. The errors have gone unchallenged because there's no appeal process, and in fact the list itself is aggressively censored. Discounting national security letters, I believe that's the only standardized secret law censorship in any developed country. The 2017 ban on fake news, 'NetzDG', has been condemned as unconstitutional and unethical by virtually every academic or free speech organization to address the topic, with the UN singling it out as "endangering human rights".

This is not a happy list, and those are only brief highlights. Privacy and free media are valuable for making speech visible, but so is permitting free speech. Intrinsic rights to speech aside, that list includes an awful lot of moral, pro-social things which can't be said.