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- [00:00]
Podcast Host
Nearly every News alert in 2025 has.
- [00:03]
Renee DiResta
Raised questions, some old, some new, about the law and national security.
- [00:08]
Podcast Host
And now you get the chance to ask Lawfare directly.
- [00:11]
Renee DiResta
It's time for our annual Ask Us Anything Mailbag podcast, an opportunity for you to ask Lawfare this year's most burning questions. You can submit your question by leaving a voicemail at 202-643-846, or by sending a recording of yourself asking your question to ask us anything lawfairmail.com by December 16th.
- [00:37]
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Kate Clonik
It is Lawfare Live the now. I'm Kate Clonik, LawFair senior editor. It is 11am Eastern Time on December 5th and I'm here with Lawfare contributor Renee DiResta to discuss the European Commission announcement that they are fining the platform x, formerly Twitter 120 million euros for violations of the Digital Services act, which is Europe's new, relatively new law around services and speech and content platforms. And we are. I don't know, we were. We kind of got word of this last night, Renee. And like, you were on. You were up very early. Not we're kind of late to this by European standards, but early to this by California standards. I like to say. Cheers. But let's like, just to kind of like read everyone in. Into kind of. Let's start with kind of just like, do you want to give a quick, quick overview of DSA stuff and like, what it is, how. Yeah. For so, like, listeners can kind of understand what's going on.
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Renee DiResta
Yep. So it's funny, whenever I say dsa, people think I mean, like, Democratic Socialists of America.
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Kate Clonik
Right.
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Renee DiResta
That's what the acronym means.
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Kate Clonik
Yep.
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Renee DiResta
In the United States. I'm in California this morning, guys. I was actually on a plane when this was happening with really crappy WI fi. Very frustrated, flying across from D.C. to San Francisco, which is where I am this morning with my mini bar behind me over here. So I actually have a primer up on my sub stack, which is Agents of Influence, where I do kind of lay this out for anybody who wants to read it in detail. But basically the Digital Services act is a regulation in Europe. Whenever people talk about how Europe regulates tech platforms, or almost always, they're either talking about Digital Markets act or Digital Services act, we're going to be talking about the latter today. It's a transparency and accountability law, primarily. Some of its key obligations include a notice in action. So platforms have to offer a clear way for the European Commission to flag what is called illegal content. We can talk a little bit about why that provision troubles some civil liberties folks. Because illegal in Europe has sometimes a broad meaning.
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Kate Clonik
Right.
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Renee DiResta
It can mean certain types of speech that, that are legal here in the US that are not in Europe. And that's where some of these tensions come into play. But that notice in action does require them to have transparency. So when the Commission requests illegal content be taken down, that gets put in a public database. There is this thing called the Trusted flagger program. That's the other part that people get troubled about. Right. Because trusted flaggers are approved by the Commission, which means that there's some concern that if trusted flaggers are flagging content and they're approved by the Commission, are they really independent in any way? That's the other piece of the DSA that makes American speech and civil liberties folks uncomfortable. Most of the rest of the DSA and the stuff that is actually what X was fined under is this transparency. And Data access set of provisions. So under transparency, there are requirements of, for example, regular public reporting that very large online platforms, vlops have to report out. They have to do a bunch of stuff where they kind of detail certain provisions that they've taken to mitigate risks. They have to detail certain types of, you know, just kind of checking in about certain types of activities that the European Commission is interested in. They have to offer researcher data access, so privacy protecting, but researcher data access. So approved scholars get access to study platform effects. These are things actually that the platforms used to do voluntarily. Twitter actually used to put out quite a lot of data voluntarily. It no longer does under the dsa, European researchers can still request that data. And so that has become a very big point of contention under Elon. And then the last part of the DSA is a user rights package. And this is very interesting because we don't have it here in the US and that's where users can actually appeal platform moderation decisions. They can demand timely explanations for why was my content taken down, why was my account removed? And they can look into, they can request information about suspensions, shadow bans and things like that. So again, it's primarily a transparency and accountability law. But there are these things related to speech takedowns. And that's where that framing of it as a censorship law has stuck. Even though, and I want, Kate, you to kind of pick up here, the investigation and the finds that X has been hit with are not under that flagging related rubric at all. They're all under the transparency and accountability and data access side.
