Who in the EU can decide what can or cannot be said online?

A specter haunts Europe: not that of communism, but that of state censorship. In the name of fighting disinformation, the European Commission, through its Digital Services Act (DSA), is about to radically alter what can be said or shared on the Internet, the public square of the 21st century.

The DSA, passed last year and whose main provisions take effect next month, is a law ostensibly aimed at regulating Big Tech’s control of online content.

Many people embraced it. Investigative journalist Julia Angwin put it well in a New York Times op-ed in which she welcomed this “bold experiment” as “the broadest effort yet to check the power of Big Tech.”

“For the first time, technology platforms will have to respond to the public in myriad ways,” he said.

However, DSA has little to do with public responsiveness or accountability. No European citizen voted for it, nor had the opportunity to discuss it. The DSAs were designed to serve exclusively the needs of the unelected European Commission.

Big tech vs big public

The DSA’s supposed goal of curbing Big Tech’s controlling power in the public square is a false farce. The attack on disinformation is just a code word for the real fear and contempt of Europe’s political elite towards the public, who they see as stupid enough to be fooled by social media messages telling them who to vote for and who to hate .

Big Tech may be the obstacle, but holding back the Big Public is the DSA’s real goal.

Of course, the European Commission cannot directly insult European citizens. But they can do it through an attack on Big Tech. Flaying Big Tech for publishing misinformation is one way of flaying the “social” in social media.

Juncker warned of the threat of “runaway populism” across the continent, which sounds scary indeed, except when you realize that the danger was that millions of Europeans would start voting for parties and policies not approved by the Brussels elite .

From the moment Brexit happened, the EU spread the idea that lies, not truth, had won. The underlying message from Jean-Claude Juncker, then president of the European Commission, was that the public in the UK must have been stupid enough to believe whatever lies the politicians fed them.

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Juncker warned of the threat of “runaway populism” across the continent, which sounds scary indeed, except when you realize that the danger was that millions of Europeans would start voting for parties and policies not approved by the Brussels elite .

Do Eurocrats know their electorate?

Brexit and then the election of Donald Trump represented a cultural revolt that shook Brussels to its foundations. The almost total rejection of the values of the ruling elites by a considerable part of the electorate is the genesis of the DSA.

Instead of questioning top-down values and technocratic managerialism, the EU elite focused on the wisdom of allowing the rioting masses to judge them from below.

DSA institutionalizes the narrative that social media is responsible for the rise of populism in Europe.

The lesson learned was that they needed to control what Europeans could read, see, or hear if they wanted to avoid similar “mistakes” in the future. Hence the DSA.

DSA institutionalizes the narrative that social media is responsible for the rise of populism in Europe. Eurocrats sincerely believe that the European electorate is a naive and apathetic pawn, at the mercy of Internet trolls and bots, and that, therefore, it must be protected for its own good.

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It betrays an underlying defensive attitude of the Brussels machine and its fragile authority among the European electorate.

Their poorly disguised contempt for the masses is expressed in their desire to regulate the thoughts and actions of the electorate by controlling social media content. EU leaders, as puppet masters, clearly summarize their contempt for the European electorate.

Who is watching the observers?

Brussels’ defensive attitude also fuels a powerful authoritarian dynamic. The DSA is like the English Crown’s licensing system of the 16th and 17th centuries, where nothing could be legally printed without the approval of the Star Chamber, a secret court of advisors and judges to the king and the official Stationer’s Company.

Today’s Star Chamber of the European Commission and its irresponsible and unelected disinformation whistleblowers will act as judge, jury and executioners in the control of social media.

We are in Ancient Rome when the poet Juvenal asked himself in his Satires: ‘Quis custodiat ipsos custodias?’: who will watch the observers?

We are in Ancient Rome when the poet Juvenal asked himself in his Satires: “Quis custodiat ipsos custodians?”: who will watch the observers?

If anyone doubts the authoritarian and censorious dynamics of the DSA, the recent behavior of the European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Bretton should make them think.

On a recent visit to Silicon Valley, this is the Commissioner who declared, in the manner of King Louis XIV: “I am the executor. I represent the law, which is the will of the State and the people.”

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In the wake of the riots that hit France earlier this month, the EU’s technocratic Sun King went on French television to declare that starting August 25, social networks will be forced to immediately delete what is identified as ” hateful content” or “[content] which calls for revolt”, under penalty of immediate expulsion from France if they do not comply.

There was surprisingly little comment on a Brussels commissioner, not a French-elected politician, behaving like the leader of North Korea, threatening to end any public debate on deeply troubling developments in the country simply by curbing the possibility of freedom of speech in France.

We should be able to say whatever we want online

The EU always claims to support European values. The DSA supports the European Commission’s divine right to regulate what can and cannot be said online.

But Europe needs to return to the values of Baruch Spinoza, the great Dutchman of the Enlightenment, who laid the moral and intellectual foundations for modern ideas of freedom.

Spinoza’s pioneering epitaph of free speech, “in a free State, every man may think what he will and say what he thinks” – which presupposes that we all have the capacity to judge what is true or false – is what Europe must embrace.

Let the court of public opinion decide what is truth, information or disinformation, not Big Tech nor the irresponsible European Commission. This is why we need more freedom of speech, more freedom, certainly not DSA censors.

Dr Norman Lewis is a Visiting Research Fellow at MCC Brussels – Mathias Corvinus Collegium and former director at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

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