The European Commission is fining the X platform 120 million euros (140 million dollars), for “transparency failures”: not sharing advertising and user data with the EU and not making it easy to censor account holders.
As Reclaim the Net reports, the European Union wants platforms to open themselves to what it calls “independent research.” In practice, this means that “academics and NGOs, often with pro-censorship political affiliations” get special access to the data, “exactly the kind of surveillance the [Digital Services Act] claims to prevent.… The EU is angry that X is not policing speech the way it wants.”
My advice to Elon Musk is to shut down X (formerly Twitter) throughout the EU. And refuse to pay the fine.
X’s departure from the EU wouldn’t need to be permanent. For the censors would then have not only X and its uncooperative CEO to contend with; suddenly, a pro‑X lobby of millions of Twitterers would be putting pressure on the censors.
The chances of unilateral surrender by the EU? Pretty high. And that’s the only kind of surrender Musk should accept.
If he agrees to even a little EU repression in return for lifting of the fine, that could lead to a total loss for the freedom-of-speech side; the bureaucrats, spies, and busybodies would likely take that seemingly marginal concession and relentlessly work to enlarge it.
Accept only total victory. And be ready to again leave the EU the instant the EU-crats resume their attacks.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “Don’t Pay, Don’t Play”
X should indeed refuse to pay the fine and be prepared to be excluded from Europe; however…
…if X.com is shut-down in Europe, most of its users would migrate to BlueSky, and the remainder would be dismissed as “far right”. The ruling class is prepared to exclude candidates (sometimes by assassination), to invalidated elections, and to falsify vote counts. If the subject peoples of the EU were going to rebel, then they would have done so long ago.
Yep, The EU and the UK are a lost cause.
“My advice to Elon Musk is to shut down X (formerly Twitter) throughout the EU. And refuse to pay the fine.”
And encourage people in the EU to get on a VPN to re-connect, giving the middle finger to their control-freak rulers.