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Kate Clonik
Yeah, totally. So I will kind of pick up on that, which is that. And this is kind of this. I think we can, I think that both you and I would agree on this is we're, you know, I think that like us having to kind of foreshadow the massiveness of the DSA, how much it kind of encapsulates everything from like researcher digital access to ad transparency centers to kind of online content moderation appeal systems getting built out. Two things that I personally think as like kind of.
- [07:37]
In my understanding think are actually a little dangerous, actually in terms of censorship. And I'm totally fine saying that because I also think that Europe as a Western democracy, functioning Western democracy, has a total right to decide what its own speech laws are and how companies operate within that, even if I disagree with the substance of their law. But even those laws, like, I just want to be super clear that the decision today is not about the parts of the law that people have been concerned about being sensorial in any way.
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And that's super important because this has become. And we'll get to this at kind of the end, and it's important to kind of foreground it, but then kind of give you kind of the facts on the ground of what's going on. I think that what's interesting here is.
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Renee DiResta
That.
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Kate Clonik
There has been a push in the last year that has been really interesting. And, Renee, you've written about this for Lawfare, and you've written about this on your substack extensively. And I have given lots of talks about this and things like that that we've had JD Vance come over and give talks at the Paris AI Summit that were kind of surprising, then even more surprising at the Munich Security Conference about basically the DSA being this tool of censorship and kind of lecturing Europeans about how dangerous their law was. And then Brendan Carr of the FCC kind of come over and also kind of say, like, this is the DSA sensorial. And if you were scratching your head and being like, why does this isolationist kind of administration give a flying hoot about the European censorship laws?
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I think that essentially it is less principled and it's a beard for us for kind of doing a lot of work for the tech companies. The tech companies have been trying for decades to get the US to carry water for them abroad as Europe comes down on them with potentially heavy, heavy fines and laws like this around tech and have been like, we want you to protect tech industry. And no one has taken the bait, including Trump won, and Trump, too, has taken the bait. And very, very, very much so. And so. And like, no one knows this better than you, Renee. They have deployed this kind of.
- [10:02]
They have kind of deployed their previously domestic, domestically kind of empowered, like MAGA and kind of administrative state around the. Around the idea of a censorship industrial complex within the tech companies. And now they're like, deploying this to effect around the world and kind of weighing in on this. And it has become truly a geopolitical issue. So we might be talking for five or so more minutes about the nitty gritty of what this does, because it's important. Facts matter, and it's important to kind of understand what this actually is. But what I wanted to kind of foreground, what Renee is foregrounding is I think, essentially kind of a little bit that takeaway just to kind of kind of put us on kind of an outline for where we'll go really quickly. And then I'll turn it back over to you, Renee. I Just was going to say that like that, that the commission's fines actually are just about three things. The $120 million, the 20, 120 million euros fines are about three things. Basically X, as we all know, started selling their verified accounts and the European Commission said this is actually really deceptive under the DSA because you're not actually verifying these accounts in any meaningful way and they're being used for scams. And so that's, that's fine number one. Okay, so like nothing to do with censorship. Fine number two is that they're, they are supposed to have an ad repository that gives you transparency about essentially that like is searchable. So the researchers, civil society can like look at like the ads you serve. See how they're using behavioral advertising and they're like access and created that. Like they have not created that as they're required to under the law. And like again nothing to do with censorship, just about creating researcher and public access to kind of how you're being served ads. And the third thing is public data. They were obligated to provide research to provide researchers with access to the platform's public data and they have basically not been non responsive. And so anyways, so those are the three things. Tell me if you hear in there anything about kind of like the. And there are other investigations ongoing. I should also say that like, so this is not the only investigation of X that the European Commission has under the DSA. But at least these three have nothing. These three, this three part kind of, this three part single decision with the 120 million or 120 million euro fine is not reflective of that. Sorry, turn it back over to you Renee, and kind of your thoughts on that?
