The European Union is using legal tools to pressure social media platforms and steer public debate on politically sensitive topics, Portugal-based international law expert Alexandre Guerreiro has told RT.

His comments came after the EU fined platform X €120 million ($163 million) last week for allegedly failing to comply with transparency requirements under the bloc’s 2022 Digital Services Act. The platform’s US-based owner, Elon Musk, responded by denouncing the EU, likening it to “the Fourth Reich.”

Guerreiro argued that the DSA is only one element of a broader regulatory framework that gives Brussels significant leverage over online communication.

“We have a lot of bureaucrats trying to impose and limit, to put conditions on creativity and free speech,”he said.

According to the scholar, the EU’s approach amounts to an attempt “to have full monopoly and full control” not only over major online platforms, but over “basically the messages and the speech” circulating on them.

Watch the full interview.

https://www.rt.com/news/629159-x-fine-speech-control/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Elon Musk and the EU jokers deserve each other

X has become a for-profit digital insane asylum and there’s no need to waste European taxpayers’ cash regulating it

BY Rachel Marsden

The American tech broligarchy is fighting with Brussels Euligarchs again. When can they all just blast off to Mars already?

Brussels fined multi-billionaire tech titan Elon Musk’s social media platform X €120 million for failing to comply with its Digital Services Act. Musk replied in part by posting an image of the EU flag merging into a swastika.

Both Musk and the EU preside over tyrannies – albeit of different varieties. This makes it difficult to pick a side.

It pains me to say it, but X has become a tyranny of idiocy.

Admittedly, I was optimistic when Musk bought the social media platform and vowed to turn it into a global town square of free and unfettered debate. Instead, it’s turned into a dumpster fire.

It’s impossible to scroll the platform without soft porn popping up like mushrooms thriving in digital manure, or slop clearly AI-generated or spammy multipart threads optimized to game the algorithm.

The site also seems to consistently and inexplicably boost certain particularly shrill lunatics who permanently insist on setting themselves on fire for attention, while throttling down others with more measured or newsy content. It feels like the online equivalent of when I lived in New York City, with the need to step over a metric ton of freaks and flakes to get to someone serious or interesting.

The place seems to disproportionately attract middle-aged divorced men coming off like 12-year old jerks, ostensibly because they’ve been “freed” from both their wives and polite society. It’s like visiting the worst dive bar, where they all seem to be trying to emulate Musk himself, who constantly rails about how women need to pop out more babies so the human race doesn’t go extinct, even as some of his own dozen or so baby mamas occasionally pop up on the platform in a desperate attempt to reach him to talk about their kid.

Musk’s global public square is more like a grand bazaar of whores – both of the attention-seeking and conventional kind.

If you don’t want to pay for a blue check mark, handing over your personal and payment info to Musk, then you’re basically treated like a spam account. So much for privacy.

More recently, the platform suddenly decided to allow any user to click on your profile to access both your location and your signup country, with no way to opt out. Some argue that this helps to weed out foreign propaganda accounts. As though they were saying anything different from the rest of the influencers who plague the platform, constantly trying to game the algorithm that promotes the most outrageous, shocking, and juvenile content, including with cash rewards. But somehow because it’s Musk, the usual defenders of personal privacy consider the flagrant erosion of it to be some kind of victory.

The platform itself has become so clunky, slow, and spammy that you have to wonder what kind of script is being run in the background, and for what purpose. Sorry if I don’t trust the American tech bros as far as I can throw them. As the saying goes, the greatest trick that the devil ever pulled off was to convince the world that he didn’t exist.

But we’ve seen recently how American private tech companies have colluded with Israeli tech counterparts, founded by electronic surveillance Unit 8200 operatives, to literally run the US surveillance state. Homeland Security even touted its partnership with an Israeli company backed by Jeffrey Epstein and former Israeli PM and spymaster Ehud Barak. Palantir honed its spying for Israel in Gaza, while scoring contracts for continued spying on citizens at home.

