JD Vance warns UK not to go down ‘dark path’ of censorship that occurred under Biden

Vice President J.D. Vance warned the United Kingdom on Friday to avoid going down the same “dark path” of censorship that he said occurred in several western democracies during former President Joe Biden’s administration.

Vance, who has voiced concerns over Europe’s free speech laws, said during a press conference that the western world became “too comfortable” with censoring speech rather than “engaging in a diverse array of opinions.” The vice president has criticized the U.K. in particular for intentionally censoring its citizens’ speech, particularly on social media.

“I’ve raised concerns about free speech in the United States of America. I think the entire collective West, the TransAtlantic relationship, our NATO allies, certainly the United States under the Biden administration, got a little too comfortable with censoring rather than engaging with a diverse array of opinions. So that’s been my view,” Vance said alongside David Lammy, the U.K. secretary of state for foreign commonwealth and development affairs. “Obviously, I’ve raised some criticism because of concerns about our friends on this side of the Atlantic.”

“But the thing that I’d say to the people of England or anybody else, to David [Lammy], is many of the things that I worry most about were happening in the United States from 2020 to 2024. I just don’t want other countries to follow us down what I think was a very dark path under the Biden administration,” Vance continued.

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The vice president told European leaders at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 14 that they had abandoned “some of their most fundamental values” by replacing free speech expression and religious liberties with censorship. He specifically chastised the U.K. over the arrest of Adam Smith-Connor, a military veteran and father, who got arrested and later convicted for silently praying within a “buffer zone” surrounding an abortion clinic.

“And perhaps most concerning, I look to our dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Brits in particular in the crosshairs,” Vance said at the conference. “A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an army veteran with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for 3 minutes.”

“Not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own … Now I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one-off crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person,” the vice president said.

Vance also mentioned the Biden administration’s efforts to censor so-called disinformation online. The previous administration worked with Facebook in 2021 to flag posts about so-called vaccine disinformation and to suppress the belief that the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, though evidence later strongly corroborated that theory.

The European Union passed The Digital Services Act (DSA) in August 2023, which requires “very large online platforms” to increase content moderation by cracking down on “disinformation” and other alleged harmful content. In the U.K., the government passed the Online Safety Act in 2023, which regulates what is defined as hate speech, harmful content and misinformation.

Police in the U.K. made an average of over 30 arrests per day in 2023 for online communications that were deemed “offensive,” which amounted to over 12,000 arrests throughout the year, the European Parliament reported in April 2025. In the summer of 2024, the U.K. implemented several digital speech laws that regulate speech in response to riots that broke out in the streets.

The U.K. also threatened to arrest and extradite U.S. citizens who made any online statements that could allegedly cause violence, according to CBS Austin.

More than a dozen British citizens were jailed in August 2024 for allegedly causing “unrest” on social media while two citizens were sentenced to over a year in prison for stirring up “racial hatred” online, the BBC reported. Authorities also arrested a British army veteran in August 2022 for denouncing LGBTQ and transgender activists online, which authorities said caused somebody “anxiety.”

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer rejected the claims that his country is censoring online speech during a joint press conference with President Donald Trump on July 28.

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