- [12:42]
Renee DiResta
Yeah, well let's, let's connect it to something else. Right, so the misleading verification that enables impersonation scams, that first piece there, which is turning the blue check into the paid check, which is a really interesting thing. Now I don't think anybody's arguing that there shouldn't that Elon doesn't have the right to offer these sort of paid promotions or paid subscriptions. What was very interesting about that was that by making verification, by alleging that this is sort of like the blue check is a verification system, which it clearly was not. Right. You did see just last week the story of the day or the sort of Internet story of the week was this revelation that you know, Maga Mom 1776 was, you know, some scammer in Nigeria. Right. So you saw this laid out for you. And most importantly, I would say the people who were really both riled up and, and you know, sort of like had the scales lifted from their eyes, so to speak, were the maga, right, Authentic influencers who were like, wow, look, these anons were able to, to parlay this tool, right, this sort of pay to play scheme into earning money on the platform, into luring our people into being manipulated, into being duped by this incentive structure. That was not, you know, that, that was misguided, that was not. That led people who were not what they seemed to be able to manipulate our community. Right? And that, that I think was actually just last week a huge scandal in the community where people were actually quite happy that Elon had undertaken this thing that made it transparent. Transparency actually really matters. I felt like I was like, well great, we're all on the same page now, guys. Do you need regulators to do it? Well, you didn't used to that. Everybody was, was, you know, we were, we were all in this like magical period of self regulation that you've written about. You called it the sort of golden age of platform transparency. This was at a time when I was, you know, when I was at Stanford Internet Observatory and we were regularly, you know, getting these data sets from Twitter that it would release in advance to researchers. Maybe we would get them like two weeks in advance and then they would be made available to the entirety of the public. You could actually go and have access to these data sets, right? State actor takedown data sets. So everybody could see that there were manipulators on the platform, that there were foreign actors interfering in the platform that ended when Elon took it over.
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Kate Clonik
Yeah, I want to kind of double down on that. Which is also kind of just an interesting point about that, which if you've been following this for a long time, if you just came in on the Twitter, on the Twitter transparency that you just mentioned about, oh my gosh, all of these, like all of these maga. And this has been something that's been an interesting, an interesting kind of as that kind of came out and we all of a sudden are seeing the location data where these users are regulated being transparent in X. There has been a lot of clamor of like, oh my God, all these MAGA influencers that are anti immigration, that are anti, like all of these types of things are, are going to be, are there. This is a MAGA problem and that's actually wrong. Like if you actually look at, you know, if you've been doing this for a while, right, like, you know that this is this like there is just as deep a fake profile presence on the left as there is on the right for money as there is for political gain influence as there is for. For kind of like media manipulation. Like there. This is a, this is a sophisticated, sophisticated ecosystem and it's not just MAGA that has the thing. And so like it's actually kind of ironic that the transparency here, had it been in place longer, had there been more of it would kind of a little bit or should have I think with good reporting let kind of kind of this story that got taken up of like kind of all of these, like that all of these fake profiles or MOGA fake profiles is like no, they're. There's just a lot of fake profiles. Like and this is a very big problem for like for everyone. And yeah, no one knows that kind of like more than you. I want to just really quickly pick up also about the TikTok decision and about.
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Renee DiResta
Yeah, let's talk about. There's been TikTok.
- [16:54]
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- [22:48]
Kate Clonik
Yes, the European Commission had this other decision that they, that they did today with the February 2024 investigation that they had started. And this is a great dichotomy because this is the difference between, in my opinion and I think you're hearing this from experts also in Europe, that this is the difference between what Europe wants to do and what they've been saying that they want to do. And it seems like they're actually doing it, which is basically like, these are not punitive necessarily. Like, in terms like these fines. If you engage with us and talk to us about your processes and we can come to some, like, agreements about what it is that we want for compliance under the dsa, we, you know, you're going to, so you're going, you're not. You won't face these fines. And in fact, TikTok also had major problems with their Ad Transparency Center. There was also an investigation into their Ad Transparency center. And also, like, they released today, had an, had a ruling on that today that had no fines. So TikTok did not have any fines around their Ad Transparency center, whereas X did. And one of the reasons that I am hearing about that is essentially that, like, this is a, this is about, about having a cohesive kind of governance structure that is responsive and trying to make sure that that is, that that is something that like, kind of we take into place the.
