How the GRANITE Act Fights Foreign Censorship of Americans

The House released the Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion (GRANITE) Act. It would amend Title 28 of the U.S. Code to prohibit any domestic court, whether federal or state, from recognizing or enforcing a foreign judgment, fine, order, or demand that enforces a foreign censorship law. The bill defines such laws with precision: any measure that restricts or penalizes expression; targets speech based on content, viewpoint, or speaker identity; or compels disclosures that would chill expression and conflict with First Amendment protections if applied domestically. It also strips foreign states of sovereign immunity for these purposes, closing a loophole that might otherwise allow foreign governments to evade judicial scrutiny entirely.

The threat the bill addresses is real and escalating. The European Commission fined X €120 million under the Digital Services Act in December 2025—the first formal penalty under that framework. The United Kingdom’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) has threatened American platforms with fines reaching 10 percent of worldwide revenue under the Online Safety Act. Brazil’s judiciary has ordered American companies to suppress accounts and surrender user data under standards that bear no resemblance to American constitutional protections. A House Judiciary Committee report documented more than 100 closed-door meetings in which European regulators pressured social media companies to adopt globally applicable moderation rules that suppressed lawful American speech. Because platforms typically maintain a single set of terms worldwide, foreign regulatory demands shape what Americans can say and see online. This dynamic is known as the Brussels effect.

The federal GRANITE Act also arrives at the right level of government. When Wyoming introduced its own version earlier this year, R Street praised the instinct but argued that the fight belongs in Congress. Foreign affairs, sovereign immunity, and the enforcement of international legal norms are quintessentially federal concerns, and no single state can meaningfully deter the European Commission or Ofcom. The SPEECH Act of 2010, which barred American courts from enforcing foreign defamation judgments that fail First Amendment standards, passed Congress unanimously. The federal GRANITE Act extends that proven defensive logic from defamation to the full spectrum of foreign censorship—and it does so with the legal authority and diplomatic weight only Congress can supply.

The bill’s enforcement design deserves particular credit for its restraint. It allows any U.S. person subjected to a foreign censorship judgment to bring an action in federal court; however, the only remedy is declaratory relief—a judicial declaration that the foreign judgment is unenforceable. This is a meaningful improvement over Wyoming’s approach, which offered statutory damages of $1 million dollars per violation (or 10 percent of a defendant’s American revenue). Damage bounties of that kind invite the litigation dynamics that followed Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act, where courts’ willingness to accept bare statutory violations without proof of actual harm produced an explosion of opportunistic lawsuits. By limiting relief to a declaration of unenforceability, the federal bill gives litigants exactly what they need to protect their speech and nothing that would reward filing suits for their own sake.

A private right of action is still not necessarily the ideal mechanism for this fight. Technology companies receive foreign censorship demands directly, possess the expertise to evaluate them, and command the resources to litigate against foreign sovereigns. Concentrating enforcement on the companies closest to the conflict would channel these disputes to the parties best equipped to win them. Future refinements might pair the individual remedy with an explicit company-level pathway to ensure that platforms can obtain unenforceability declarations covering their users at scale rather than case by case. But because the current draft confines relief to declarations rather than damages, the usual abuse potential of private rights of action is substantially reduced. As a starting framework, it is sound.

The GRANITE Act represents Congress doing what only Congress can do: erecting a uniform national shield against foreign attempts to censor American speech through American courts. Well-targeted and carefully drafted, the bill is built on a legislative model with a record of unanimous bipartisan support.