EU Officials Seem Pretty Pissed Off At Thierry Breton For His Censorial Letter To Elon
Yesterday, we wrote about EU Commissioner Thierry Breton’s preposterously stupid letter to Elon Musk, warning him that Elon had to make sure his Spaces conversation with Donald Trump did not include any “harmful content” or it might violate the DSA. He also demanded that Elon tell Eurocrats what ExTwitter was doing to make sure that no “harmful” speech from Trump could possibly reach Europeans’ brains.
It was very stupid.
Elon’s response — posting a meme telling Breton to “fuck yourself in the face” — while not exactly a masterclass in diplomatic communication, at least made his feelings on the matter abundantly clear. It also made the point that Breton appeared to be using the DSA in a manner that Europeans insisted the DSA would never enable: to order companies to censor content.
Since then, I’ve had (mostly) Europeans in the comments to my post and on Bluesky arguing something to the effect of the standard argument every time I point out the censorial nature of EU laws: “the EU doesn’t have a First Amendment, you stupid American, and we’re just trying to stop Elon from enabling more violence.”
This is not a particularly compelling response. I may be a stupid American, but I still think I’m allowed to discuss the actual impacts of laws that will be used to regulate speech. I’m quite aware that the EU has no First Amendment. All I’m pointing out is how that enables problematic and concerning censorship, such as what Breton sought to do this week.
Indeed, it appears that other EU officials agree that Breton went too far. The Financial Times covered the story by noting that other EU officials were wholly unaware that Breton was going to send that letter, and they sound displeased about it:
On Tuesday the European Commission denied that Breton had approval from its president Ursula von der Leyen to send the letter.
“The timing and the wording of the letter were neither co-ordinated or agreed with the president nor with the [commissioners],” it said.
An EU official, who asked not to be named, said: “Thierry has his own mind and way of working and thinking.”
Now, remember, EU Commissioners are not elected. After each EU election, each country gets a Commissioner who is in charge of something as picked through some sort of opaque process involving the European Council and the Commission-President-elect. The President-elect gets to submit a full slate of Commissioners, which the EU Parliament only gets a yes/no vote on (the entire slate, not individual Commissioners).
So now we have an unelected bureaucrat who was put in charge of a law that enables him to kick off investigations that could result in massive fines to (almost entirely) American companies, who appears to have total free rein to send threatening letters based on his own personal censorship desires.
It seems less than great.
In Politico, another unnamed EU official is even more direct about how bad this looks for Breton and the DSA.
Four separate EU officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Breton’s warning to Musk had surprised many within the Commission. The bloc’s enforcers were still investigating the platform for potential wrongdoing and the EU did not want to be seen as potentially interfering in the U.S. presidential election.
“The EU is not in the business of electoral interference,” said one of those officials. “DSA implementation is too important to be misused by an attention-seeking politician in search of his next big job.”
So, it sure looks as though some others in the EU are similarly disturbed by Breton using the DSA as his own personal censorship tool. Perhaps, if the various Europeans want to insist that the DSA won’t be used for such censorship, they should fix things so that an “attention-seeking politician in search of his next big job” can’t abuse the law that way? The DSA needs safeguards to prevent abuse by overzealous regulators, or it risks enabling the very censorship many insisted it would prevent. Unless, of course, they want more EU officials being told to perform anatomically challenging acts.