EU Eye On X Like A “Transatlantic Flank Attack”
By Rebecca Grant: The US and European countries are lovey-dovey NATO allies when they face down Russia’s Vladimir Putin and assist Ukraine. When it comes to tech and the European Union, the hard-won transatlantic consensus breaks down. The ongoing implementation of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) is clashing with all things American when it comes to tech and free speech.
The EU Digital Services Act is supposed to target illegal goods, services and content shown online. The problem rests with the “illegal content” component. The DSA requires providers like X and Meta to counter “illegal hate speech,” a policy that could run afoul of the First Amendment. Ben Weingarten of RealClear Investigations has written an eye-opening brief on how the global crackdown could actually threaten American free speech values. As his piece notes, “foreign efforts to cast populist narratives on matters such as election integrity, immigration, and public health as mis- and dis-information constitute a surreptitious “transatlantic flank attack” on American speech. That’s coming from a former State Department cyber official.
“We’re bringing our European values into the digital world,” Ursula von der Leyen trilled on X when the DSA passed in August 2023. “As of today, very large online platforms must apply the new law.” Of course, most “very large online platforms” are American. The EU DSA is “voluntary” but global in reach. One American legal scholar called it Europe’s Plot to Regulate Free Speech in America because it is “claiming the right to censor what Americans are allowed to say about politics, science and other subjects.”
The US shouldn’t give Europe a pass on digital policy just because of the NATO common defense treaty. Don’t forget the United States Senate approved the NATO alliance; not so for the DSA. Opinion editors at Bloomberg contend the European Union needs a bigger budget, but hopefully not for fiscal firepower against US companies.
Read a rosier view of DSA here from the Council on Foreign Relation. However, the CFR reports that the EU queried X on why they cut their content moderation team by 20%. Isn’t staffing an internal business decision? This level of intrusion is wrong in principle.