How Unelected EU Officials Built a Transnational Speech Police

On December 5, 2025, the European Commission imposed a €120 million fine on X, formerly Twitter—its first enforcement action under the Digital Services Act (DSA). The stated violations had nothing to do with incitement, fraud, or child exploitation. The Commission objected to the design of X’s blue checkmark, the layout of its advertising repository, and […]

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On December 5, 2025, the European Commission imposed a €120 million fine on X, formerly Twitter—its first enforcement action under the Digital Services Act (DSA). The stated violations had nothing to do with incitement, fraud, or child exploitation. The Commission objected to the design of X’s blue checkmark, the layout of its advertising repository, and its data-sharing arrangements with academic researchers (read the Commission’s decision here). In the bureaucratic vocabulary of Brussels, these constituted breaches of “transparency obligations.” In plainer language, the world’s most powerful unelected regulatory body had just demonstrated that it could extract nine-figure penalties from an American company for interface design choices that no European citizen was ever asked to vote on.

The fine, for all its size, was a warning shot. The DSA authorizes penalties of up to 6% of a company’s global annual turnover—a figure that, for the largest American platforms, runs into tens of billions of dollars. Ten of the nineteen platforms Brussels has designated as “Very Large Online Platforms” subject to the law’s most invasive requirements are American companies, including Amazon, Meta’s family of apps, Google, and Wikipedia. The architecture is unmistakable: a European regulatory apparatus with global jurisdiction over American-built infrastructure, enforced by officials whom no European voter directly elects, and backed by financial penalties severe enough to function as existential threats. The Commission insists the DSA is a “transparency” law. The machinery it has assembled tells a different story.

The Digital Services Act, which became fully applicable in February 2024, operates through a structure of cascading obligations that grow more coercive at each level. At its foundation lies a definition of “illegal content” so expansive that it functions as an invitation to suppress speech at will. Article 3(h) defines illegal content as anything that is “not in compliance with Union law or the law of any member state”—a formulation that means the most restrictive speech law in any of the European Union’s twenty-seven member states can become the effective continent-wide standard. Germany’s NetzDG hate speech provisions, France’s memory laws criminalizing certain historical interpretations, Poland’s blasphemy statutes—any of these can furnish grounds for content removal across the entire bloc.

Above this baseline, the DSA erects an apparatus of “trusted flaggers”—government-approved entities, including NGOs and law enforcement agencies such as Europol, deputized to flag content for priority removal by platforms. Their notifications must be processed “without undue delay.” The platforms must then report to EU regulators what action they took in response. The incentive structure is not subtle: process the flags quickly and remove the content, or face questions from Brussels about why you failed to act.

For the largest platforms, the obligations escalate further. Articles 34 and 35 impose a duty to “assess and mitigate systemic risks,” a category that includes threats to “civic discourse,” “electoral processes,” and “public security.” The language is so broad that virtually any political speech disfavored by the Commission could qualify as a systemic risk requiring mitigation. The Center for Strategic and International Studies—hardly an institution of the populist fringe—has acknowledged that the DSA’s architecture creates structural incentives for platforms to remove more speech than the law technically requires, simply to reduce regulatory exposure. The Chicago Journal of International Law has warned that these incentives will fall heaviest on “political speech, criticism of political figures, parody, and pro-LGBTQ+ speech.”

There is no meaningful check on this power. Appeals from Commission enforcement decisions must travel through the Court of Justice of the European Union, a process that takes one to two years and costs sums that only the largest corporations can afford. National courts cannot overrule the Commission’s interpretations. The entire edifice—the definitions, the trusted flaggers, the systemic risk obligations, the enforcement mechanism—was enacted by the European Parliament and Council, then placed in the hands of a Commission whose president is proposed by the European Council and confirmed by Parliament. No citizen of any EU member state cast a direct ballot for Ursula von der Leyen or any of the officials who now wield this apparatus.

If the Digital Services Act’s architecture were merely theoretical, its critics could be accused of speculation. Subpoenaed documents obtained by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee have now closed that gap between design and deployment.

In July 2025, the Committee’s Republican majority published an interim staff report titled “The Foreign Censorship Threat,” based on nonpublic documents obtained under subpoena from major American technology companies. The documents include email communications between Commission staff and platform executives, and internal materials from a closed-door “DSA Workshop” the Commission hosted with platforms in May 2025. At that workshop, Commission regulators presented a hypothetical social media post—”we need to take back our country,” a phrase so common in democratic politics that it could have appeared in any campaign in any Western nation—and labeled it “illegal hate speech” that platforms are obligated to censor under the DSA.

The Committee’s findings go further. Commission regulators explicitly told platforms at the workshop that “continuous review of global community guidelines” was a best practice for DSA compliance—a directive that, because major platforms generally maintain a single set of content moderation policies worldwide, means that speech restrictions demanded by Brussels are imposed on users in the United States, Brazil, Japan, and everywhere else. The Committee concluded that the Commission’s censorship efforts have been overwhelmingly one-sided, targeting political conservatives—a characterization the Committee offered as a documented finding, supported by the subpoenaed materials.

The Commission’s reach extended deep into the electoral politics of its own member states. Internal TikTok documents submitted to the Committee revealed that the Commission pressured platforms to increase content takedowns ahead of elections in Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, Moldova, Romania, and Ireland, as well as the 2024 European Parliament elections. TikTok’s own staff expressed concern in internal communications about what they called the Commission’s “very informal approach” to Romanian election authorities, and warned about “unjustified removal of legal content (such as political speech).”

Former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton established the tone before the DSA’s enforcement apparatus was even fully operational. In 2023, he publicly declared, “I am the enforcer,” and threatened to ban platforms from operating in the European Union entirely if they failed to remove content he deemed illegal. Breton’s letter to Elon Musk in August 2024, warning that “spillovers” of American speech into the EU during a U.S. presidential campaign could trigger “interim measures” against X, was regarded as so nakedly political that it contributed to his departure from the Commission under pressure from von der Leyen herself. The episode revealed not a system of neutral regulation but a political apparatus in which individual commissioners claimed personal authority to determine the boundaries of permissible speech across an entire continent.

The most dramatic deployment of this apparatus came in Romania, where the interaction between the DSA, intelligence claims, and judicial intervention produced what may be the first annulment of a democratic election in EU history carried out under the banner of “platform regulation.”

The sequence is worth reconstructing precisely. On November 24, 2024, Călin Georgescu—an independent populist candidate running on a nationalist, anti-establishment platform—won the first round of Romania’s presidential election with 23% of the vote, having polled in single digits weeks earlier. The result stunned Romania’s dominant political parties and alarmed Brussels. On December 4, outgoing President Klaus Iohannis declas