It’s not every day that a collection of retired European grandees emerges from Brussels’ revolving doors to tell everyone how misunderstood the European Union is.
Yet here we are, with Bertrand Badré, Margrethe Vestager, Mariya Gabriel, Nicolas Schmit, and Guillaume Klossa linking arms to pen a sentimental defense of the bloc’s new digital commandments.
Their essay, “The Truth About Europe’s Regulation of Digital Platforms,” aims to assure us that Europe’s online rulebook, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA), does not constitute censorship. It is “accountability,” they say.
In their telling, the DSA is less a blunt legal instrument than a moral document, a kind of digital Magna Carta designed to civilize Silicon Valley’s chaotic playground.
“There is no content regulation at the EU level,” they wrote, invoking the phrase like a magic spell meant to ward off skeptics.
The laws, they explained, simply make big tech companies “evaluate and mitigate systemic risks” and “act against illegal content.” Nothing to see here, just a little transparency, a dash of democracy protection, and the occasional removal of whatever a member state happens to call “illegal.”
It is the sort of language that can only come from officials who have spent decades describing regulation as liberation.
The letter was a response to a growing chorus of critics, including former US officials, who say Europe’s digital regime gives bureaucrats indirect control over what billions of people can see or say online.
Under the DSA, platforms must scan for “harmful or misleading” content, report their mitigation efforts, and warn users when something gets zapped.
Free speech groups have pointed out that when the law tells companies to “evaluate risks to democracy,” those companies tend to err on the side of deleting anything remotely controversial.
To them, “mitigation” often means mass deletion.
Badré and company brushed this off. “When we require platforms to be transparent about their algorithms, to assess risks to democracy and mental health, to remove clearly illegal content while notifying those affected, we are not censoring,” they wrote.
“We are insisting that companies with unprecedented power over public discourse operate with some measure of public accountability.”
When Europe does it, it is not censorship, it is civic hygiene.
Hellbound and Down 
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