- [24:14]
The. I think that I wanted to quickly kind of also just pivot to like, what you, what you think about that. Do you think that there is like, there is much there to kind of the, the takeaway? Like, is it fair? Like, I guess kind of like, I certainly have a perspective from a legal perspective of like, whether or not it's fair that the Europe is being, is like kind of forcing tech to kind of come to the table with them and to come to the table with regulators through these fines. But like, I'm just kind of curious from a non legal perspective if that, how that kind of strikes you and how you think that plays into kind of a narrative.
- [24:54]
Renee DiResta
You know, I think there's been, I have always been more on the. Yeah, I kind of came from, I wrote a lot back in the day about coming from Wall street, right, where I was a trader. And so you would have these multi tiered systems of regulation. There would be the exchanges that had their rules, there was the associations that had their rules, there were the SEC rules. And so you would have this, this system where different rules would come into effect at different levels and different regulators could operate at different speeds. And so there was this mix of self regulation and then top level regulation, if you will. And I always appreciated self regulation and design as means of being nimble. Right ways to respond. And I get asked a lot in the context of my work, what regulations do you support? What regulations or policy remedies do you like, particularly in the United States? And I, you know, I kind of get frustrated sometimes, maybe sound a little bit salty when I say, like, well, the US Congress passes nothing right? In, in 10 years or so, maybe. I think I've been in this field for maybe 12 years now. But what we've gotten, like take it down, I think is maybe the only major thing that we've seen pass in the US and that's because there's such divergent perspectives. And so for a very long time.
- [26:08]
Again you've written about this.
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There was this period where I think in good faith, you had the transparency that was proactively happening. You had the ad libraries that came into being. You had the launch of the oversight board that sort of came to serve as this independent judiciary where I was actually writing public comment last night for an oversight board case. There were opportunities to write comment, to sort of sit in these rooms and have these debates. There was, there's back and forth. You know, we would write a lot publicly as independent researchers at the observatory, but we knew that they were reading our stuff also. And that all really disintegrated in part because of the malicious political reframing of, you know, cooperation as a cabal. And everything became censorship, right? Transparency is censorship. Labeling is censorship, fact checking is censorship. All these like became this mental stop word. But it shut down. It began to preclude anything voluntary. And so now it's weird to be in this place where I also don't like a lot of some of the stuff in the dsa probably for the same reasons you don't. Right. Where I do feel like it's, you know, it's weird to be in a position of, of saying like, well, I like these parts of it and these parts of it I do not. You know, but I mean at the same time, when all of the voluntary stuff rolls back, you see the, the hollowness of only having the voluntary right. And that is why when you look at Wall street regulation, the SEC is up there. And so I know it's probably a long winded answer, but you need both.
- [27:46]
Kate Clonik
I think, I think that that's, I think it's actually really well spelled out. I think that's great. I think it is great. I mean for me this is kind of like, like listen, this is actually just not that complicated. And the idea of framing this is you can't. You Europe can't regulate American companies just.
- [28:00]
Renee DiResta
Like absolute, like, oh, I mean it's.
- [28:02]
Kate Clonik
Just like, it's just like a non starter. People regulate any type of companies that exist within its borders.
- [28:07]
Renee DiResta
Right, exactly.
- [28:10]
Why not tech? I mean that's the part where I think it's because the framing of it as the public square, because there is this component of we are speaking, we are contributing, we are participating, that reframing, you know, and that has, that has come to kind of grate on me a little bit over the last two years. The idea of the public square. No, there's still, still it's privately owned. It is a privately owned company operating in a market and must adhere to the rules of the market. Nowhere did this become clearer, I think, than in the fight in Brazil where I think that that's where you really saw that sort of speech versus sovereignty framing come to a head with Brazil choosing to say to X our market, our rules. And that game of chicken that they played for what was that, a week to two weeks or so? Trying to remember, it was about two years ago ago now.
