Europeans are free to speak their mind as they wish, most of them believe. They can express their views on controversial political and social issues on social media platforms from Facebook to X.
But all of that may soon change. Europe is implementing the Digital Services Act, which is using the exact same censorship system we exposed as part of the Twitter Files, notes Michigan State University legal scholar Adam Candeub.
The EU is saying, “‘You must get trusted flaggers,’” Candeub said in a podcast with me this morning. “‘You must tag and flag all harmful information, which is illegal under any EU state.’ That includes hate speech, incitement, misinformation and disinformation… The EU bureaucrats have already made threatening noises toward Elon [Musk].”
You might think you shouldn’t worry about this because it’s happening in Europe. European nations have a long history of censoring their citizens far more than the US.
But Candeub says that the EU may end up censoring the whole world.
“What's disturbing is that now the platforms will have two choices,” he explained. “They'll be able to have one EU-compliant platform worldwide. Or they'll have an EU and American Facebook. It seems like the cheaper version is the former version.”
