The latest salvo in the ongoing battle between between Elon Musk and the EU came courtesy of the X owner. He revealed that in the run-up to the European elections, X was offered “an illegal secret deal”: if the platform would agree to secretly censoring online speech, then the European Commission wouldn’t fine it for violations of its new online content moderation law, the Digital Services Act (DSA). X refused to cooperate, but all the other major platforms accepted the deal.
Musk’s revelation came shortly after Thierry Breton, the EU’s censorship czar, announced the Commission’s preliminary findings that X’s new “blue check” verification system was in violation of the DSA. Given that anyone can now subscribe and obtain a “verified status” — unlike before Musk when the platform arbitrarily decided who was worthy of the coveted blue check — this, he stated, undermines users’ ability to make informed decisions about account authenticity.
The Commission also accused X of “fail[ing] to provide access to its public data to researchers”, as mandated by the DSA. It urged the company to address such breaches or face a fine up to 6% of its total worldwide annual turnover, which was approximately $3.4 billion in 2023. Failure to comply could result in X being banned from operating in the EU altogether.
The line trotted out by the Commission is that this all about “transparency” and protecting users from deception and disinformation. But the truth, as Musk suggests, is that this is really about the EU’s desire — and the DSA’s ultimate goal — to secretly control the online narrative. So much for transparency.
This mission to censor has been backed up by Mike Benz, a former Trump official and cybersecurity expert who has alleged that “granting researchers access to X’s public data” isn’t quite as benign as it sounds. In fact, it’s a cover for the EU’s attempt to “use the DSA to force X to restaff the censorship squad fired when Elon took over”. Elon got rid of the team because, as the Twitter Files revealed, their sole purpose was to act upon government requests for censorship. Hence Benz’s claim that these “researchers” are actually “political operatives”. Musk reposted Benz’s analysis with one word of comment — “Exactly” — adding that if the EU pursues an enforcement action against X, he will take them to court.
The language and accusations are nothing new. The ground rules for this battle were laid the moment Musk took over Twitter and tweeted “the bird is freed”. Breton immediately replied: “In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” with a reference to the DSA, which had been officially signed into law that same month.
Even though Musk initially pledged to “respect the future European regulation”, the honeymoon didn’t last long. In May 2023, he pulled out of the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, which started out voluntary but was subsequently made de facto legally binding under the DSA. This triggered an investigation, in December, into whether the platform violated the DSA in areas such as “risk management, content moderation, dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers”. Last week it concluded that it did, hence the latest showdown.
It’s hard to see how Musk can win this battle. Especially considering that his pro-free speech stance hasn’t just put him toe-to-toe with the EU, but also with a number of other governments around the world. Musk has attacked “takedown” requests in Brazil, India, Australia and Turkey and has even challenged some of these demands through national courts. In almost every case, however, the platform has ended up complying with governments’ requests. Indeed, a report from last year showed that under Musk, X had approved more than 80% of censorship requests from governments.
So even as Musk publicly challenges the EU, he is removing posts — as many X users have lamented — because of non-compliance with the DSA. On 10 October, for example, days after Hamas’s attack, Breton issued a warning to Musk over alleged “disinformation”; X responded by immediately removing or flagging tens of thousands of pieces of content.
Accusing Musk of hypocrisy, however, would be to miss the point. Complying with these requests is often the only way that the company can continue to operate — and at least Musk, unlike the other major platform owners, has brought online censorship into the open. The publication of the groundbreaking Twitter Files, remember, revealed the shocking level of collusion between the US administration and social media companies.
More to the point, though, X, despite the censorship, remains the only platform where information is allowed to flow relatively freely. Indeed, it remains the single biggest threat to the establishment’s desire for full-spectrum information control — and that is why they are coming down on it so hard. But one man, no matter how rich or powerful, cannot be expected to single-handedly stand up to some of the most powerful governments in the world — let alone to the European Union, the world’s most influential supranational institution.
There’s also another factor to consider. The global attack on free speech isn’t just the whim of out-of-control, power-hungry politicians and bureaucrats. It’s a systemic problem that relates to the structural decay of liberal-democratic institutions, particularly in the West. As our societies degenerate into de facto oligarchies controlled by increasingly delegitimised political-economic elites, this manipulation of public opinion — not only through propaganda delivered via traditional mass media channels but also, increasingly, by policing and micromanaging the public conversation taking place on social media platforms — has come to be seen as an imperative for keeping the status quo safe from the threat of democracy. This is compounded by the growing militarisation of the geopolitical context, which requires an even more compliant populace given its political and economic consequences.
It’s no coincidence that the censorship-industrial complex started emerging in the second half of the 2010s. This was the time when the West was rocked by an unprecedented “populist” backlash against globalisation and the neoliberal order — Trump, Brexit, the Yellow Vests, and the rise of Eurosceptic parties and movements across Europe.
It was also when the path of future confrontation with Russia was being laid in Ukraine — and when Nato started developing the hybrid or cognitive warfare doctrine, which conceptualises the management of Western public opinion as an integral part of warfare. As Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s former Secretary General, put it in 2019: “Nato must remain prepared for both conventional and hybrid threats: from tanks to tweets.”
The Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the first mass deployment of online censorship, bought Western elites some time. But not for long. Today, a “populist” backlash is once again engulfing the West: Right-populist parties are surging across Europe, and Trump is on course to winning the next US election. Meanwhile, escalating tensions in Ukraine have detonated into a no-longer-so-proxy war between Nato and Russia. From the perspective of Western elites, this all calls for a doubling down on the censorship regime, with a major difference: online censorship used to occur behind closed doors, extra-legally and in a context of plausible deniability of behalf of governments; today it is being institutionalised and constitutionalised through tools such as the Digital Services.
Elites conveniently justify their censorship in two ways: by constantly expanding the scope of “hate speech” to cover almost anything; and, more ominously, by rebranding critical opinions, especially on foreign policy and geopolitical matters, as “disinformation” or examples of foreign interference. It’s no coincidence that the European Commission’s first-ever DSA report was entirely focused on the question of “Russian disinformation”. Tellingly, the report puts “Kremlin-aligned accounts” — potentially any account that is critical of Nato — almost on the same plane as accounts that are connected or associated with the Russian state.
This deliberate blurring of the line between illegal and harmful speech, and between critical opinion and foreign propaganda, is central to the censorship regime, as it effectively allows EU elites to determine what hundreds of millions of Europeans can or cannot say and read online. It’s state-sanctioned censorship, plain and simple. And it should come as no surprise that the greatest threat to free speech today comes from the EU: the bloc’s entire institutional edifice, after all, is geared towards constraining democracy, by transferring power to unaccountable elites largely insulated from the demos. In turn, the top-down imposition of unpopular policies on the people of Europe inevitably engenders opposition, which then requires the suppression of free speech to counter the backlash. It’s a vicious feedback loop.
This sort of mass censorship should really be understood as a desperate oligarchy’s last line of defence — and no one encapsulates this oligarchy better than Breton himself, a former businessman and military and intelligence contractor turned technocrat-in-chief. If this were a movie, one couldn’t imagine a better choice than him as the arch-enemy of the populist rabble rouser Musk. But it isn’t a movie. This is a struggle that will define the future of democracy for years to come. And if we expect Musk to fight for the rest of us, we’ve already lost.