- [29:00]
But that I think was very interesting to see that, that recognition that these also aren't the only game in town anymore. That's the other thing that I think is a little bit different since you know, you wrote the new Governors and was it 2019, 2020 or so?
- [29:18]
Kate Clonik
20. 2018. Yeah, 2017.
- [29:19]
Renee DiResta
Yeah. So that was the, the other thing that's really shifted is that there are more speech platforms now. And that's where. Another thing that I talk about a lot in my work is appreciation for decentralization and for tech that makes it possible to have more entrance into the market right from the standpoint of alternative goods, alternative places. And another thing that I do think is interesting about where Europe is going is that interoperability that they're considering. You see them doing more in this interoperability rules because you should want to have more entrance into the market so that people can continue to express themselves.
- [29:53]
And there are other places for people to go. So again, it then reinforces that these are private companies operating in a market as opposed to the only place for people to go to express themselves totally.
- [30:04]
Kate Clonik
So like, we have to kind of keep this short, I guess, in theory, because we, we, we, you and I like helped create, helped make Substack live and define what Lawfare now is going to be. And I was like, it should be short. It should be 25 minutes. And we are definitely, we're at 25 minutes right now. And I feel like we're just getting started. But let's, let's go to 35 minutes because it's our rule. It's, this is our platform and our role.
- [30:27]
I do want to kind of give kind of readers, like, so what's next in terms of like, so what does this mean?
- [30:33]
Renee DiResta
What does that do with these fines now tell us.
- [30:35]
Kate Clonik
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the what next is that X has 90 working days basically to submit, like, which will take us into about.
- [30:44]
Renee DiResta
April.
- [30:46]
Kate Clonik
To submit to the commission.
- [30:50]
And.
- [30:52]
Around, not around the blue check marks, but around the add transparency in the researcher access. So 60 days for the blue check marks and kind of giving an explanation and how they're going to bring that into, into compliance with the DSA Article 25, then 90 working days. And so this puts us out in this thing. So the question is like, are, is X going to deign to play ball? Like, essentially are they going to kind of say, like, okay, sure, we'll finally do this type of thing. It's interesting because there it is. Not just. It does not. It's certainly not a capacity problem. X could do this. We just talked about how they have like essentially like released this public data about users and where users are logging in from. Like, that is actually like challenged their own verification system. Clearly they could engage in this. It seems to be like a pretty distinct power play of not wanting to kind of, to kind of not wanting to do that. So I made a bet last night with someone in Europe. I was like, I bet by like December, end of December, X has turned off the thing and they were like, no, like, I would like, I don't think that that will like that that will happen. And now I wish that I just made the bet for a little bit longer. So like I was like if I had done this into like. Yeah. So you know, there's always the chance that like it does not look like in at least I have to kind of do a more research. It does not look like Europe like they escalate fines if X fails to comply. So in 90 days they will start escalating fines if there has not been any movement towards compliance. There's an abuse. Right.
- [32:37]
Renee DiResta
They can, there's a court type entity, there's like a commission type entity, there's.
- [32:43]
Kate Clonik
An appeals process, but that will like kind of also be separate from and like they will first have to engage in that process before for kind of the compliance kind of. They also have to engage in the compliance process simultaneously.
- [32:57]
And that has timelines on it. So that's not like a, that's not like that the board itself is like going to have like they have one month to write an opinion about whether or not they accept X's. Like, you know, and it's not clear if they haven't engaged in this process very much in general or at all in general. Like why would they also engage in and appeals process versus just continue to ignore this. So like that being said, the, the there is basically the main thing is like well, will Europe turn off X because of non compliance? And it does not look right now like that is something they're threatening to do. They are just threatening to like because.
- [33:37]
Renee DiResta
Europe, you know, like would the member countries do it? What would that actually look like? Explain that to us.
- [33:42]
Kate Clonik
Great question. It would have to do. I mean, but the DSA is a regulation and kind of. And so there is like kind of a different kind of regime about how this works versus like member states. But it would have to involve the ISPs. It would be a bunch of different, kind of like a bunch of different questions. And so I think that that the difficulty of doing that, if they did that at all is like it's not super feasible for Europe as like an, as an idea specifically for the reason that you discussed in like national sovereignty of like the member states. But, but that instead this ratcheting up of fines and this continuing ratcheting up of fines at which point like this is just boring kind of enforcement legal stuff. Like if you don't pay fines then they start seizing your assets. But again this gets into like how many assets? Like as one of our friends.
