Can Elon Musk beat the EU censors?

Elon Musk, the eccentric billionaire and owner of X, has lifted the lid on the EU’s war on free speech.

Musk has accused the European Commission – the unelected body that rules over the European Union – of offering X an ‘illegal secret deal’. According to Musk, if he agreed to censor content – and keep quiet about it – regulators in Brussels would turn a blind eye to all of X’s alleged breaches of EU rules and regulations.

He claims that all the other Big Tech firms have agreed to these terms. The likes of Facebook and Google, Musk alleges, have become willing tools of censorship.

The EU denies proposing any secret deals to X or any other company. But an arrangement like this would hardly be unprecedented. Back in 2022, the Twitter Files revealed how Western governments worked hand in glove with the pre-Musk Twitter to suppress online speech. This sinister, secretive form of censorship went into overdrive during the pandemic – even in America, the supposed land of the free. To get around the First Amendment, federal agencies piled pressure on Big Tech firms to suppress certain posts on their behalf.

Now, it’s bad enough when elected governments attempt to censor the internet. But at least we can punish their authoritarianism at the ballot box.

Europeans have no such luck. The EU is ruled by the unelected technocrats of the European Commission – leaders with no accountability to the public. The EU has something called a ‘European Parliament’, but it is completely toothless. It is the only parliament in the supposedly democratic world that cannot propose or repeal legislation. It can only approve or amend laws that are proposed by the Commission, making it totally subordinate to an unelected bureaucracy.

Few Europeans will have heard of Thierry Breton, the European commissioner currently locking horns with Elon Musk. Certainly, no one voted for Breton or his censorious agenda. But that hasn’t stopped him and his underlings from trying to restrict what hundreds of millions of Europeans can say, watch and read on the internet.

In the run-up to the European Parliament elections in May, EU officials passed laws like the Digital Services Act, the Media Freedom Act and the Artificial Intelligence Act. These laws may sound anodyne, but they have handed vast new powers to the European Commission to sanitise and censor the internet.

The Digital Services Act compels social-media firms to remove any content that’s been flagged by the EU as contravening its rules. Failure to comply can result in eye-watering fines of up to six per cent of a company’s global income. In the most serious cases, a platform could be banned from the EU entirely. This is the threat currently being made to Elon Musk. He is being told to submit to EU censorship or face hefty consequences.

This ramping up of tech censorship in the run up to the European Parliament elections, showed how politicised this EU crackdown is. Populist parties were on the rise, and went on to chalk up historic victories in those May elections. The European Parliament may be a powerless talking shop, but the Commission still wasn’t prepared to brook any dissent to its authority.

And so, a vast empire of censorship has now sprung up. Bureaucrats in Brussels, with the help of AI and algorithms, are now busy badgering the tech firms to remove reams of content from the European internet.

Of course, the EU elites do not admit that what they’re doing is censorship. They refuse to acknowledge that they’re undermining free speech. In fact, they claim they’re defending ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ from the threat of authoritarianism. They say they are protecting Europeans from ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate speech’.

But this is complete nonsense. While we can all object to the rantings of racists and the ravings of conspiracy theorists, we should be deeply alarmed when the state offers to censor them on our behalf. Free speech is utterly meaningless if we can’t express or hear views that some might find hateful. What’s more, one man’s fake news is another man’s sincerely held belief. No government should get to decide what is true and false.

Besides, it has become abundantly clear in recent years that ‘disinformation’ is now just a code word for views the elites dislike. It has become a euphemism for ‘dissent’. ‘Hate speech’ is not what it seems, either. It has become a byword for blasphemy against woke ideology. When the EU talks of tackling ‘hate’ and ‘disinformation’, it increasingly just means tackling speech that challenges the rule of Brussels, that questions the globalist consensus, that promotes populist parties and advances anti-woke causes.

America shows us just how dangerous it can be to crack down on ‘disinformation’. This is not about separating fiction from fact, but approved views from unapproved views. Just consider all of the true stories and expert opinions that have been branded false by the powers-that-be and then banished from the digital realm.

Back in 2020, when the New York Post broke a number of stories about Hunter Biden, the current president’s son, its scoops were censored by Big Tech following pressure from the security services and Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. They claimed the revelations were Russian disinformation. The Post, America’s oldest newspaper, was even locked out of its Twitter account. Users were prevented from posting links to the story, even in private messages. Facebook suppressed its spread, too. Yet, the authenticity of the infamous laptop, from which the Hunter Biden scoops originated, has since been confirmed in court proceedings against Hunter.

National and supranational agencies also worked closely with Big Tech to suppress dissent about Covid’s origins. And, as we now know, they ended up suppressing views that turned out to be entirely legitimate. For instance, any suggestion that the virus may have leaked from a Chinese lab was treated back in early 2020 as a racist conspiracy theory and censored accordingly. In the years since, the lab-leak theory has been endorsed by multiple US government agencies – and Big Tech firms have had to hastily change tack.

In the European context, the ‘disinformation’ smear is now thrown at anyone who questions establishment policies. It’s been levelled at Europe’s farmers, who oppose stringent climate measures. It was levelled at the French yellow vests, who staged a year-long revolt against President Macron and his fuel taxes. And of course, it is levelled at all of those populist parties who are threatening to bring the EU oligarchy to heel. In a similar fashion, Europeans who oppose wokeism are routinely accused – and sometimes even convicted – of peddling ‘hate speech’.

That being said, there are plenty of hateful and untrue things that you are permitted to say, without having anything to fear from the speech police. You can say that women can have penises, that climate change will boil us all alive or that Western civilisation is racist to its core. You can vent your spleen against the alleged evils of the white working class or gender-critical feminists. None of those views is in danger of being censored. Because all of them are shared and parrotted by the Right Kind of People – from blue-haired students to grey-suited technocrats. You can have freedom of speech, but only if you’re on the side of the elites.

The EU’s fear of ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate speech’ is really a fear of freedom. The establishment is filled with horror at the thought of citizens having unregulated conversations and expressing unsanctioned ideas. It is terrified that a well-informed populace might take control of the narrative and challenge unelected power.

This is why the looming showdown between Brussels and Elon Musk is so much bigger than one billionaire and his tech company. Hundreds of millions of Europeans are losing their liberty to speak. Hard-won rights are being removed by decree, crushed by undemocratic forces that are accountable to no one. The fight for free speech in Europe is just getting started.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.

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