> The ‘blue checks’ charge is about consumer deception. X changed the rules about how it does verification in a way that allowed impersonation and scams to flourish. [...] As the Commission put it, the DSA “clearly prohibits online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified, when no such verification took place.”
> The ‘ads transparency’ charge stems from the DSA’s requirement that platforms must maintain a public archive showing what ads the platform ran, who paid for them, and other information. X fell drastically short of meeting this requirement
> The third thing the EU penalized X for is not giving researchers better access to public data. This enforcement is not about the DSA’s more famous and controversial requirement for platforms to hand over internal data. It’s just about information that was already publicly available on X’s site and app.
It's clear why the tech monopolies want to keep their secrets in the dark. There is a democratic consensus that what they're pulling either is illegal - or should be illegal. E.g. Scam advertisements, overt editorial practices by selective (de)amplification and/or monetization and looking the other way about bots and third-parties leveraging their systems for spreading political propaganda.
Transparency is their enemy. Free speech is their irrelevant but emotion-laden argument. Europeans see straight through it - the questions is, do the Americans?
Maybe breaking up the US would be a good idea. The blue states are funding the American government which is led by the people mostly popular in the red states. But you won't see EU politicians set up a well-funded plan to actually do it.
America has turned into a ridiculous cartoon of itself in such a short time frame.
See the fourth row.
Competition is necessary to keep these people remotely honest.
Edit: This comment has been flagged.
Instead the EU levied their own fines against VW and BMW including a €875 million fine in 2021. When can we expect the US to slap X with a multi-million dollar fine?
the entire EU couldn't even defect Russia that has a GDP smaller than a single state of the US.
If they're saying this to undermine Europe, their track record suggests that it might strengthen Europe. If it is coming from the US State Department they are so bad at international politics that there is a pretty good chance that the path to thwarting them is following their plan. The most powerful era of Europe was literally when they had lots of small but technically and socially advanced countries competing with each other. It was literally a world-conquering combination that put them centuries ahead of everyone else. In some sense the reason the EU exists is to try and hold the Germans back; talking about breaking it up is one of those careful-what-you-wish-for requests.
The main problem with US international politics is that they are looking on the problem through American lenses, i.e. why would Afghans refuse liberal values and either choose or tolerate theocracy? Does not make any sense from view of an average American.
Same like it makes no sense for average American why states in EU are banding together and slowly shedding its nationalistic values? What if same would be done by Latin America? Wow scary, need to throw a spanner into the things!
Not surprising at all considering that socialism and centrally planned economies are inherently more efficient than liberal free markets - by removing the constant pressure for quarterly profit and removing or severely limiting the bourgeoise who only exist to take the value generated by companies for themselves, you have a system that does a much better job of allocating labour and resources. For example, imagine how much better Windows 11 would be if Satya Nadella wasn't taking home a $100m salary and that money was spent hiring or paying developers.
Frankly, American capitalists got so high on their own supply after the dissolution of the Soviet Union that they thought they didn't need to keep the boot on the necks of the communists any longer. As soon as the pressure came off the superiority of the Chinese communist system became evident and is virtually impossible to stop now.
If anyone still doubts whether the Americans are serious about going solo in geopolitics this should be nail #192873 in your Trans-Atlantic coffin.
They are not serious people. Plain and simple.
The day these clowns are kicked out can't come soon enough.
At the level it existed before the 2nd Trump admin, it had supply chains of intelligence, capability, and the ability to project actual force and support.
It has deleted institutional knowledge.
The degree of self own here, is historic.
The price per kWh has dropped sharply in recent years compared to the invasion peak, though they are about double what they were before COVID (not inflation adjusted) - see https://skilky-skilky.info/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Househ.... It's the UK that's up the shitter but that's far from uncommon....
The century of American humiliation is just beginning.
(I personally expect Vance to be banned from the UK - along with Denmark and Greenland - as soon as he is no longer VP. But then I suspect his days of international travel will end then more generally.)
But since diplomacy requires proportionality, maybe we start with Bannon, or Nick Fuentes, or Andrew Auernheimer. (They really should be banned from travel here like Matthew Heimbach, Richard Spencer, Don Black and Mark Weber already are.)
Oh no, I'm sorry if this is upsetting or surprising to anyone!
Seriously: Vance will be persona non grata when this is over. The list of countries that should ban him is longer than the one I made (Germany should, for example). The list of countries he won't risk visiting is probably longer still. But then I think he won't risk leaving the USA at all after this is all over. And nor should he.