Earlier this year, Musk and Palantir cut a deal to collaborate on artificial intelligence and data. Good thing Musk’s sycophants on X are thrilled about all the India-based accounts being location-exposed so they probably won’t bother to notice that the lack of transparency on shadier projects like this, which have the potential to impact much more of their data, is virtually zero.

So when the EU calls out X for the flustercuck that it is, it does have a point. Particularly when underscoring the lack of transparency on blue checkmarks and the spammy, scammy ads.

Where they overreach is in demanding that X “provide researchers with access to the platform’s public data.” Look, who cares – go wade into the swamp and get it yourself. Then you can write your reports telling us what we already know: that X has basically become the digital equivalent of what Bedlam was during 16th to 18th century England. We don’t need to waste taxpayer cash on that. Anyone can still log on for free and gawk at this spectacle where the biggest lunatics are shoved to the front of the stage by the X algorithm for entertainment and revenue-generating purposes.

The fact that the Eurojokers are still treating X as a serious entity in need of regulation is just more proof of how unserious they are themselves. Can’t they just ignore it like the rest of us do? Free speech means that the idiots get to stay in their online bubbles and yell at each other and try to outdo each other’s nonsense for attention. Let them. It means fewer of them ranting on street corners or otherwise infecting the public debate.

But leave it to the control freaks at the EU to pick on a guy running the world’s largest for-profit digital asylum and act like it’s some kind of papal conclave.

https://www.rt.com/news/629183-elon-musk-eu-x/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

¿A dónde va Europa?

ÁLVARO GARCÍA LINERA

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Las élites demandan libre mercado y ejecutan el proteccionismo. Reclaman un Consejo Europeo con más poderes, pero les aterra someterlo a la elección popular que legitime esa autoridad...

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The elites demand a free market while simultaneously implementing protectionism. They call for a European Council with greater powers, but they are terrified of subjecting it to a popular election that would legitimize this authority.

A general sense of unease and despondency is gripping Europe. Social democracy and the cosmopolitan right, which routinely took turns in power for 40 years, have for years been ousted by authoritarian, anti-immigration, nationalist, and anti-egalitarian right-wing parties. This is not a mistake of "political cordon sanitaire" policies. It is a symptom of the state of society, or at least a segment of it.
If we look at the overall trend in per capita income in the European Union over the past 20 years, we see no sharp declines. On the contrary, it shows a stable and sustained growth trajectory (World Bank, Statistics 2025). Similarly, public spending has remained between 45 and 55% of GDP throughout the last 25 years (OurWorldinData); this explains why, while neoliberalism has dismantled certain components of the welfare state, the core of the social protection system has remained intact. In general, European societies have crossed a threshold that guarantees that their entire population has its basic and essential material living conditions met. And yet, the collective feeling of dissatisfaction and anger has grown in recent years. Several indicators help to understand this distrust. The first is the decline in EU economic growth. World Bank data shows a continent that has been in a period of “prolonged stagnation” for more than a decade. While around the year 2000 continental wealth increased by 2 to 3% per year, from 2010 to the present, it has fluctuated between 1 and 1.8% growth. And in the case of Germany, by far the continent's largest economy, it has now experienced two consecutive years of recession.

Sluggish growth in European GDP over so many years hasn't pushed its population to the brink of poverty, but it has hampered upward social mobility, already slowed by increasing inequality across the continent. In 1980, the richest 10% held 29% of total national income; by 2024, they will hold 37% (Wid.World, 2025).

