Only under the EUs backwards idea that if it makes speech illegal it's not censorship.
>its failure to provide researchers access to public data.
I don't want my X posts being handed over to researchers even if they are technically public. On social media and chat platforms there is an expectation of the posts and chat messages you make to be private due to being in an obscure section of the website. Just look out the outrage over people's privacy that happens every time someone makes a public search engine of everyone's chat messages on a Discord that has an open invitation link. People's idea of privacy does not align with the idea that anything public should be widely spread with others.
Then X shouldn't make their business available in the EU, but because X wants EU users, they're participating in a market where they need to follow the law of the market. If you disagree with X's choice of participating in that market, you should vote with your wallet/attention.
> On social media and chat platforms there is an expectation of the posts and chat messages you make to be private due to being in an obscure section of the website
That might be, but the internet unfortunately doesn't work like that, they are public platforms, so the information there is treated as public information, which it is. If you make it invite-only, I understand the expectation of privacy and private conversation, but for platforms with open signup? Don't participate and share stuff you don't want to be public, it's kind of easy.
I think a more mundane explanation, which I personally subscribe to, is that Europeans have different priorities than Americans. They don’t want the same trade-offs, and they’re willing to make certain business models economically unviable if they believe those models are harmful or in bad taste. US companies are disproportionately affected because they don't share those values. First amendment, etc.
From the outside, this can create the impression of "hidden motives": the stated reasons sound unconvincing, the effects fall heavily on US companies, and so people infer that the EU is targeting Americans. But really, I think we're just different. If US laws disproportionately burdened EU citizens, I’d expect Europeans to be equally upset. It's only natural. I'm sure few people in Europe would be thrilled to find out that GDPR doesn't apply to ChatGPT because they got involved in some copyright lawsuit in New York.
That said, there's always a mix of motivations. I'm personally not a fan of other EU initiatives, like the one on encryption, but I think GDPR and DSA mostly mirror what the average João wants. I'm not sure most people care that much about the geopolitics.
It doesn't though, it applies those laws if the entity in question happen to also be slurping up a bunch of user data and selling/using it for various purpose, something which requires intent and active work to do.
If they instead didn't do those things, these laws wouldn't apply to them in the first place. Random American HN users just having a website public on the internet without perverse tracking has nothing to worry about, and does not have to care about GDPR, EU rules or much else.
That's information war. We should probably ban on sight but as we are free countries, we put in place a regulatory framework and let the courts do their work.
You don't want balkanization of the internet? Tell your government to stop using it as a weapon.
Right... and maybe next the US won't let Europe have any IP space. It's the internet. A US business needs to be governed by US law, not whatever law that a user chooses to access their site from..
So if I run a business from a country where cocaine is legal, I should be able to sell to users in the US? Are you sure you thought this through? Seems you're letting your emotions get in the way of your reasoning.
US customs takes the product at the border, and if you transit the border expect to be arrested. Your customer should expect to be arrested as well.
Maybe you get put on a list so US banks can't send you money anymore too.
Makes perfect sense for me in both cases.
Any attempts by the US government to assert control of a foreign non-profit entity such as RIPE is only going to end in tears. I suspect would also empower those pushing to balkanise the internet should the independence of RIPE or ARIN be violated.
I'm not sure region specific intranets is a future anyone should want.
The irony of how blind you are. EU trying to enforce censorship laws on American companies will end in tears.
This has always been true. E.g. Google and others complying with Chinese laws, or not operating at all in places like Iran. X can simply cease operations in EU if they don't like it.
Why is that? I think you can reasonably argue that a user should enjoy the protections offered by law in the place they live.
The current administration has openly stated their intent to bully selected countries they don't like in various ways, but especially when it relates to their ability to push US propaganda to foreign places via companies like X.
I hold back no criticism on free speech issues in eu (ie chat control) when it is correct to do so, but this case doesn't look like it
It's extremely tiring to decipher takes like these and they're everywhere recently. It's supposed to be convincing, yet to read it without finding it jarring, I'd already need to agree with you. Makes no sense!
This is why mentions of "free speech" are inherently red herrings to me. It's an idea, a mirage, and a rather absolute one at that, especially under certain interpretations. It is something to get people ideologically motivated by and then used in my opinion. To me, it bears little difference to run of the mill marketing speak about agile and scrum, for example. Just like with code, the difference between idea and implementation is ever-shifting and never nil, sometimes intentionally so.