- [34:30]
Renee DiResta
Joe, what else does it.
- [34:31]
Kate Clonik
Yeah, like I mean, yeah, somebody was like, yeah, the we work office of X and like we're going to seize, we're going to seize the rented office space that you like, you know.
- [34:43]
Renee DiResta
You.
- [34:44]
Kate Clonik
Know, these are good questions, but not a ton, who knows, like, there's always something, there's servers, there's other types of things. But like that's, I think that that would be better served as like we even get close to kind of understanding that. What I also think is interesting, and I'm interested in hearing your take is that yesterday kind of the fact that these two decisions were coming out came, started kind of getting leaked around the end of the day yesterday and JD Vance immediately kind of pitched in on X saying like, here comes like, here comes the ds like you know, Europe with its censorship regime kind of doing his like, as we kind of foregrounded his, like, his kind of, his spiel of kind of defending American tech companies against this, against this Europe or specifically in this case, I shouldn't even cast the net so broadly say American tech companies. I don't want to defame anyone. But specifically X, against kind of this, this type of about. Against this type of action. And first of all, it hasn't been met by the facts of what the actual thing is saying. But then secondly, like, I'm just kind of curious what you think is next. I mean, do you think that like, I don't know. I'm sure Jim Jordan will have things to say about this. I am, I am sure that like, maybe car and, and J.D. vance will have things to say about this. Maybe they won't. Do you think that the TikTok decision next to the X decision takes the censorship like claims off the table a little bit? Or do you just think that this is like facts just don't matter.
- [36:21]
Renee DiResta
I really think facts just don't matter at this point. Maybe that sounds awful, but I've become that cynical. No, in all seriousness.
- [36:33]
Because it's an attention game and a framing game, right? And so they can simply just not talk about TikTok. They can just simply continue to beat the drum. And so a lot of people are not going to go read the article that frames the TikTok decision. The news coverage that talks about what happened with X is just not going to talk about what happened with TikTok. It's not going to be a full and complete story. It's going to be an article that's going to say, you know, censorious Europeans, you know, try to kill X's, you know, kill, kill X. Right. Or it's going to be like they hate you is going to be the framing. They hate American speech, they hate free speech. And that's, it's going to be very simple frame and it's going to be put out by influencers on X. And so if you follow those influencers, if you're in that media ecosystem, that is the story that you're going to see by just not talking about TikTok, you can largely prevent that counterpoint from even being seen. It's just not that hard to frame a story these days. And so in, you know, more reputable, neutral journalistic media, you'll see these two things juxtaposed against each other. You'll see why those fines were levied. You'll see it in the context of the three things that we discussed up at the start. You know, this is related to the blue check dark pattern. It's related to the ad library, it's related to the, you know, the things that are, that it's actually about. But when you have people who have been beating the drum saying digital Censorship act for the last three years and that is the frame that they have set this law in already, it is just not that hard for them to say, here are the fines under the Digital Censorship Act. And only one side has chosen to fight the propaganda war. And so the, you know, that is the, the frame in which the audience is going to receive the story. So it's unfortunate, but that's where, that's what happens when you live in a fragmented media reality like we do at this point. So, yeah, I'm sure that Jim Jordan can hold another hearing. Right? You know, you can send.
