Law, Power, and Justice

open.substack.com/pub/davekeating/p/the-us-has-declared-rhetorical-war

On Thursday, after stalling for many months, the EU Commission announced it will be enforcing the Digital Services Act’s provisions on deceptive practices and transparency. The American platform X will be fined €120 million for deliberately deceiving users into thinking people who have paid for a blue checkmark have had their identity “verified”, and for failing to provide accessible and searchable ad repositories to researchers and civil society as required by the DSA.

The reaction from Washington over the past three days has been fast and furious. US Vice President JD Vance said the move amounts to the EU trying to suppress free speech and that Brussels should not be “attacking American companies over garbage”. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the fine “isn’t just an attack on X, it’s an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments”. “The days of censoring Americans online are over,” he added. These attacks are lies. The fine in this instance is not about free speech. It is about deceptive practices and algorithm transparency. “The DSA has nothing to do with censorship,” EU tech vice president Henna Virkkunen pointed out Thursday. “We are here to make sure that our digital legislation is enforced and if you comply with our rules, you don’t get the fine. It’s as simple as that.” TikTok, for instance, was also initially under investigation for the same lack of transparency allegations, but took actions to change its practices so it didn’t violate the EU law and it avoided the fine. X did not.