Furthermore, Europe as a whole is seeing a decline in the overall status of its population in the global income hierarchy. As B. Milanovic (Jacobin, 2025) demonstrates, the rapid rise of Asian economies, particularly China, is creating an Eastern entrepreneurial and middle class that is challenging, and in some cases dislodging, Europeans—including their working and middle classes—from the global pedestal they have occupied for 200 years. This is why it is not surprising that many people experience a sense of loss and regression.
While Europeans do not engage in compulsive consumption as a mechanism of social cohesion, unlike North Americans, over the past 20 years the upward trajectory of access to new material factors of stability and social recognition for the European middle and working classes has flattened, particularly with regard to healthcare, transportation, housing, and savings.

All this data and these collective anxieties are symptoms of a continental development model that, according to the President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, is “gradually disappearing.” Of course, European growth and stability rested on four pillars: abundant and cheap gas; the free movement of goods and capital guaranteeing export surpluses and the efficient outsourcing of European businesses; the European banking system as a support for financial globalization; and, finally, military protection from the United States.

However, these four things no longer exist. Russian gas, which guaranteed cheap energy for all activities, averaging $3-5 per MBTU (million British thermal units), has been replaced, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, by gas, largely from the United States, at $11.5 per MBTU. The free global movement of goods has given way to tariff wars. The United States has imposed tariffs of 15% on European imports and 50% on the steel industry. In turn, the EU has established tariffs of 25% to 45% on Chinese car imports; and now, there will be taxes on the millions of packages arriving from Shein and Temu.

Regarding the hubs that have ensured financial globalization, in 2008, European banks handled up to 62% of these flows. In 2021, they handled only 35%, while other banks Asian countries already control 43% of the market (BIS, 2023). Furthermore, the North American military umbrella reflected its undisputed global economic and political leadership. But this too has changed. The single hegemon no longer dictates world order from above, with absolute power and generosity. Instead, multiple hegemonic powers are vying for their new positions in the global hierarchy on a polycentric and geofragmented planet.

According to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, by 2030, China will account for 45% of global industrial activity, while the United States will produce only 11% and Europe between 6 and 7% (UNIDO, Database, 2025). This is why Trump's "America First" is the slogan of a power concerned only with itself in its rivalry with China, leaving each country to fend for itself in a brutal world undergoing profound geopolitical reconfiguration. While current European political elites are certainly sensitive to global change, they lack the character to confront the challenge of building a new order of economic accumulation and political legitimacy with firmness and boldness. They have taken steps to strengthen continental cohesion, such as the Next Generation EU plan to support economic restructuring; the Green Deal Industrial Plan to reduce fossil fuel imports; and the European Chip Law to double the share of semiconductor production, among others.
Each of these initiatives promotes a mild regional “industrial policy.” However, and contrary to all this, they validate a form of vassal capitalism by agreeing to invest $600 billion in the United States and purchase $750 billion worth of fuel over the next three years, ostensibly to bolster North American industry.

They proclaim the defense of free trade at the Davos Forum, yet do not hesitate to launch a trade war with China. Von der Leyen asserts that “Europe must defend itself alone,” but Rutte, the NATO Secretary General, in a shameful act of subservience, calls Trump “daddy” to maintain “Europe’s security.” They want a world order “based on rules” that are equal for all, but bury them when it comes to accepting the genocide of the Palestinian people or supporting neo-fascism in Ukraine.

In general, today, European elites are betting on everything at once, but committing to nothing. They call for free markets and implement protectionism. They demand a European Council with greater executive powers, but fear submitting it to popular election, which would legitimize that authority. They want to strengthen their own financial system to attract investment for their businesses, but they don't lift a finger to stem the hemorrhage of savings flowing to the United States because the returns there are five times higher. They want to act as a single political body, but every investment requires harmonizing 27 regulations from 27 different countries. Where is Europe headed? For now, nowhere. It gives signs of wanting to go everywhere, but in truth, its elites lack the conviction and moral strength to actually move toward a destination. Will this ever change? For now, no.

Alvaro Garcia Linera

https://www.lahaine.org/mundo.php/a-donde-va-europa

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

SEE ALSO: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-news-shop-bankruptcies-surge-across-germany/live-75010590