And as others have observed, Musk has actively attempted to foment violence in the UK; people get banned from other countries (including the USA) for that all the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S-WJN3L5eo 1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives (ft. Mehdi Hasan)
This is apparently representative of what that means at this moment in time.
I think it's pretty extreme too, but on searching, none of the participants' positions seem to have been disowned by their own side. One of them actually fundraised $30000 afterwards.
Or let me guess, "Trump bad and therefore we should accept DSA/Chat control 2.0/3.0/etc."? Sorry, I don't care. And people who think this is only about the recent X fine are also wrong (this started last year when Thierry Breton started influencing european elections while also boasting about how he can annul such elections without repercussions; you can deduce what I'm talking about by asking an LLM). This is in part US gov. protecting private companies (and thus itself) from fines, sure, but the broader point about censorship within the west applies. Everything that hurts the people making legislation regarding the Internet (or software in general) within the EU should be welcomed with open arms.
EU apologists would rather change the subject and talk about Trump and the polarizing social environment in the US rather than acknowledge that within the EU, there's not even a chance for discourse to be had about any policy(especially the nonexistent free speech) due to the aforementioned laws. The same people will act surprised when extreme positions regarding the EU are adopted by an ever-increasing number of people "until morale improves".
Individual free speech is not - of course - ethically or politically identical to "free speech" produced by weaponised industrial content farms funded by corporations and foreign actors.
And the Cambridge Analytica "phenomenon" is not really something you can realistically prevent. I'm sure it happens now with some other better firm (Palantir probably), but this is really beside the point. The point is that normal citizens, like you and me, are effectively censored upon suspicion before any burden of proof is provided. Nothing says "protecting democracy" like deleting posts from social media and then finding out the context.
> Individual free speech is not - of course - ethically or politically identical to "free speech" produced by weaponised industrial content farms funded by corporations and foreign actors.
Sure, nobody likes bots/paid shills. But of course, in a normal society, you have to prove those posts are made by actual bots/content farms before taking any action. Otherwise it's just censorship. Election interference always happens, without exceptions, but degrees vary. This is not to say we shouldn't point out when it happens, but to not do censorship against our own citizens because "the models indicate a pattern akin to foreign entities." Patterns are not burdens of proof, and thus employing a "crowdfunded" fact-checking system like Community Notes or the one from YouTube is at least partly the actual solution instead of directly removing content. Under DSA, you can effectively remove content without providing burden of proof regarding the identity of the poster. Platforms must provide a "statement of reasons" (Article 17) to affected users for any removal, including appeal rights, but this does not impose pre-removal identity checks on posters.
The EU doesn't want to accept that millions of people don't share the EU elite consensus on several issues - usually still a minority of people, but a substantial minority. Instead of recognizing their responsibility to steer the ship of state with the winds of the times, they are simply declaring all bad political opinions to be the result of the Russians, the Americans, or the corporations, or some combination of the three. Countries in which serious conversations are had about banning one of the most popular political parties for wrongthink can only ironically be considered democratic.
YouTube's system of DMCA takedown(the copyright issue being way more serious legally than what DSA is supposed to protect against) is not perfect and cannot be perfect (proven by the fact that content is unjustly taken down all the time). DSA is just the same, except more vague, more complicated and (imo) ultimately worse.
DSA has an appeal mechanism, with an option for out-of-court settlements, which means you can employ independent fact-checkers (certified by Digital Services Coordinators (DSCs)); the list of certified bodies is, of course, maintained by the European Commission. The problem is that these DSCs are appointed by each country's gov., which means there's potential room for conflict of interests not only at a national level(I find hard to believe appointed DSCs are completely impartial to the gov. that appointed them) but also at an EU-wide level(certified fact-checking bodies who are supposedly not influenced by EC when judging cases pertaining to EU in international cases).
Then again, Trump has to win the election, and the Bell curve is symmetrical. Sanctioning EU politicians is less like sanctioning elected national politicians, and more like sanctioning artists. No nation was offended
He has had a fantastic career in business, academia, and (French) politics. Less than 5 years of that career was spent in Bruxelles.
It's odd anyone paying attention to what Breton says could possibly think otherwise.
So what hard evidence that he is working for the Russians?
Since when is it OK for governments to sanction people when they are lawfully expressing disagreement with Govt policies or views?
You mean a sovereign financial and banking system like the one currently freezing some $200B of Russian assets? Yeah I think the EU already has one of those.
Sanctions on Jacques Baud for anti-war activism: https://data.europa.eu/apps/eusanctionstracker/subjects/1802...
Sanctions on Nathalie Camp for of anti-colonialist speech: https://data.europa.eu/apps/eusanctionstracker/subjects/1764...