It is not helped by how someone can read the same situation very differently, which is the whole premise behind the "speech that you don't like" narrative in the first place, in the face of which loaded assertions fare really quite poorly: https://programmerhumor.io/backend-memes/ourblesseddepartmen...
This is what the article said. [edit, mostly wrong: "You gave the reason that was used for an investigation of TikTok, and I don't know where you got the blue check thing from."]
> I hold back no criticism on free speech issues in eu (ie chat control) when it is correct to do so, but this case doesn't look like it
edit: I got a bad load that cut off the end. What was actually said, however was,
> EU regulators said X's DSA violations included the deceptive design of its blue checkmark for verified accounts, the lack of transparency of its advertising repository and its failure to provide researchers access to public data.
Italics mine. The first line however, is about breaching "online content rules."
The DSA does not create new categories of illegal speech.
I further disagree that the legal system should be turned into a swiss cheese of enforced and unenforced laws, although I will admit, that is entirely a principled preference on my part. I strongly believe that bad laws should (ideally) be repelled, not worked around.
Too bad, don't make them public then. I'm not sure where this idea came from that "free speech" also means "free of consequences", but it sure is pervasive. It's always been the case in every society for all time that you need to be careful what you say publicly. The modern notion of "free speech" is related to retaliation from the government, it doesn't grant you immunity from people reacting to your public speech, nor does it grant you some sort of ill-defined "public speech anonymity."
In the past, news would travel—but slowly—and minor news about local citizens was not normally considered newsworthy in non-local markets unless it was extremely unusual and entertaining.
The EU makes a lot more sense when you think of it as the neo-Vatican super state power. A core aspect of this is asserting things makes them true.
> Its 2024 adjusted EBITDA nearly doubled Twitter’s best year
Revenue is up 20% in 2025 but profit is lower and revenue in general is still much lower than pre-Musk purchase due to lost advertising but it is still improving slowly. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-saw...
In the UK there was a more serious drop in revenue https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/15/x-twitter...
Not sure about EU
I leapfrogged this by pulling myself out from Twitter instead a while ago, and I can only recommend. And I don't mean this in the "in favor of Bluesky/Mastadon" sense.
There are some types of content that I did lose access to this way, but in retrospect it was worth it. I found that the cost-benefit for it is just not there, not for me at least.
Like when they "pulled out" of Brazil? When Musk said they were fighting for freedom, democracy, and the rule of law? Then X got blocked in Brazil, and they silently complied with everything that was against "freedom, democracy, and the rule of law" and stopped talking about it.
This one in particular is both personally desperate for approval of his petty, narcissistic bullshit, and for trying to consolidate political power by amplifying and supporting authoritarian candidates (that are expected to quid-pro-quo him back).
None of the craigslist type websites I used in Europe (Leboncoin mobile.de...) we're free of scams, are they getting fined bazillions ? These people live in a buble of infinite wisdom as to their understanding of the Internet and technologies
Exactly why people are leaving Europe in droves
If it is an American site that only does business in America... well still all the jurisdiction they need; that's kind of how sovereignty works. But little practical ability to enforce orders.
But X isn't an American site that only does business in America so the issue is moot, anyhow. It's a multinational corporate network with both business dealings and a local corporation in the EU whose corporate parent happens to be HQ’d in the US, and the EU has as much legal and practical jurisdiction over it as the US had over TikTok when its corporate parent was in China.
That's the issue, none. They have jurisdiction because part of the software runs on EU citizens computers and because they process the data of EU citizens.
So that companies can expose them to scams even more optimally with even less recourse? Now that's a surprising conjecture!
What of this is censorship?
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
Not a single word about removing anything in this.
Why lie so blatantly? This is what was in the article:
> EU regulators said X's DSA violations included the deceptive design of its blue checkmark for verified accounts, the lack of transparency of its advertising repository and its failure to provide researchers access to public data.
Can you count? I count three distinct claims, not one.
I think X is in the wrong here, the blue checkmark usually means the identity has been verified, in other social media, but also historic twitter.
Nowadays on X it only means that a fee has been paid, it's used for scams, some even claim to be Elon Musk or official twitter announcements, which is very ironic.
I want to make no mistake - I personally think that Kiwifarms is absolutely gross with their harassment campaigns. But it does appear legal, and first amendment speech issue.
SaSu advocates for people who wish to commit suicide, a how-to. Its the final "my body, my choice" that every government wants to take away. So silencing is a thing. But again, 1fa issue.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/05/when-trolls-take-on-tyra...