- [38:39]
Kate Clonik
I'm sure there'll be another hearing. Yeah, totally. I mean, and I, and I do wonder like, I mean, what's really interesting to me too and just to kind of like. And we should kind of like wrap this. And I think that, that like your kind of last point is like the perfect point but like just to kind of like, you know, say one last thing. It's kind of like. And how is this going to play domestically and how is this factoring into the idea that like this administration is kind of talking out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to tech regulation. There is kind of, they, you know, there's simultaneously a desire to kind of like to pass these new age verification laws for kids. This simultaneous kind of going after the tech companies for kind of the, like there were a number of very angry, like the administration was very angry about how like the Charlie Kirk shooting got handled and various parts of like glorification of his death and that the tech company didn't do enough to take that down while simultaneously claiming that they care about free speech online. And so there is, you know, this is part of a, this is part of a like an acknowledged like ecosystem of stuff that it'll get play into dramatically. But like, I'm just kind of, I don't actually know. Like it doesn't. And maybe your answer again is like, facts just don't matter. They can do both of these things and that people, people are not putting together that they are fighting the fight for, for certain tech companies abroad while, while kind of like condemning certain tech companies where it's maybe best for their constituency in the domestically.
- [40:14]
Renee DiResta
Well, it's, it's politics and power. Right? That's what we're seeing here. And the dynamic has been, you know, Jim Jordan launched investigations into me and other American researchers for two years alleging that we were secretly communicating with tech platforms about election speech. And then you see Pam Bondi say, yep, we were talking to them about dhs, we wanted ICE videos taken down. Right. I mean, and it's just. But hypocrisy requires you to have like shame and values. And that's not where we are.
- [40:45]
Kate Clonik
Well, so hypocrisy to be an effective method you have of like in for. Of norm enforcement, you have to have shame. So that is like. Yes, that is like. Yes, exactly.
- [40:55]
Renee DiResta
So I mean, we all know what's happening here. That's why I feel like just saying it. Right. For me anyway. I feel like it's very cathartic to say it, but it is just that, that dynamic of why the thing is. And I'll just maybe end on this point for me when I write about what the DSA is or why it's not the Digital Censorship act or whatever. It takes me 2000 words to lay out all of the different points in this behemoth of a law and then to throat clear with a paragraph about how I don't like all of it and that's what it takes to get the nuance out there. And all they have to say is 3 Digital Censorship Act. And I'm like, no, no, no, but let me tell you, let me lay out for you all of what it actually is. But then also I don't like all of it. And that's what you're up against. And that's. When I say propaganda, I use that word very deliberately. I don't, I don't even mean it as a pejorative. It's just what it is. And I think that we need to get comfortable with understanding that that is the fight that we're actually in right now.
- [41:51]
Kate Clonik
Yeah. Thank you so much, Renee. I think that is like an excellent kind of analysis and it's fun to. It's fun. It's, it's super interesting having spent like, you know, 18 months in Europe watching the DSA go into implementation against the very large online platforms and the very large online search engines and kind of being in that ecosystem of kind of what, how Europe sees itself vis a vis Silicon Valley, vis a vis the US Vis a vis these tech companies. And now kind of watching all of this, I mean, like a number of these investigations dropped while I was in Europe, but they've taken a year and a half to.
- [42:29]
Kind of come to fruition. I just think that this is, it has just been a fascinating, it's just been a fascinating kind of and I think unexpected turn how the administration has responded to this. And I wouldn't have predicted it. I left in like in Europe in December of 2024. So like, I just like, you know, I had not, it had not occurred to me that this would like, it was like some distant possibility that like, this would be a tactic that like, was kind of deployed about like, you know, of the US being leveraged against Europe. But, but it certainly has just been an interesting, really like, different way to kind of, and as you said, like, it just kind of changes a lot of how you engage with this, this, the laws that are passed and how you like kind of the, the levels of normative judgment that you have. Like, okay, I disagree with the substance of this law, but I agree with the right for them to have it. Like, do you know what I mean? And it's very, and so there's, you know, this is, and none of that is very easily conveyed in, in like in a five second tweet or in a, in a snappy phrase, you know, type of thing. But with that said, I'm going to say that to wrap and do our outro. This podcast is part of the Law Fairs Live Stream series, Lawfare Live. The now subscribe to Lawfare's YouTube or Substack to receive an alert the next time we go live. And our audio and engineer for this episode was the great Anna Hickey of Lawfare, who we love dearly and as always, thank you for listening. Renee, thanks for being up early, California time to do this with me and as always for excellent thoughts and analysis.
- [44:08]
Podcast Host
Likewise.
- [44:13]
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