For all the talk of “the people,” Musk’s position boils down to a demand that one billionaire, who’s, unelected, unaccountable, and running a global communication platform, should operate above the law. Europe, to its credit, is saying no.
Talking about throwing your toys out of the pram. After the EU imposed a €120m penalty on X for breaching the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA), the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, lashed out in his usual reactionary fashion. Brussels, he declared, was a “woke Stasi” that “must be abolished.”
He posted on X: “The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people,” which rather typically ignores the fact that the EU has always ensured that ultimate sovereignty resides with the member states.
The outburst followed the EU’s two-year investigation into X’s repeated failures to comply with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires large online platforms to curb illegal and harmful content, from hate speech to coordinated disinformation campaigns. The objective is to prevent online environments from becoming engines of harassment, radicalisation, and large-scale deception.
But for Musk, any requirement to limit harmful content is rebranded as an existential threat to “free speech.”
Naturally, he ramped up the rhetoric, railing against Brussels’s “bureaucratic monster,” and demanding Europeans “dissolve the EU and return power to the people.” He attacked unnamed officials as “EU woke Stasi commissars,” vowed retaliation, and posted images likening the EU to the “Fourth Reich”
He then threatened that Brussels would soon “understand the full meaning of the Streisand effect, a phenomenon named for Barbra Streisand, in which efforts to censor information only bring it more attention.
EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen seemed unbothered by Musk’s theatrics. The fine, she explained, was “proportionate and calculated” based on the seriousness, scale, and duration of X’s violations.
“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 said.
But Musk was not the only American to take up the mantle of EU-bashing. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared the fine to be “an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments.”
Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr said Europe was punishing X merely “for being a successful US tech company.” And Vice President JD Vance repeated the right’s tired talking point that the EU should be “supporting free speech,” not “attacking American companies over garbage.”
Critics have also compared the DSA to the UK’s Online Safety Act, warning of creeping censorship.
In a statement in the summer, X said: “Many are now concerned that a plan ostensibly intended to keep children safe is at risk of seriously infringing on the public’s right to free expression.”
Yet these laws do not grant governments power to police opinions. They require platforms to stop amplifying illegal content and to maintain basic transparency about how their systems operate. Far from throttling democracy, they aim to protect it from manipulation and abuse.
The louder Musk rails against “woke tyranny,” the clearer it becomes that his real objection is to oversight itself. For all the talk of “the people,” Musk’s position boils down to a demand that one billionaire, who’s, unelected, unaccountable, and running a global communication platform, should operate above the law.
Europe, to its credit, is saying no.
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