Just a reminder of why the American Revolution was great for the world:
From Reuters:
Elon Musk's social media company X was fined 120 million euros ($140 million) by EU tech regulators on Friday for breaching EU online content rules, the first sanction under landmark legislation which will likely draw the U.S. government's ire.
Rival TikTok staved off a penalty with concessions.
Translation: The American company did not fold. The Chinese one did.
The European Commission, the EU's executive, said its laws do not target any nationality and that it is merely defending its digital and democratic standards which usually serve as the benchmark for the rest of the world.
The EU sanction against X followed a two-year-long investigation under the bloc's Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires online platforms to do more to tackle illegal and harmful content.
When most people think of "illegal and harmful content," they think of death threats and child pornography.
When the EU thinks of "illegal and harmful content," they mean disagreeing with the idea that men can become women.
Because of this, no one can trust what the EU Commission's tech chief said next:
The European Commission's tech chief Henna Virkkunen said X's modest fine was proportionate and calculated based on the nature of the infringements, their gravity in terms of affected EU users and their duration.
'We are not here to impose the highest fines. 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. And it's as simple as that,' she told reporters.
'I think it's very important to underline that DSA is having nothing to do with censorship,' Virkkunen said.
Meanwhile, the U.S. vice president knows a spade when he sees one:
CNBC reports that Virkkunen says the primary issue is transparency. Twitter used to only provide "checkmarks" to users with verified ID. Now it allows anyone to get a checkmark with a subscription to the platform. The company also doesn't like sharing its own data with "researchers" (who DEFINITELY aren't connected to government agencies).
'Deceiving users with blue checkmarks, obscuring information on ads and shutting out researchers have no place online in the EU,' said Henna Virkkunen, executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy.
It should be noted that profile "checkmarks" were invented entirely by private social media companies, and the way they were used was made up entirely by their staff.
Twitter, for example, tended to only verify leftwing accounts (its staff were overwhelmingly supporters of the Democratic Party), promoting them with "checkmarks" while shutting out public figures on the political right. For years, they were accused of using their checkmark system to curate an expert class for the public that fit the leftwing vision for "progress." This propaganda network, when combined with traditional corporate media and powerful political allies, directly impacted elections, finance, policy, and law across every conceivable industry and institution.
(See our reporting on the Twitter Files here.)
The EU Commission had no issue with this kind of deception and propaganda thwarting "democracy."
It was only in 2022, the same year Elon Musk bought Twitter, that the EU passed the Digital Services Act (DSA) and quickly decided Elon's changes were a problem!
'With the DSA's first non-compliance decision, we are holding X responsible for undermining users' rights and evading accountability.'
MHMM.
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