A major legacy media outlet discussed the massive issues at stake as the sword of Damocles hangs over Elon Musk’s X in Europe. The writer couldn’t hide her bias against free speech advocates.
Politico noted the European Union’s apparent failure to crush Elon Musk’s X alongside other Big Tech platforms in an April 23 article headlined “The EU has fined Meta and Apple. What happened to X?” In her article, Politico tech reporter Eliza Gkritsi suggested that the EU’s European Commission might prefer forcing X to make changes instead of paying horrifying fines, since the former decision “could have a meaningful impact on users.” However, Gkritsi labelled opponents of the European Commission’s authoritarian push as “far right” while offering more neutral terms to proponents of radical EU laws.
She added, “Those remedies could return X users to an earlier era, one when blue check marks were handed out based on users’ verified positions rather than on cash, and Community Notes were supplemented by robust fact-checking.”
In other words, the European Commission could bring the return of pre-Musk Twitter censorship by forcing X to heed anti-free speech fact-checkers who flag content for removal. In fact, Gkritsi made clear that the regulators wouldn’t stop at demanding fact checkers. “The European Commission is investigating whether X adheres to its requirements to act on illegal content and fake news,” she wrote [emphasis added].
The European Commission fined American tech companies Apple and Meta nearly $800 million for allegedly violating a separate, far-reaching EU law, the Digital Markets Act (DMA). As noted by Politico, X risks fines of up to six percent of global revenues or $150 million.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has asked for support from the American government against such EU laws, saying that European countries have wrung “more than $30 billion” from American tech companies through fines. President Donald Trump has explicitly warned the EU against this approach, while Vice President JD Vance has strongly urged Europe not to continue to push Big Tech to suppress free speech.
In her article, Gkritsi highlighted the “fuzzy” standard of the anti-free speech Digital Services Act (DSA) that the European Commission has repeatedly wielded against tech companies. “[The DSA] doesn’t draw clear lines on what features are permissible, nor does it judge platforms solely based on the results of their efforts to combat illegal content — instead, it seeks to determine whether what platforms are doing is good enough,” she wrote.
Despite acknowledging the utter lack of an objective standard, Gkritsi absurdly framed opponents of the radical DSA as “those on the far right who condemn the rules as a censorship tool.” She then cast those who think that suggested changes for social media platforms are too moderate or not censorious enough as “Digital rights campaigners, and center and left-wing parties.”
Notably, former Biden administration Disinformation Governance Board Czar Nina Jankowicz testified in support of anti-free speech efforts in Europe, only one day after the April 22 decision to fine Meta and Apple.
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