Authored on Dec. by Michael Shellenberger via X,

Today Last week, the European Commission fined Elon Musk’s X €140 million for, it says, breaking laws requiring social media transparency. Specifically, said the Commission, which is the executive branch of the European Union, X broke the law by making its blue checkmarks available to anyone, failing to make its advertising repository transparent, and failing to provide researchers with special access to its data. “Today’s decision has nothing to do with content moderation,” insisted the Commission’s spokesperson.

In truth, the Commission’s fine has everything to do with “content moderation,” which is censorship. The EU wants X to give its data to government-selected “researchers” so they can identify which posts and advertisements should be censored. This is a censorship-by-proxy strategy. The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from 2020 to 2022, and Europe today, have authorized government-funded NGOs to demand censorship of social media platforms in an attempt to deceive the public.

As such, the European Commission is spreading disinformation in order to demand censorship, and is openly engaged in a deception campaign aimed at confusing the people of Europe and the United States about what it is doing.

Many Americans may rightly wonder why they should care about what the European government is doing. President Donald Trump shut down much of the US censorship industrial complex, including by the DHS.

The reason we should care is that the goal of the European Commission, like that of the governments of Britain, Brazil, and Australia, is to censor the American people. As Public was the first to report in October, a pro-censorship activist think tank, the Stanford Cyberpolicy Center, hosted a gathering of global censorship officials to censor American social media platforms and American citizens. The Stanford Cyberpolicy Center was home to the fake “researchers” who oversaw the DHS censorship-by-proxy effort from 2020 to 2022.

Moreover, the EU is now in direct violation of the NATO Treaty, under which the US is militarily obligated to defend Europe. The NATO Treaty requires member states to have free speech and free and fair elections. France and Germany are actively and illegally preventing political candidates from running for office for ideological reasons, namely their opposition to mass migration. And the Romanian high court, with the support of the European Commission, nullified election results under the thin and unproven pretext of Russian interference, after a nationalist and populist presidential candidate won.

The X fine comes in the wake of a renewed push for governments to break encryption and read private text messages, known as “Chat Control.” The ostensible goal of this is to combat child abuse, and yet there is little evidence that such a system is needed. The heads of Signal and Telegram have strongly opposed the effort as a violation of privacy and a backdoor that others could exploit.

And last month, the European Commission launched a “Democracy Shield” program consisting of more funding for NGOs and “fact checkers” to “ensure swift reactions to large-scale and potentially transnational information operations. An independent European Network of Fact-Checkers will be set up to boost fact-checking capacity in all EU official languages…” In the past, activist NGOs have demanded that social media companies censor content based on fact-checks, including false ones.

The European Digital Services Act (DSA) rests upon a model of censorship by proxy. The proxies are NGOs, law enforcement organizations, and industry groups designated “Trusted Flaggers.” Noted Lorcán Price of the Alliance Defending Freedom in his testimony to Congress in September of year, “When a Trusted Flagger speaks, the service provider must listen and prioritize the review of the flagged content before that of its regular users. The service provider must review the flagged content to determine whether it violates the law of an EU member state or the EU itself. If so, the service provider must remove or disable access to the content.”

Notably, the European Commission announced its X fine on the same day that the Trump administration released its new security strategy, which reads, “We will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies.” The document implicitly threatens US commitment to military security for Europe. “It is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.”

The European Constitution states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” 

Why then is it now seeking to deny those rights?

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