In February, Vice President J.D. Vance surprised many at the Munich Security Conference by raising concerns about the erosion of democratic values among our allies. He explicitly stated, “In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.” This caused no small amount of consternation on both sides of the Atlantic, but it clearly needed to be said. Even as American voters decisively returned free speech advocates to the Presidency, Senate and House of Representatives — the European Parliament passed and the EU has expeditiously implemented troubling censorship laws such as the Digital Services Act (DSA).

The DSA has been billed by its authors as a badly needed legal tool that will finally make it possible to render order out of the chaos that allegedly characterizes the digital sphere. Inevitably, like many censorship projects launched in the U.S. by the Obama and Biden administrations, the DSA’s ostensible purpose is to “protect our democracy” from the omnipresent menace of disinformation, misinformation, malinformation and of course hate speech. Moreover, it can and does indirectly contrive to coerce its draconian censorship regimen on the U.S. by demanding that large American-owned corporations such as Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and X — abide by its absurdly nebulous terms.

How is that possible? According the European Commission’s website, “If the Commission definitely establishes a breach of the DSA, it may adopt a decision imposing fines up to 6 percent of the global turnover of the VLOP [Very Large Online Platform] or VLOSE [Very Large Online Search Engine] concerned, and order that provider to take measures to address the breach by the deadline set by the Commission.” For the large platforms noted above, this would mean billions of euros. Not even they are large enough to ignore such exorbitant fines. And you will no doubt be deeply shocked to discover that the very first formal DSA investigation targeted X.