It’s no secret that free speech is under attack across Europe. Under the guise of preserving order and protecting the public from ill-defined harms, authorities across the continent have embarked on a program of censoring wrongthink and jailing violators. Still, it wasn’t obvious that European authorities intended to make money by suppressing speech. On Friday, it became clear when the European Union fined X 120 million euros (about $140 million) for a series of alleged violations of the Digital Services Act, making the social media platform the first company to face a fine under the 2022 law.
The stated reasons for the fine are a lack of transparency, a violation of advertising rules, and misleading users with “deceptive” design. The real reasons have little to do with those allegations, and everything to do with the kind of speech the EU wants to suppress: perspectives that have not been filtered through bureaucrats, academics, or media professionals; views that go against the received wisdom of policymakers; and views that have not been vetted and found to be acceptable by governments. Any company that utters the wrong kind of speech should now know that the meter is running.
Compared with previous EU fines against U.S. tech companies, which usually amount to billions of dollars, this is not a big one. Call it a silver lining that this is all Brussels has managed to squeeze out of its social media law so far. The EU seems to move as slowly in issuing penalties as it does in everything else.
