The European Union’s decision Friday to impose a fine on Elon Musk’s social-media platform X.com raises a question: What the heck is wrong with these people? Even in Brussels, it’s unusual for a single policy move to create so much economic self-sabotage and diplomatic harm at one go.
The €120 million ($140 million) fine is for breaches of Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA), the first time Brussels has enforced that law in this way since it came into force in 2022. Europe’s online commissars cite several supposed infractions. The silliest complaint is that X’s system for selling “verification” blue checkmarks “negatively affects users’ ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content they interact with.”
More serious, Brussels insists X must make data about advertising on the platform readily available to outsiders, and shouldn’t use its terms of service to prohibit data scraping by “eligible researchers.” The EU claims this open access to X’s commercial data is vital to allow researchers and “civil society” to spot scams and information warfare.
That reference to “civil society” is a tell. Brussels wants to force X (and inevitably other platforms) to share data that hostile activists can wield against the platforms in future regulatory actions or litigation. All based on a theory that European citizens are too dumb to take the things they read on X or elsewhere online with a grain of salt.
Mr. Musk and Trump Administration officials describe this regulatory case as a form of censorship, and it’s hard to disagree. Mr. Musk wrote on X last year that the European Commission, the EU bureaucratic arm levying the fine, offered X a “secret deal” to drop the case in exchange for the platform censoring unspecified forms of speech.
Even without that alleged interference, Mr. Musk has become a thorn in the side of many European politicians with his support for insurgent movements in many countries, sometimes to good effect and sometimes for ill. Insurgent politicians are highly effective at using X and other social media to spread their messages. This makes X an inviting target in Brussels.
Meanwhile, a word about the bad economics. Brussels is wracked with anxiety about how to foster a more competitive digital marketplace. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen recently rolled out a proposal for digital deregulation to make it easier for artificial-intelligence and other tech companies to use data.
There’s growing (although still not widespread) recognition on the Continent that Europe’s long-running mercantilist tax and regulatory war against American tech is suffocating Europe’s economy rather than fostering homegrown digital giants. Did someone forget to tell the mandarins investigating X?
Europe can’t afford any of this—not the censorship of Europeans’ own political speech, not the diplomatic battle with Washington, not the war on economically vital data and technology. Earth to Brussels: Are you awake?
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