The EU's Fine Against X Is Not About Speech or 'Censorship'

Summary

In May of 2022, shortly after he announced his bid to buy Twitter (now X), billionaire Elon Musk, left, met with former European Commissioner Thierry Breton, right, in Austin, Texas. At the time, Musk said Europe's Digital Services Act (DSA) was "exactly aligned" with his thinking. SourceDon't let anyone — not even the United States Secretary of State — tell you that the European Commission's €120 million enforcement against Elon Musk’s X under the Digital Service Act (DSA) is about censorship or about what speech users can post on the platform. That would, indeed, be interesting. But this fine is just the EU enforcing some normal, boring requirements of its law. Many of these requirements resemble existing US laws or proposals that have garnered bipartisan support.There are three charges against X, which all stem from a multi-year investigation that was launched in 2023. One is about verification — X’s blue checkmarks on user accounts — and two are about transparency. These charges have nothing to do with what content is on X, or what user speech the platform should or should not allow. There is plenty of EU political disapproval about those things, for sure. But the EU didn’t choose to pick a fight about them. Instead, it went after X for violating much more basic, straightforward provisions of the DSA. Those violations were flagrant enough that it would be weird if the EU hadn't issued a fine.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. It’s kind of like if a grocery store said it had vetted all the produce in its special ‘blue check’ section for worms — but then once consumers started relying on that, it actually stopped checking. 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.” In the US, consumers who were harmed by that kind of bai...