Isaac Saul (19:33)
Alright, that is it for the left and the Right are saying. Which brings us to my take. I have no love lost for X. Over the last few years, the platform has gone through a rollercoaster of ups and downs. When I started my career in journalism, Twitter was my favorite social media application. It was an awesome way to debate smart people in public and get the fastest breaking news updates in the world. But when it throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story and disingenuously framed it as Russian propaganda, I strongly criticized it. When Elon Musk was supposed to join the board, I supported his push to add ideological diversity to the platform. When Musk bought the platform outright, I worried about the richest man in the world forcing the purchase of such a critical source of information. When Musk began very obviously thumbing the algorithmic scales to promote his worldview and selectively nuked accounts, I again vocally criticized the platform. Today, X is a cesspool. It is overrun with bots, misinformation, porn and bigotry. The community notes system remains helpful, but is far too slow to be effective in reining in misinformation. Too many users delegate their thinking to Grok, which is clearly an unreliable arm of Musk's own beliefs. Elon himself promised to, quote, unquote, fix it when it started, giving answers he didn't like. Which is all just to say I'm not the person you might expect to be defending X right now, even though I once believed in Musk and once loved the platform. And yet, I also think Europe's enforcement of these rules and its trajectory more broadly is deeply concerning. Whenever we cover the Trump administration, we often face the criticism that you can't look at the president's individual actions in a vacuum, but have to look at the whole. That's true. Fitting pieces together shows a more complete picture, which was the underpinning of my piece. Yes, things are pretty bad right now. The fundamental context of this enforcement, which has to be explicated up front, is that Europe is backsliding in genuinely horrifying ways on speech rights. The Digital Services act is the latest government overreach, but it's part of a frightening trend. In the uk, thousands of people are being arrested each year for statements on social media. In Germany, online hate speech can bring the police to your door, and politicians can sue Germans for criticizing them. In France, laws narrowing online rights have proliferated. We see these attacks on speech pop up in the US from the left and the right, but they are much rarer and face far more backlash in Europe. The DSA is an important piece of this picture an enforcement mechanism not just for the continent but apparently the globe, and this is its first major enforcement. Remember that last year, before the US Presidential race, then Commissioner Terry Breton threatened Musk, telling him that if he livestreamed an interview with Donald Trump on X, it could violate the DSA. Months ago, Musk alleged that the EU's bureaucratic arm was offering him a secret deal to drop the case in exchange for the platform censoring forms of speech. Musk didn't specify, but the claim seems more plausible after the EU struck deals with TikTok and Facebook. All of this makes the criticisms Vice President J.D. vance and Musk have leveled at Europe much more plausible. There are allies and Democratic peers, but if these kinds of draconian stances on speech spread to the United States, that could cause social upheaval. All of this is the context leading to the EU's fine and X's supposed transgression. First, that its blue check mark policy purportedly violated the DSA because it might confuse users about which accounts are verified. The symbol represented external identity verification years ago. But the platform has not been ambiguous about how to get a verification check mark. Now you pay for it. I hate this change, and I think it's partially how Musk ruined the platform. But do I think it should be illegal for a private company to change this feature? No, I don't. Am I confused about what that check mark means? No, I'm not, and I don't think many users are. Another of X's alleged crimes is that it has not met the DSA standard for advertising transparency. The DSA requires companies to maintain an easily searchable, publicly available archive of who bought X and what the ad's content was, who the ads targeted, the legal name of the entity paying for the ad, and how many users the ad reached, among other things. Easily tracking how money flows on a platform like X has clear upside, but demanding that data be widely accessible is an incredible overreach. Advertising data is exactly the kind of proprietary information that makes X valuable. And for advertisers, it's the kind of thing you intentionally keep private to have an advantage on your competition. Which, by the way, means that this action supposedly targeting a tech behemoth will have consequences for countless smaller players. For example, if my team came up with a brilliant strategy to advertise Tangle on X, I wouldn't want our timing, location, and price points to be shared widely in a place where our competitors could mimic or steal the strategy for their own gain. Yet this is what the DSA demands of X. The final allegation against X is that it is not meeting the DSA's transparency requirements because it's too hard for researchers to access data posted publicly on the platform. Specifically, the EU claims X's terms of service forbid researchers from using a method called scraping to access public data that's using scripts that visit web pages and get relevant information from the site's HTML, and that it puts up bureaucratic hurdles and delays for researchers who want to access that data through permitted channels. At base, I feel that X is within its rights here on the terms of service. If Tangle became the most well read news outlet in the world and researchers wanted to scrape our comments section to study our readers, I think I should be able to make terms of service that make that more difficult. But putting aside the question of why these researchers should have the right to access that public data of a private company, the complaint itself seems like an incredibly subjective standard ripe for abuse. Some commentators defending DSA argued that this law was similar to the US Platform Accountability and Transparency Act PATA, which was introduced on a bipartisan basis in 2023. The difference obviously, is that PATA is a narrow regulation that also didn't become law, not a part of a massive regulatory framework empowering Oversight Commission to fine or shut down platforms. Under the dsa, the EU can ignore difficulties posed by one company while easily tacking on a claim that another made accessing data too hard to some other allegations, which in my opinion is happening here. So has X violated the dsa? The EU says yes, and maybe they did. We haven't seen the evidence and X hasn't yet had the opportunity to defend itself. They could appeal, but it's not clear if they will. Even presuming X violated the rules, though, the issue isn't X's policies, it's the law itself. In tech policy press, Daphne Keller, under what the left is saying, summed all this up with a cheeky that's it. That's everything X is in trouble for under the dsa, at least for now. But that's not it. The same bill being enforced now also gives the EU enforcement power to compel companies like X to hand over internal data, which Keller herself acknowledges just sentences before Plus Europe has two other investigations open against X, including one for illegal content under the dsa, which would open the door to the EU restricting speech that is legal in the us. Now X has three months to hand over an action plan explaining how it will address these infringements, all with the other open investigations, or face a potential $140 million fine. Perhaps for people who loathe X, are furious at musk and despise online hate speech. I'm all three. It feels nice to watch someone throw a punch at the platform. But trust me when I say we should not want any government in charge of regulating speech in the modern day public square, but especially not these governments. In Germany, insulting a politician can get you three years in prison. In France, a woman is on trial and facing $14,000 fine for calling Emmanuel Macron filth in a Facebook post. Believing this enforcement against a US Tech company has nothing to do with speech rights requires head in the sand levels of denial. No different than thinking Trump's test run of national guard troops in D.C. wasn't going to be expanded across the country. At the very least, we should all be deeply alarmed that a European enforcement agency, some of whose members won't tolerate insulting public officials, is now reaching into the US to dictate how a major social media platform here is run. If we're lucky, X will fight and win. Not because they're the good guys, but because they have every right to run a crappy, hard to analyze platform full of angry, embittered users if that's what they want to do. All right, that is it for my take. There are two staff dissents today, one from Senior Editor Will Kaback, one from Managing Editor Ari Weitzman. You can ignore them. These guys don't know what they're talking about. No, I'm just kidding. All right, first up, here's Will.
