How Unelected EU Officials Built a Transnational Speech Police
On December 5, 2025, the European Commission imposed a €120 million fine on X, formerly Twitter—its first enforcement action under the Digital Services Act (DSA). The stated violations had nothing to do with incitement, fraud, or child exploitation. The Commission objected to the design of X’s blue checkmark, the layout of its advertising repository, and its data-sharing arrangements with academic researchers (read the Commission’s decision here). In the bureaucratic vocabulary of Brussels, these constituted breaches of “transparency obligations.” In plainer language, the world’s most powerful unelected regulatory body had just demonstrated that it could extract nine-figure penalties from an American company for interface design choices that no European citizen was ever asked to vote on.
The fine, for all its size, was a warning shot. The DSA authorizes penalties of up to 6% of a company’s global annual turnover—a figure that, for the largest American platforms, runs into tens of billions of dollars. Ten of the nineteen platforms Brussels has designated as “Very Large Online Platforms” subject to the law’s most invasive requirements are American companies, including Amazon, Meta’s family of apps, Google, and Wikipedia. The architecture is unmistakable: a European regulatory apparatus with global jurisdiction over American-built infrastructure, enforced by officials whom no European voter directly elects, and backed by financial penalties severe enough to function as existential threats. The Commission insists the DSA is a “transparency” law. The machinery it has assembled tells a different story.
The Digital Services Act, which became fully applicable in February 2024, operates through a structure of cascading obligations that grow more coercive at each level. At its foundation lies a definition of “illegal content” so expansive that it functions as an invitation to suppress speech at will. Article 3(h) defines illegal content as anything that is “not in compliance with Union law or the law of any member state”—a formulation that means the most restrictive speech law in any of the European Union’s twenty-seven member states can become the effective continent-wide standard. Germany’s NetzDG hate speech provisions, France’s memory laws criminalizing certain historical interpretations, Poland’s blasphemy statutes—any of these can furnish grounds for content removal across the entire bloc.
