Mere days after the EU fined Elon for working Twitter as a Nazi bar, his bro Donald desires Europe to cease cleansing up its platforms and begin tolerating Nazis, within the identify of “free speech.”
In a pleasant little present of “laws for thee, however not for me,” the administration started threatening motion towards European firms like Spotify and Siemens until the EU stops attempting to implement its personal guidelines. It’s no coincidence in any way that this little little bit of mob boss mentality got here one week after the EU penalized X.
Pretending that requiring an organization to comply with primary transparency guidelines is the peak of censorship is particularly ridiculous on condition that Federal Communications Fee Director Brendan Carr, again when he was a Venture 2025 man, known as for platforms to be required to elucidate and justify all editorial selections. That’s fairly a bit extra heavy-handed than the EU requirement that X hold some advert information.
What makes the demand particularly grotesque is its ideological readability. This is not about summary free expression; it is about defending reactionary ecosystems that thrive on harassment, racism, and historic revisionism. Europe’s hard-learned classes about the place unchecked fascist speech leads are being dismissed as regulatory overreach. On the similar time, American officers place themselves as the worldwide enforcement arm of Silicon Valley’s most poisonous enterprise fashions and particular person.
Europe spent the final century studying, the laborious manner, what occurs when fascist speech is handled as simply one other opinion. The Trump administration’s demand is not ignorance of that historical past; it is a rejection of it, in service of platforms and ideologies that carry out higher when no one is allowed to say no.
Beforehand:
• Xitter fined €120M, Musk calls for finish of Europe
