Meta and X are going rogue. Here is what Europe should do now.

Corporate social media goes down the drain

In the past months, it sometimes seemed like the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s main online platform law, did not have much effect on large social media platforms. Large commercial social media like X, Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok produced one scandal after the other, angering users, experts and politicians alike.

X (formerly known as Twitter) will soon effectively be a part of the US government. In fact, it is already used by its owner Elon Musk and his political allies as a tool for far-right extremist propaganda. The European Commission said that they are investigating whether the platform secretly tweaks its algorithms to privilege Musk’s own posts and political content he agrees with—at the expense of other political views. Anyone who has used X in the past year will probably have seen some evidence of that.

While the DSA does not—and should not—prohibit any specific types of political propaganda it does impose transparency, due diligence, objectivity and proportionality requirements on online platforms when it comes to how they apply their terms of service and algorithmically moderate user content. So chances are that X is already on a hard collision course with its legal obligations in the EU. The EU Commission has already found preliminary evidence suggesting that the company could be in breach of the DSA for a number of related issues.

Content moderation falls victim to far-right culture war

Meta meanwhile announced a major deterioration of their content moderation approach on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. This change abolishes some of the most basic human rights protections in the US with the aim to target marginalised communities and embolden right-wing extremists. It is the same communities that will also be most affected by Meta’s decision to eliminate its diversity, equity and inclusion programmes.

In a downgrade of its “hateful conduct policy”, Meta now explicitly allows hate speech against selected groups, in particular on migration, gender identity and sexual orientation. This makes marginalised and minoritised communities open targets for hate and vitriol. It also “creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion, and in some cases may promote offline violence,” according to Meta’s previous policy rationale for banning hateful conduct, which has now been deleted.

For example, Meta now allows its users to refer to “women as household objects or property” or “transgender or non-binary people as ‘it’.” It now allows users to verbally attack LGBTQ+ people by stigmatising them as “abnormal” or “mentally ill,” and said that it would generally limit moderation. As targeting people based on their appearance, race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, gender identity or sexual orientation, among others, are no longer prohibited, Meta’s new policy systematically legitimises and normalises the dehumanisation of people in the guise of ‘free speech’.

Meta’s policy degradation is only made worse by the apparent rhetorical alignment of its CEO Mark Zuckerberg with Trump’s and Musk’s nonsense talking points about alleged “institutionalised censorship” in Europe and his declared readiness to “work with Trump” to oppose it.

The DSA is good, but it alone won’t save us

To be clear, as critical as EDRi and its members have been towards some of the provisions in the DSA, Europe’s online platform regulation is not a “censorship tool”. It is relatively well designed to create accountability for online platforms—in particular the very large ones—while not making them automatically responsible for every single piece of content one of their users might publish.

The DSA has reasonable systems in place to protect free expression while also, at least theoretically, enabling enforcement authorities like the EU Commission and national Digital Services Coordinators (DSCs) to ensure that X, Facebook, Tiktok and so on aren’t a threat to people and democracy.

So far, both the EU Commission and DSCs have launched an impressive number of investigations against virtually every single very large online platforms out there (we’ve made a list!). These investigations cover things like risks to mental and physical health, a lack in content moderation resources, the illegal use of deceptive interface design, missing advertising transparency and interference with the right to data access for researchers.

With the unholy alliance forming between Big Tech executives and the incoming Trump administration, it is instrumental that the EU does not yield in its efforts of holding tech corporations to account. There are reports (that the Commission somewhat denied were true) that EU leaders are caving into pressure from the US. This risk is real. Slowing down, reducing, or pausing any of the investigations into Big Tech under the DSA or the DMA would be a grave mistake.

The DMA is meant to reign in the immense power that Big Tech has. That power is now being wielded against us to disrupt and sabotage the very foundations of our societies: democracy and human rights. If the Commission allows itself to be bullied into reassessing its investigations into Big Tech due to fear of political backlash from the US, this bullying—from both the tech corporations and Trump—won’t end.

We need a new kind of digital public infrastructure

Yet, even if the EU Commission holds the line, and laws like the DSA, DMA and GDPR start to push large online platforms into introducing tangible improvements, the core of the problem is hardly solved: Corporations like Meta, X and Tiktok have too much power. This power puts our entire public debate and even electoral campaigns at risk, as they depend on the goodwill of a small handful of Silicon Valley billionaires. This power also extends to our public infrastructure, access to essential services, and core functions of our States in ways that may soon become irreversible.

That’s why there has never been a more fitting moment for the EU and its member states to start seriously addressing our dependency on Big Tech and invest in real alternative models and services, including investing in Europe’s sovereign digital commons. The EU and member states should build up independent public funding mechanisms, like the EU’s Next Generation Internet programme but bigger, to support the development of sovereign free1 and open source software that can contribute to the resilience of our public digital infrastructure.

These public funds should be subject to conditionality, and not be spent on “AI hyperscalers” or “lighting-fast growing unicorns” that eventually reproduce exploitative business models and further consolidate the economic and political power of large tech corporations. Instead, they must be reserved for open digital infrastructure, software, hardware and standards, similar to what the NLnet Foundation and the Sovereign Tech Agency are already doing on a smaller scale.

This includes the core internet infrastructure that is mostly invisible to users, but could also be extended to projects like an open search index that can be used by innovative, more ethical search engines without having to rely on Google’s or Bing’s indexes, or an open browser engine that can be used by browser makers without being dependent on Google’s Blink engine. In order to address the threats outlined in this article, we also need substantial investment into non-commercial, decentralised public interest social media software like Mastodon, Peertube and other key pieces of the Fediverse.

With the US moving further away from its democratic path, Europe must show leadership to build a better digital future for people, democracy and the planet now.

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1 We refer in this article to “free” as in freedom. See the four software freedoms for more information.