by Dennis Behreandt
In apparent alignment with the Biden administration, the European Union has joined the censorship witch hunt against Elon Musk and the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Under the European Digital Services Act (DSA), which took effect in November 2022, the European Union seeks to enforce digital censorship not just in Europe, but around the world.
As the U.K. libertarian and euroskeptic news site Spiked reported in March, “Under the DSA, very large online platforms (VLOPs) with more than 45 million monthly active users — like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram — will have to swiftly remove illegal content, hate speech and so-called disinformation from their platforms. Or they will face fines of up to six per cent of their annual global revenue. Larger platforms must be DSA compliant by this summer, while smaller platforms will be obliged to tackle this content from 2024 onwards.”
Because the European Union is the world’s second-largest marketplace, it believes it has leverage over global policies. Under the DSA, platforms can be banned from the European market, not just fined, and the EU believes that it can force international compliance with its censorship regime as a result.
As Spiked has pointed out, they may not be wrong. The EU’s “strict regulatory standards often end up being adopted worldwide by both firms and other regulators, in what is known as the ‘Brussels effect’. Take the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a privacy law which came into force in May 2018. Among many other things, it requires individuals to give explicit consent before their data can be processed. These EU regulations have since become the global standard.”
Most U.S.-based websites are compliant with GDPR, even though neither American citizens nor American companies are bound by that law. Much the same could happen under the draconian DSA.
The EU attack on X is the first attempt by Brussels to establish its hegemony as the global censor stifling free speech worldwide.
In October the EU commissioner of the DSA sent a strongly worded letter to Musk warning him to comply with EU censorship demands. The letter alleged that X was “being used to disseminate illegal content and disinformation.”
In an imperious and condescending tone, the letter also warned that European bureaucrats had “from qualified sources, reports about potentially illegal content circulating on your service despite flags from relevant authorities.” The letter told Musk that he “must be timely, diligent and objective in taking action and removing the relevant content when warranted.”
Despite being asked to provide details of infringing content by Musk, the EU did not provide any examples of the alleged “illegal content.”
Why go after Musk? Simply, it seems, to attack the most high-profile proponent of free speech. This is the opinion of Dr. Norman Lewis, a visiting research fellow at the think tank MCC Brussels and a former director at PwC — the consulting and professional service firm formerly known as PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“The EU is going after Musk specifically because he is a vocal advocate of free speech,” Lewis wrote for Spiked. “The point of the Commission’s investigation into X is to establish Brussels’s right to dictate the terms of debate. It is the opening salvo in the battle to control the political narrative in Europe,” he concluded.
Moreover, with the DSA, the communist regime in Brussels has staked a claim that it has a legitimate right to end free speech globally, including in the United States. Our own government has a right and a duty to protect American citizens from international infringements on constitutionally protected natural rights.
Unfortunately, the radical leftists currently controlling the White House are aligned with the internationalist brigands in Brussels rather than with American tradition, precedent, and law, and are engaged in their own aggressive campaign to overturn the First Amendment, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights.
Dennis Behreandt is publisher of The New American. Dennis studied history, biology and education at Ripon College and studied theology at St. Norbert College. He worked for a decade as research librarian and knowledge management specialist in the specialty chemicals industry and he previously served as managing editor and senior editor for The New American. He has written hundreds of articles on subjects in history, theology, science and technology, with special emphasis recently on the COVID-19 pandemic.
